Be Big, Be Special.

First published in Off Kilter Volume 112: Be Big, Be Special. Off Kilter is a weekly newsletter dedicated to finding the signal in the noise of brand, marketing, and design. If you like it, please subscribe and get more like this every Thursday.

A cack-handed attempt at explaining brand effects.

“You’re not big, and you’re not special” is an old put-down said to people who do particularly idiotic things. Well, turns out that when it comes to brands, big and special is exactly what we’re gunning for.

When I started this business, I was a voracious reader of all things brand. I read about strategy, design, identity, advertising—all of it. I inhaled the likes of Aaker, Kapferer, and Kotler. And I dallied briefly with snake oil sellers like Godin, purple cows and all.

And then, after a while, I stopped. The books were boring and repetitive. Too much of what I was reading was rooted in the world of CPG/FMCG rather than building brands for corporations where you don’t represent a product but a culture and system of human endeavor. And, way too often, what I was reading about and what I was experiencing in practice were profoundly disconnected (Notably, I remember reading about GE as a superlative example of a master brand, even as I was working with GE to help fix its terribly atomized reality.)

Eventually, I concluded that while much hot air was expended on the topic of brands and branding, there wasn’t much worth paying attention to.

And then, the internet changed everything. Well, not really. But the rise of digital did lead to a much more robust and analytical look at how brands work, what makes them tick, and how they help drive growth. And as much as the theoretical postulations of Aaker, Kapferer, and Kotler had faded in my memory, a new generation of thinking from the likes of Sharp, Ritson, Binet & Field, et al. captured my attention as they blended old and new and empirically researched concepts into what might loosely be labeled a modern unifying theory of brand. However, as fun as this has been, the challenge is that it’s all a bit complex to share with your average client, especially those that aren’t brand geeks like I am. Unless you’re talking to fellow geeks, the moment you bust out terms like salience, reach, memory structures, mental and physical availability, penetration, positioning, brand spend, activation spend, distinctive assets, attention, share of search, ESOV, etc., you may as well turn out the lights because your audience has long ago fallen asleep.

So, while it may be viewed as heresy by the puritanical wing of the marketing science community, there remains a need to explain this stuff more simply for people who don’t live and breathe it every day.

Here’s how I simplify when talking to clients, especially non-marketers.

If you look at the positive effects brands have on business - purchase preference, price premium, etc., you can boil these effects down to how big you are and how special, which you can conceptually plot onto a chart (hey, I’m a consultant. There’s nothing we love more than a whiteboard and an erasable marker so we can draw charts)

The biggest benefit comes from being big - brand scale gives you more awareness, reach, preference, and availability. It also tends to increase trust, as trust generally goes up as you become better known. (assuming you haven’t done anything terrible.)

However, not all brands are big. Some don’t want to be. Some never will be. Some aren’t there yet. Here, we find that being special is what brings a benefit. Successful smaller, more niche brands typically have something special that helps them stand out. (Note, we could talk about differentiation, distinctiveness, innovation, purpose, positioning, etc., here, but then we quickly run slap bang into the “too complicated” bucket. Special, as broad and as vague as the term may appear, is much easier to digest).

Often, with very young brands, being perceived as special is a lead-in toward scale, where being special for someone rather than not special for anyone is key to growth. (This closely mirrors a “wedge” product strategy for anyone focused on startup culture.)

Typically, this ephemeral specialness declines as businesses grow and brands expand in both scale and scope. The larger the potential audience, the broader the surface area of the brand, the bigger the business, and the more management focuses on efficiency, the harder it is to be special. By definition, the natural forces of scale tend to make brands blander, more generic, less innovative, more broadly defined, and thus harder to connect with at any more than a surface level. For many brands, this isn’t a detriment. I don’t want Cascade to be something I feel emotionally drawn to; I want it to be a mental shortcut to clean dishes. However, just because maintaining specialness is difficult doesn’t make it impossible. Notable exceptions are Apple and Disney. One of the management strengths of both has been the ability to sustain the perceived “specialness” of their brands, even while operating at massive scale, enabling both to drive volume at a meaningful price premium.

While smaller brands often look toward what makes them special as a stepping stone toward greater scale, we see the reverse from large brands that already have the scale and now seek greater specialness.

Just recently, I’ve been working with a large market-leading brand. Looking at its vast reams of research, it has all the benefits of scale. Simply put, the top of its funnel is wider and captures more potential opportunity than competitor peers. However, what’s interesting is that while it outperforms at the top of the funnel, it underperforms on the way through. For some reason or another, this brand wastes a greater percentage of potential sales than its peers, which means something not special is happening in the experience.

Now, I’m not going to get into how we’re addressing that problem here other than to say it’s a problem of not being special enough to enough of the right people. But the point is that when we boil things down to questions of how big your brand is and how special people perceive it to be, it opens up a richness of conversation that’s useful to have.

Brand scale is often a factor of how large your business is, how much and how well you spend your advertising budgets, how well you manage distribution and access, and the level of resources you throw at PR. Specialness is often a factor of your value proposition, how distinctive your experience is, how innovative and desirable your products are, how hard they are to substitute, and how well you engage people through creativity and storytelling.

In sum, it’s not just size or specialness that matters; it’s the interplay of both.

Oh, and as a final aside. While you can be incredibly successful by being big and not special, your chances of success if you’re small and not special are slim. This is why for very young brands, unless you have gazillions of VC dollars behind you, you should start by focusing on what makes you special to your customers before considering how to drive toward scale.

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