The Art and Craft of Creating a Sticky Brand.

Brands spend on marketing and advertising to ensure recall at the time of making a purchase decision. A big marketing budget is not a guarantee of making a brand stick in public memory.

Using emotional appeal, creative content, and proving relevance go a long way in enabling brands build stickiness. Some brands can do it, while some simply cannot.

Brands that succeed in creating a niche for themselves in the minds of their audiences are the ones that get recalled when similar products or services are to be purchased.

A brand succeeds in creating “headspace” when it appeals to both the logical and subconscious parts of the brain. If you can apportion the amount of effect that your communication has on the reasonable and creative parts of the audience’s brains then you will generate data for benchmarking future performance.

Stickiness of a brand depends on how effectively the brand sends forth marketing signals and how receptive the audience is to those signals. The buyer demographic will always leave subliminal and over clues about what it wants. You have to be able to pick up these clues and ensure engagements that generate an interest in your product and stimulate purchase. Take a look at sticky brands across industries. What are they doing right?

Find out where the maximum possibilities for creating brand stickiness reside. Brand stickiness leads to an increased headspace, which in turn results in more sales and an increased market share.

FMCG brands such as tea and detergents need to project an image of quality and trust. When it comes to creating a message with such products, there isn’t much that you can play around with. Teas are sold for flavor. Relaxation and family time are common themes associated with tea. Tea brands that enjoy stickiness have been around for a long time. They have the buyer’s trust. If you have trust and credibility on your site, you are in a very good position to create sticky content.

In the FMCG space, there is a lot of jostling and pushing for a buyer’s mind space. Your efforts towards creating sticky content will bear fruit only if you are regular with content creation and dissemination. Familiarity, in the world of marketing, breeds trust. Content that is likeable, associations that evoke a warm emotional response, and of course, a quality product are three pillars on which to build a sticky marketing campaign.

Whatever the niche or industry that you operate in, you must try and understand the reasons behind a viewer’s or customer’s emotional response. Knowledge of these triggers will allow you to pitch your product or service in a much more targeted manner.

Monitor user perception of your product as well as competitor products. Can you discern any changes in their feelings and opinions toward your product? The answers will help you come up with a marketing plan to build the brand further and sell more. The information will also enable you to allocate funds for marketing in a much more precise manner.

Brand stickiness has a lot to do with the cues that the marketing team picks up from the market. These cues can fortell trends and give marketers the time to suitably alter their communication so that, at the very least, their brand maintains its position.

Customers are willing to pay more for sticky brands. Stickiness, if you remember, is associated with powerful and positive emotional feelings. If you can get a share of the customer’s mind, then wallet share will follow.

Operating in a micro niche, such as flavored teas or high-end teas, will mean that you sell your products at higher rates. The higher costs will not deter your customers if you have been able to create brand stickiness through sticky content.

Continuing with the example of tea, you can actually wean tea drinkers away from their established tastes by offering them something different. And this “something different”, while a tangible product, has to first appear different at an emotional level. How can you create an impression of difference that will last? In other words, how do you make the brand identity sticky? Emotional appeal comes to the fore. If you’re targeting tea connoisseurs, then you have an idea regarding how to go about creating some space in the minds and hearts of your audience.

When it comes to stickiness, everyday brands have an advantage over niche brands. They address a very large audience. Niche brands have limited appeal. They have to work assiduously towards creating brand stickiness.

Finally, every brand big or small needs positive reviews. A single bad review on a popular website can put paid to all the hopes you may have harbored from your latest marketing campaign. This is particularly true if the review mentions failure in terms of the very attributes that you wish to project as a strength.

Done right, customer reviews are a more powerful tool for creating brand awareness as compared to advertising. Savvy consumers will take the word of a peer over a marketing agency.