Is your brand stuck in the friend zone?

How to escape being a commodity and making your fans fall in love.

Commoditization is lonely and can kill relationships for brands trying to stand out in a competitive market and connect with buyers. It is like being in the “friend zone.” 

Everyone knows about the friend zone, right? It’s where you’re stuck being platonic friends forever, and romance crawls into a corner to die. When your brand is in a commodity quagmire, it’s in a sea of sameness with no particular customer loyalty or love—you’re the same as all the other friends on the shelf.

How does commoditization happen?

It’s easy to see how products in a commoditized category become all the same. Big market investors love and promote commoditization because buying and selling becomes more effortless, transaction friction is reduced, and sales volume increases. 

Yet, on a smaller scale, commoditization happens because not enough strategic work is done to provide a unique brand definition. Or, fearing the competition, marketing departments look to their neighbors to see how they market and typically copy it.  “Oh no! So-and-So brand is saying they’re 50% shinier. We’ll become 60% shinier!”

When all the features in a category become the same, the only thing left to compete on is price. It becomes the big “Race to the Bottom,” where the only winner is the least expensive option. If the products are practically identical, who cares which one I choose? A buyer thinks I’ll just get the cheapest.

Escaping the friend zone.

So, how do we get our customers' attention and get them to make the first move toward intense love that leads to a lasting relationship? Escaping commodity land and creating a lasting commitment with your audience requires brands to know who they are and see their customers' needs. Strong, well-defined brands are more profitable and can weather the storms of today’s market better than their competition. 

Here are a few ways to get there:

Get deep.

Everyone knows love comes from intimacy. So, get to know your buyer, but go beyond the surface-level stuff. Knowing their income, age, and demographics is okay, but what is it telling you? Dig deeper to understand their behaviors around the product and how you can be helpful to them as a brand. Is there an insightful need that the market isn’t meeting? Can anything in the brand experience set it far above the competition?

Find your purpose.

Get a clear understanding of why the brand exists in the first place. What did you set out to do from the start? As companies grow, they often lose sight of the initial idea that brought them to their current level of success. If you focus on a product feature/benefit list, you are lost in the friend zone of commoditization. Spend time defining your brand’s purpose (its reason for being), and your marketing efforts will become clear.

Express yourself.

You can’t get a date if you’re not getting out there. The same goes for marketing. So, stop doomscrolling, put your shiny new brand strategy to the test, and launch a small social campaign. Testing the results is so easy today that there’s barely an excuse to sit satisfied with your brand being “only friends” with your customers forever.

__________

Love and wha?

We’re ready to help your brand escape the commodity zone and become loved by your customers. Love & Robots is creativity for humanity, by humanity. We create brand strategies and experiences that connect the uniquely human, technologically enabled populace. 

Sounds good! Let’s go. 

100% naturally written by Joe Bartolucci