No matter the brand, no matter the service, the first question on the lips of anyone who wants to engage a consumer is “how can I help you?” But it isn’t just the people who represent a brand who need to ask relevant questions: the brand itself does, too.
A consumer approaches a shelf groaning with choice with one question on his or her lips: “How can you help me?” A great brand – one that answers that question in such a positive and authoritative manner that the competition doesn’t get a word in edgewise – is one that really knows how to communicate. And all communication starts with the right questions.
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers,” said the great French philosopher Voltaire in the 18th century, and 300 years later the same applies. In the same way that “how are you?” conveys good will and good wishes to anyone from a life partner to a potential customer, “how can I help you?” offers a gentler alternative to the vital question for any business to ask its audience: “What do you want?”
This fundamental question has a number of important functions. Firstly, it expresses openness and flexibility: the customer’s needs come first, and the questioner is intent on finding out what those needs are, and satisfying them. Secondly, it presents the opportunity for the customer to contemplate what they lack (“what help do I need?”) and without that lack there is no sale.
However, there is one thing this question doesn’t do. It doesn’t lead directly to an answer.
Marketing exists in part because we are all presented with too much choice – we know what we don’t want but we don’t necessarily know what it is we do want, and we need help to find out. The cleverest and most successful brands ask the kind of questions that lead to a simple yes. They may not do this overtly – in fact, they probably don’t.
Coca Cola doesn’t come right out and ask, “do you want to enjoy life?” But every element of their design, their branding and their attitude, from the distinctive red to the bubble-framed inducement to “open happiness” demands an answer to just that query.
When we were asked to rebrand Sunbites, a healthy snack that was struggling to escape the perception that it was too “worthy” to taste good, we condensed its offering to the question “do you want to eat tasty food without getting fat?” and created a bright, lightly frivolous look, with sunburst and butterflies, and the strapline “tiny moments of extraordinary pleasure” that presented the customer with a simple answer that had nothing dull or worthy about it.
Brands that invest time in asking the right questions tend to emerge from the past with greater clarity on their true story. It is a truism, now, that a brand needs a story, but, in a marketplace cluttered with more stories than a municipal library, that’s not enough.
A brand needs the right story – one that entices and elicits an answer. After all, we may be bombarded with brands begging for our attention but a human being can only concentrate on one conversation at a time. The world may have grown much busier – but our wiring has not kept up. The winners in our crazed marketplace will be the brands who are clear enough and consistent enough to truly engage the consumer.
So much of our work – look at Mini Cheddars or Copella apple juice as examples – has lasted years, because if you get it right, you don’t need to keep changing. Research has shown that a brand takes two years to really embed in the public’s mind, so there’s a strong incentive to stay consistent for longer than that. Only a tired brand really requires a refresh.
Just as effective branding is more than pack design or tactical marketing, so the creation of a great brand message must involve canvassing the needs and opinions of those on the inside and the outside of the corporation.
It’s vital to talk to as wide a swathe of stakeholders as possible. Go beyond the marketing people, and talk to those in research and development, customer service, even finance. That is the only route to a really solid understanding of the organisation. Bear in mind too the positive effect on corporate culture of gaining input from these departments. How often are they asked these questions?
The question for women, always, has been “do you want to feel beautiful?” And the answer has very rarely been no. Every cosmetics brand, back to the peddler who crushed the beetles for Cleopatra’s lipstick, has presented its product as the route to that beauty.
The question for women, always, has been “do you want to feel beautiful?” And the answer has very rarely been no.
Elizabeth Arden, the early 20th century makeup pioneer, asked a slightly different question: “do you want your beauty aids to say who you are?” Her response to the obvious answer was entirely innovative – and as varied as the shades you now see on make-up counters throughout the world.
Arden supplied red lipstick to the suffragettes in the 1910s, reinforcing the colour as a statement of independence, one as controversial as a red rag to a bull. She invented modern eye-make up, giving women a whole new facial area to enhance – and to buy cosmetics for. Then, in the 1930s, came a masterstroke: instead of buying a lipstick to match their complexion, she created different shades, encouraging women to buy lipsticks to match their outfit.
No woman is quite the same person in a ballgown as in a daydress; Arden took that fact and applied it. She realised that the immediately obvious question was not quite the right question. She looked deeper and discovered a more nuanced question – one that has resonated through the decades and provided the foundation for a cosmetics empire.
What question does your brand ask? Have you invested the time it takes to find the true story – one that resonates and endures? Every brand needs to do this – find the right question and ask it in the right way, then supply an answer that may be glittering or subtle, as appropriate.
This question won’t necessarily be asked in words, although those are important too. It is the whole entity: the colours and shapes, the content and the packaging that makes the difference between shoving your brand at potential customers, insisting “here’s how we can help you” on the one hand, and on the other hand letting them choose you.
The width of that question mark is the slender difference between another brand clamouring for attention, and the success that commands loyalty, and keeps it. So, ask yourself this question: which of those do you want your brand to be?
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024