Unleash the Extraordinary to Create Followers, Not Brands
What is ordinary to you is extraordinary to others.
Welcome, Extraordinary Strategists, to our first mini-book. It includes the recent article “The Secret to Getting People Interested in Your Niche Brand.” I’ve decided to un-gate the rest of the article because I’m grateful for your readership.
Before we dive in, let’s pause to consider my insecurity in putting this point of view into the world and reflect on this quote from Tom Schwab:
“What is ordinary to you is amazing to others.”
It’s simple. It’s profound. It calls us to think about everything through somebody else’s eyes. It reminds me of Derek Sivers’ insight from the book “Hell Yeah or No,” and this article, Obvious to you. Amazing to others.
So I reframe my insecurity and think, “Maybe what’s obvious to me is amazing to someone else?” That’s where we’re jumping off from.
In today’s brand-driven world, differentiation rules. Let’s remember that Extraordinary Strategists learn from hindsight, act with insight, and guide with the foresight to design a different future.
How does a company cut through the noise and hyperbole to design the relationship between your company, its niche (the solution that solves a problem in a category), and your ideal consumer? Don’t design a better product. Design a different future.
What is ordinary about your brand should unleash the extraordinary in others.
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But first, a story:
“Let’s move the ‘About Us’ navigation to be the first in order, along with our mission and vision.”
I groan silently and ask the same question I’ve asked of business leaders dozens of times:
“Why do you want to make it about you?”
I understand the client’s intent. As a startup in the financial sector, they are eager to validate their relevance to the consumers they want to attract. Positioning your brand as more important than the customer’s goals and motivations is a strategic mistake.
“Love is at its best when it longs for the good of the beloved.” — Charles Taliaferro
Stick with Your Guiding Principles
The way to demonstrate relevance isn’t to talk about why you think your brand is different; it’s to be in a dialog with your community — the buying tribe or ideal consumers if you prefer — and how you can help them achieve a goal, meet a need, or solve a problem.
Extraordinary Strategists place the buying tribe’s needs and goals first.
People care about what matters to them and what improves their lives and grows their businesses.
People care about their family, their health, the food they eat, and the house in which they live. These are niche subjects with specific tribes, identities, goals, and motivations.
Companies that focus on their buying tribe — their tribe’s identity, what they care about, their goals, and motivations — successfully attract the right people who want to do business with them.
You won’t attract the right consumers by talking about your business. You attract people and build community by being attractive, talking about what matters to them, and appealing to their desired transformation. Let’s call these people your ideal consumers.
How Home Depot Wins Attracts the Ideal Customer
Home Depot understands four things about its ideal consumer:
Who they are: Homeowners and construction small business owners.
What they care about: To repair, improve, and enhance homes.
Their goals: Help with tools and supplies for DIY improvement and repair projects.
Their desired transformation: A sense of accomplishment because they did it themselves.
Understanding what motivates people is the secret to successfully attracting your ideal consumers. As a brand missionary or evangelist, you must constantly ask what motivates people. Dig deep into how they will transform by buying your product or working with your company.
Making fast emotional connections with people will help your brand win trust and resonate with people’s hearts and minds. Listen to Brian Sooy’s conversation with author Will Leach.
When it comes to niche marketing, many people make the mistake of telling consumers what they do instead of talking about the problem the customer wants to solve. This self-centered approach to branding and marketing doesn’t consider the customer’s needs, wants, or desires.
When you understand an ideal consumer’s goals, what motivates them, and the triggers that compel them to buy, you can better connect with them, and they will be more interested in the product or service you offer.
There are many ways to gain the insight you need. Some are more effective than others.
How Do You Know What Your Ideal Consumers Want?
From my experience, many companies are satisfied with consumer personas that give the impression that the business analytics team collected meaningful information.
Many companies ignore the high-relevance insights that can only be discovered through interviews and research and settle for low-relevance information, such as personal income, education, gender, and experience level.
The designers or agencies with which these companies work look for a template and fill in the gaps with low-relevance demographic information instead high-relevance data, such as the ideal consumers’
Self-identity,
Low-level, high-level, and aspirational goals,
Specific needs and challenges,
Buying habits and emotional buying state,
Motivations (There are nine primary human motivations that drive our behavior),
Decision triggers, and more.
In short, the business analytics team projects its idea of an ideal consumer onto their perception of their actual consumer because the brand hasn’t built enough meaningful relationships with its most loyal customers.
Your Brand is Beautiful, but is it Relevant?
During a design briefing, the Design Director of a global healthcare company that focused on families and children told our team, “We don’t have a brand; we have a line of well-known products. As a brand, we are irrelevant to consumers.”
From there, the briefing turned to a discussion of the tangible aspects of the product line. From their design-centric perspective, the brand had everything to do with the product: color, packaging, scent, and sustainability. Seeking clarity of the ideal consumer’s wants was secondary to the company’s sustainability goals and social activism agenda.
When we pointed out that the buying tribe is more concerned with the intangibles, such as the consumer’s desire for natural ingredients and assurance that the product isn’t harmful, it was as if we were speaking a foreign language.
The design team’s passion for their brand was evident, but it clouded their judgment. They were too concerned with ensuring executive-level decisions for ESG goals were baked into the product line in the hope it would grow revenue than they were with understanding what their ideal consumers wanted their product to do for them.
As business owners, we are all inclined to think our brands are beautiful and that our strategy is sound. We love our brand because we believe our company, products, and services are different and unique.
We hold up a Magic Mirror to our company and ask, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest brand of all?”
Ever eager to please, the Magic Mirror responds, “You are.”
Until that day when a competitor appears, and what you see in the mirror is a tired, aged reflection of what your brand used to be.
When a brand becomes obsessed with its beauty, it risks becoming irrelevant, just like Narcissus, who fell in love with his reflection and wasted away. A brand that fixates on its reflection can lose sight of what matters most.
The marketplace decides if your brand matters and rewards relevance with revenue.
What matters most for a brand is not how it looks to itself but how consumers perceive it. We can influence that significance, but ultimately, consumers believe we are different enough to deserve their attention. If a brand is no longer seen as beautiful or desirable by consumers, it will quickly fade into irrelevance.
To avoid this fate, brands need to focus on where consumers are active in the marketplace, not their brand. They must constantly be aware of how their company is perceived and adjust their category strategy accordingly. Only then can a brand hope to maintain its place in the hearts and minds of consumers.
How Do You Overcome Consumer Skepticism?
Do we have to state what everybody knows? We used to spend more time shopping in retail stores to see, feel, touch, smell, and interact with the limited options for products we wanted to buy. The internet changed our experience and expectations and expanded our options.
Even business buyers have more options. Companies don’t have to settle for a local solution; they can research and work with the company that best fits their needs and solves their problem. That’s why an Australian skydiving center and a Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer can work with an Ohio-based agency like Aespire Branding.
Consumers ask three questions every time they interact with your company:
What problem am I trying to solve?
What can your company do for me?
Why should I trust your company?
How can you position your niche company and expertise as trustworthy and relevant?
Claiming your position as the only relevant option in a category begins with designing the relationship between your ideal consumers, a niche (or subcategory), and your company:
Your perfect consumer has a specific problem.
Your company creates a product, service, or experience to solve the problem.
You focus your marketing on the category to attract your ideal consumers.
People seek solutions to functional problems and want to experience transformational goals. To trust that your brand exists to help consumers, your messaging needs to express empathy. For people to be confident that your brand can help them, it must demonstrate authority. Any company expressing genuine empathy and consistently showing authority becomes a brand with credibility.
Credibility leads to brand relevance. Relevance is why people put their belief in specific brands and not others. At the same time, every company battles the specter of indifference, the mortal enemy of relevance.
You can’t take shortcuts with empathy. Empathy is more than words; it’s in how you show people that you understand their pain, goals, and motivations.
Empathy is one of the essential qualities a person — or a brand — can possess. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings and perspectives of another person. Without empathy, we cannot build relationships or connect with others deeply.
Without authority, your buying tribe may not be assured that your company can help them. People want help from experts who have successfully solved the problem that causes them pain.
You demonstrate authority by letting outside sources do the talking for you. Which of these statements is most compelling?
“I’m the best at at solving the problem you have.”
“I hear you’re the best at solving the problem I have.”
“My colleague told me you’re the best at solving the problem I have.”
Don’t sing your praises. Word-of-mouth references and testimonials are the most effective form of authority.
There are always two additional questions that your prospective customers ask themselves: “Does this brand understand me?” and “Can this brand solve my problem?”
Review your website and other marketing touchpoints with those two questions in mind, and ask yourself whether you’ve expressed empathy and demonstrated authority. These brand characteristics are essential to how your ideal customer remembers, understands, and chooses your product or service.
Remember, it’s your goal to position the customer as the ideal buyer for your brand. When your brand strategy focuses on the customer with empathy and authority, they are more likely to think of your brand because they associate it with the category.
Ordinary people look for brands that help them transform from ordinary to extraordinary. Perhaps we should focus less on designing brands that stand out and more on guiding people to become better versions of themselves because they choose our brand.
The secret to attracting people to your niche brand isn’t to out-market your competition. It’s in understanding what other people find extraordinary in what you find ordinary.
What is ordinary about your brand should unleash the extraordinary in others.
Become a paid subscriber to get practical examples, insights, and ideas about unleashing the extraordinary in others in the rest of this mini-book and read the Extraordinary Strategist Principle: Create Followers, Not Brands.
Principle #3: Create Followers, not Brands.
“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” — Peter Drucker
After four decades as a design professional, I don’t know if I believe that any longer.
Many companies get one thing wrong about consumers (There are many more; let’s stay focused on this one for now). Companies operate with the assumption that people want a relationship with their brand, and many interactions are designed to try and nurture a relationship.
There’s nothing wrong with that unless you enjoy the attention of someone trying too hard to be your friend.
The assumption executives and business owners make (and perhaps you do, too) are
That companies build brands,
Which turns consumers into loyal customers,
Who become ambassadors, raving fans, and brand advocates.
That’s wishful and self-centered thinking! Niche businesses don’t have the time, finances, or capacity to devote themselves to brand-building that way. But every specialized company has daily opportunities to walk alongside people who want solutions to specific problems and offer them the answer, inviting them to be followers who co-create their brand and sustain their company.
Instead of brand building, what if you devoted your attention to fully understanding
What consumers and future customers want,
Where and why are they looking for what they want, and
What did it mean to them when they found what they wanted?
When people look for a solution to a problem, they think about a category or niche first, not a specific brand. What if you focused your marketing on the niche (or subcategory) where your company has the best opportunity for success?
Let’s call it playing to win in the niche you claim: your field, your rules, and your game.
Except when it comes to your ideal buyers. They make their own rules and own their identities.
Because we love labels, brand managers refer to customers as ambassadors, advocates, and raving fans. People don’t start their day thinking about being an ambassador for your brand. They wake up and think, feel, and worry about their problems, goals, interests, and activities. If your product or service intersects with one of those areas, you might have a chance at attracting their attention.
Once you have the consumer’s attention, they may consider your brand worthy enough to warrant their focus, purchase, and pledge loyalty.
We think about categories before we think about brands
At some level, your company has a specialized focus and expertise for a specific niche. Here are some examples of focus and expertise:
Sales training for creative firms
Home services for busy homeowners
Better living through health and wellness
When people are looking for a solution to a challenge or how to achieve a goal, they think about a niche or category, not a brand.
When I think about the joy of driving, I think about automobiles or motorcycles before the brand or model.(1)
If my muscles are sore, I may consider a massage before knowing where to get one.
When we’re hungry and want to dine out, I ask my wife what she feels like eating before we decide where to dine out.
What if your branding helped people build relationships?
The heart of brand-building is about being relational, not about forming a relationship with a customer. Being relational goes beyond inviting people into a story, participating in a program, or making a transaction. That’s what marketing does. Branding attracts and invites people to join your brand. What they do after that is up to them, not you.
What if your branding focused on your customers’ desires, wants, and needs and not your company? What if you focused on positioning your ideal customer as the heart of your brand (instead of positioning your brand in your customer’s mind)?
Remember, building a brand is about creating followers. It isn’t easy to influence what people think. In a consumer’s mind, your brand (if it has their attention) solves a problem (which has more of their attention).
That implies that people looking for a solution think about a category, not a specific brand.
People will explore a category that leads them to a solution. They will follow other people attracted to a category because those people succeeded in finding an answer or achieving a goal.
“The purpose of business is not to create profit. The purpose of business is to create profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet.”
— From Putting Purpose into Practice: The Economics of Mutuality, Colin Mayer CBE
We buy what’s convenient, familiar, famous… and makes us happy
A friend recently visited a specialty coffee company’s retail location, where a small group of baristas was protesting outside, holding “Baristas On Strike” signs. She only wanted a coffee to start her day. On her way to the door, one of the protesters approached her and said, “This company doesn’t treat us fairly. Will you support our strike?”
Calmly, my friend replied, “If you’re not satisfied with the working conditions, are there other places you can work?” The snarky reply was, “There are other places to buy coffee.”
Again, she calmly replied, “But this coffee makes me happy.” She later told me that if the protesters hadn’t left, she would buy them coffee. She’s generous like that.
We buy what’s convenient, familiar, famous, and makes us happy.
A recent Harris poll(2) revealed that 82% of shoppers are interested in brands that align with their values.
“New research tells us that 82% of shoppers want a consumer brand’s values to align with their own, and they’ll vote with their wallet if they don't feel a match. Three-quarters of shoppers reported parting ways with a brand over a conflict in values.
Are you willing to cross a picket line to get what makes you happy? Was the coffee shop closed because of a few unorganized protesters? The practical lesson here is that the company showed up for its customers, despite the noisy voice of a tiny minority.
People don’t want relationships with brands. People want relationships with people. People gather in communities and around shared interests. The brand is the ambassador from the niche (the craft coffee category, in this instance) to the consumer.
Specialized companies can use positioning (A distinct point of view and proven expertise in a vertical market or horizontal discipline) to nurture the relationship between your company and consumers.
Position consumers as the ideal buyer of your product or service.
Position your brand as the ideal solution for a consumer’s problem, challenge, or goal.
Market your brand as the ambassador for the category or cause your ideal consumer is interested in.
Invite them to follow you. People will follow a brand (or cross a picket line) to get what makes them happy.
Consumers can become evangelists for your brand when your company walks with them in a specific category or cause. Only when they associate the category with your company’s specialty can they become evangelists for how your brand makes them happy, guides them, and then share their experience with others. When it happens, it’s a bonus.
Brand building is collaborative and complementary; the brand ambassador (your company) and the consumer (the future brand evangelist) walk together to share experiences and create stories worth telling.
How does story framing help to create followers?
Story framing is how companies create the elements for people to make a story, find an identity, and form brands.
Declare one compelling truth,
Invite people to believe in it,
Give people the words and means to spread the message,
Give people a reason to follow.
There are six ways to walk alongside your buying tribe (and community) when you join the customer on their journey:
Speak to the heart: Share a vision that appeals to people’s desires.
Inform the mind: Give people a compelling reason to own and apply your solution.
Be the hands: Show people how to grow & achieve their desires.
Be helpful: Walk with people and help them become who they want to be.
Create habits: Help people build beautiful routines that sustain their desire (and your brand!)
Create a community, and stay involved with it.
Great brands appeal to the heart and speak to the mind. Invitations always take the form of a story.
How Do You Invite People Into a Story?
You might recognize this pattern. It’s ancient. It also mimics a consumer journey.
Curiosity
Challenge
Commitment
Confidence
Companies (and causes) need followers (aka consumers) who sustain their brand.
Many storytellers turn to classic literature and movie formulas to teach storytelling but ignore the model in history’s most famous published book. I first saw this pattern in the Bible when I read about Jesus, who noticed some people fishing from a beach and said, “Follow me.” Those fishermen experienced four opportunities to engage with this extraordinary leader.
Curiosity (They asked each other, “Who is this?”)
Challenge (Come and see—word of mouth)
Commitment (Follow me)
Confidence (Take action and become something greater)
When you share a clear and compelling story about your vision of a better and different future, it
Attracts the curious,
Challenges the enlightened,
Calls people to commit, and
It gives people the confidence to follow and act.
Story framing is how companies create the elements for people to make a story, find an identity, and form brands. Every company tells stories to invite people to join brands and movements. Successful companies create a framework that equips people to tell their own stories. Companies share their brand story with one voice. Their followers share many stories with many voices that point to how the brand helped them overcome a challenge, achieve a goal, and find their identity.
Something makes us curious (how do I solve this problem or achieve this goal?),
which leads to interest (Could this be the solution I’ve been searching for?).
The challenge leads to a commitment (This is the solution I’ve been looking for, so I’ll follow, buy, give, and act) and
an invitation where the brand and follower walk together.
Where people enter this journey depends on how people hear about your product or service.
Never forget: Brand building is about being relational, where the brand-builder (the company) and the brand owner (the consumer) walk together in the tribe or community.
Buying a product does not mean I want a lifelong relationship with a customer service department or company. (The first thing I do after I make an online purchase is to unsubscribe from the subsequent barrage of emails). It takes more than an email campaign to nurture a relationship.
Creative professionals make a lot of assumptions about brand building with the idea that “the brand” is what matters to consumers.
People don’t want a relationship with a brand. People want relationships with people.
Practical applications for niche marketing
None of this matters unless it challenges you to change how you think about branding (at least a little) and apply your new thinking to help your company win in the marketplace.
Focusing on your specialization, category, or niche makes a huge difference because of how people search for and find things online. For example, when we run digital ads for a plumbing company, our keywords focus on people’s problems (clogged drains) and what they are looking for (a local plumber) and present them with the brand name of the plumber who can solve their problem and create satisfaction.
Consumer Problem —> Category —> Brand <— Solution <— Consumer Satisfaction
Understanding your ideal consumer’s buying behavior and adapting your messaging can significantly impact purchasing decisions. Business storytelling frameworks such as StoryBrand refer to the customer as the character or hero and the brand as the guide. Ideally, when the guide understands the character’s problem, she can express empathy for how the situation makes the character feel before presenting the character with an action plan.
Stories blend rational, transactional behavior and emotional messaging, and words in a way that speaks to the buyer’s mind and touches their hearts. But it doesn’t always work. Some buying tribes and communities, such as CPAs, CFOs, and engineers, don’t always respond to the emotional aspect of a story. They are busy, analytical people. Sometimes we must cut to the chase, identify the problem, and present the successful resolution of the issue with a call to action and be done with it.
Here’s the truth: People care about solving problems, achieving goals, and being independent, loved, accepted, and involved. People care about convenience, saving money, and status. People desire safety, security, and being in control.
I hope these ideas help you think clearly through your company’s and customers’ interactions.
Put this micro-principle into practice with your team: Create Followers, Not Brands.
*No, this is NOT me. OK, it is me.
If you’re interested, my current preferences are Subaru and Can-Am Spyder.
https://consumergoods.com/new-research-shows-consumers-more-interested-brands-values-ever