How Brands Can Leverage Limitations to Win

Excerpt from Prentice Howe’s Amazon Best-Seller, The Empowered Challenger Playbook: How Brands Can Change the Game, Steal Market Share and Topple Giants.

Brands today are facing a new reality. The playing field has changed, and you’re expected to do more with less. I’ve seen this narrative in the 20 plus years I’ve been working in advertising. New or returning clients continue to come to us here at Door Number 3 with budgets that are stretched or categories flooded by new contenders, yet expectations are always higher year after year.

It’s reminiscent of MacGyver: Here’s your bobby pin, toothpick, and rubber band. Diffuse the bomb. Figure it out.

Once we prove we can do just that, we develop an appetite to do even more with even less. As Sir Ernest Rutherford said, “We have no money, so we will have to out-think.” Successfully out-thinking is a drug for brands that have figured out that resourcefulness is a form of creativity. Being resourceful forces you to change your perspective and shake things up. Oftentimes, playing in a smaller sandbox is one form of leveraging your limitations, as knowing where your boundaries are can actually liberate you to solve problems in entirely new ways.

There’s another aspect to this new reality: Brands aren’t in control—consumers are. In the Mad Men era, traditional media was an easy way to reach a captive audience. You could dream up a fun campaign, put it on one of the major networks, and people would see it. Why? There was no fast-forwarding of commercials. No ad blocking. No smartphones for distraction. Back then, brands were put on a pedestal—entitled, if you will, by the essentially guaranteed consumption of whatever they were spewing.

Things couldn’t be more opposite today. We’re all distracted, and often we’re looking at two devices at once. Sometimes three. Choices for devices and platforms abound, so the power really is in the hands of those who are sharing the story—that is, consumers.

In this digital age, your brand is discovered more effectively when a customer passes it on to friends and family. Word-of-mouth marketing is all about spreading the love for your brand organically and with authenticity, but this phenomenon doesn’t just magically happen. You have to give people the tools and the resources to be able to effectively share your story, and the best way to do that is to make it become part of theirs.

What does that mean, exactly? All those interesting Twitter posts, memorable videos, and bits of engaging content build your brand’s personality. They’ll want to pass on that personality through sharing because they’re empowered to be a part of your brand experience more than ever. Yes, some of the sharing is out of your control, so you’ll need to be willing to let go to a degree. To achieve long-term success, though, you must do all you can to influence what they pass on by arming them with what they’ll need to ultimately help you do your job. That starts with clearing a pathway that leads to advocacy, and there are four steps in that process: differentiation, fasciation, consistency, and ultimately advocacy.

Differentiation is critical—not just because it’s the first step in your journey to create a pathway to brand advocacy, but also because it forces you to identify a blindingly clear proposition. What makes your brand special in a way no other brand can claim?

An example of a brand nailing differentiation is Soda Stream, whose tagline is “water made exciting.” By creating home carbonation machines for the masses, they went after an industry ruled by giants in a refreshing way. Soda Stream’s story is rooted in social and environmental responsibility. Americans alone dispose of 130 billion bottles and cans every year, but with their product, you can use your own tap water and return the gas cylinders. As part of their global ad push, they released a commercial in 2012 called the Soda Stream Effect that depicted thousands of bottles and cans that spontaneously vanish when someone uses their Soda Stream soda maker at home. The voiceover says, “With Soda Stream, you can save 2,000 bottles a year. If you love bubbles, set them free.”

That’s differentiation. They could have mentioned that their bubbles are fizzier than the competition’s, that their machines are more convenient than driving to the convenience store for a soda-fix, or that their products can save soda drinkers hundreds of dollars a year. But they didn’t. Soda Stream aligned with a higher calling, taking on a billion dollar industry and decades of indifference about waste and recycling. While they’re no mom and pop business, they’re certainly an example of a challenger that not only differentiated beautifully but also understood the magnetic power of doing so unabashedly.

In 2011, Kristen Harp, Soda Stream’s US Marketing manager, said, “Then and now we've had very little budget for traditional media spend. We've built this business, an entire category in fact, on the back of word of mouth and PR.” It’s paid off.

Keep reading! Visit Amazon and order your copy of The Empowered Challenger Playbook!

Written by: Prentice Howe, Founders Firm Advisor / Owner at Door Number 3