3 Ways to Change Brand Assumptions In Your Favor
It’s a safe bet that at this moment, someone in your life is carrying around an assumption about you that is either outdated, untrue, or even potentially harmful. These assumptions can play out on a casual level – “Oh, I assumed you got too busy to call back: I didn’t realize your car broke down!” – or a deeper one – “I always assumed you didn’t like me. I must have been projecting something.”
But what are the personal, cultural and financial implications when people (BtoB buyers in particular) hold inaccurate assumptions about brands: local, regional, even huge global brands with a century of history behind them? To answer these and other questions, my colleague Mike O’Toole has been talking with some of America’s top Chief Marketing Officers. The output of these interviews is a growing number of articles about using brand to drive change that have been appearing on Forbes’ CMO Network.
One thing that immediately becomes clear, listening to these conversations, is that people assume things about brands whether they are wildly successful or clawing their way back from the brink of extinction. Another is that you can never quite prepare yourself for what people may assume.
Based on these CMO interviews, a few themes have emerged. You may find that they apply to you, or could be stalling the ability of your brand to influence the buyers you most want to reach. And if you follow the path of these CMOs, you’ll see how they have corrected brand assumptions by directing buyers’ attentions to new market realities.
Assumption #1: If you’re in a problem industry, you must be part of the problem. Ten years after the Great Recession began, any brand in financial services can still be tarred with the same brush as Lehman Brothers. Eve Callahan, CMO of Umpqua Bank, knows this well. “All banks kind of got painted the same way. But the complexity of investment banks is very different than the complexity of a main street bank like Umpqua, where we are focused on the core element of banking, which is helping people and businesses grow.”
The Pivot: Callahan’s response to narrowminded assumptions about banking has been to focus on what sets her brand apart. As she puts it, “There can be humanity in banking. Banking is important, noble work helping people navigate life and business and money.” One of the ways her marketing gives this idea life is its excellent podcast series, Open Account, now in its third season. There’s no way you can listen to a few episodes of host SuChin Pak laying bare issues around the confusion, embarrassment, empowerment, and stress of money without reconsidering your assumptions about what a consumer bank can stand for.
Assumption #2: If you built your success on one product, the story of your future success always will be about that product. This is a challenge that Lisa Campbell, CMO of Autodesk, continues to face. As she frames the erroneous assumption, “It’s that we’re a design-and-make company, and we’re helping people make things. Some people still say, ‘Oh, AutoCAD. Yeah, I know AutoCAD. It's all about CAD and design.’ That's something that we continue to have to work on in our market and with new projects – that we're much more than that.”
The Pivot: As a seasoned marketer, Campbell realizes that the entire market around product design and construction has changed fundamentally and isn’t turning back. That’s why part of her response is the online community The Future of Making Things. She knows that sponsoring conversations about this new reality will change what her BtoB buyers pay attention to – and what they assume Autodesk stands for. The company’s recent history bears this out in spades.
Assumption #3: If a market dramatically changes, you have to beyond existing companies to the next generation of companies to find solutions. The process of home buying and financing is being thoroughly reshaped by fintech innovation, but this doesn’t mean that traditional players can’t change with the times. Ask Riham El-Lakany, CMO, Single Family, at public government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac, about outdated perceptions home buyers have in 2018 and she’ll share an anecdote like this:
“We were shooting a video recently and I was on set, kind of sitting to the side with the crew. Someone from our business mentioned something about our 3% down product. And one of the crew turns around to me, a young woman, and says, ‘You can get a mortgage for 3% down? I've never heard of such a thing.’ I said, ‘I think we could help you.’”
The Pivot: Freddie Mac’s first effort to recast homebuyer perception is a website called Borrower of the Future, which launched in May. It contains research insights packaged for easy consumption, but also eye-opening profiles of the borrowers who are shaping the new reality in home ownership. Like America itself, it’s a multiethnic, multigenerational, and multifaceted reality.
Brands are often double-edged swords, simultaneously trying to hold onto decades of equity while shifting mindsets about how they hope to change the world. For CMOs in these situations, the key, as former Xerox CMO Barbara Basney put it, is “don’t be flat-footed and start with, ‘Let me tell you what I want you to know about me.’ That is typically not very sticky.”
Instead, to change brand assumptions in a meaningful way, a far more effective strategy is to align your brand with the world, the market, and the culture around it; produce thought-provoking content that doesn’t lead with the brand; and let the buyer make the connections between the two. In such a fast-changing world, this feels like the new formula for success.
As an advertising agency that does a great deal of positioning in BtoB technology and healthcare, we see every day that assumptions like these are at the root of the challenge for creating powerful positions. Or as Stephen R. Covey once noted, “The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable.”
For more insights on marketing planning and other topics, I'd love to chat with you. Just shoot me a note at [email protected]