We all know that advertising is important, that in order to be bought by consumers our brands need to stand out from the crowd, be distinctive and memorable! Without this your business just becomes a face in a crowd, unknown and unrecognised for the great work you do. There are thousands of brands out there and to consumers they almost look the same, so how do you make sure your advertising is building your brand and not getting confused with your competitors? This is a problem and sadly one of the reasons small businesses struggle to see the value in advertising. But there is good news, a simple solution.
The filter Test
There is a simple filter test that you can do for your business to see if your branding and advertising is effectively contributing to your brand growth. And when I say simple, I mean it is really simple. All you need to do is to ask yourself three questions.
Is my branding and advertising:
- Unique?
- Consistent?
- Recognisable?
Being 1 in 10,000
Did you know that you as an individual see an average of 10,000 items of marketing every single day! I bet you can’t remember more than 5 that you saw yesterday, or maybe the ones you can remember are for major companies eg. Coles, Woolworths, KFC, Commonwealth Bank or Telstra. Why? Well because our brain screens things out, and we see that much advertising that we screen the vast majority of it out until we need something from that category. This is because our brains largely process information through what is called the peripheral route, based on feelings, relevance and familiarity.
You would recognise this, but in a different context; ever notice that when you get a new car all of a sudden you see that car everywhere? You have always been seeing those cars but your brain screened it out due to lack of familiarity and relevance. In order to be successful you need to have your brand appeal to this route of processing. It needs to be unique, consistent and recognisable.
Stick with it, because it builds over time
Did you notice something about all of the brands I mentioned before? They all follow these three principles with their branding and advertising. Coles, as a supermarket uniquely and consistently use the colour red with their logo which is recognisable as its just the word ‘Coles’, their slogan ‘Value the Australian way’ or ‘Down Down the prices are Down’ compared with Woolworths who use green, their W logo, and their slogan ‘The fresh food people’, you may even be humming the jingle now. ‘Did somebody say KFC?’, or Commonwealth, ‘Can lives here’ or Telstra with the possibly the most recognisable logo in Australia.
All of these companies make themselves known to customers and distinctly remembered by their branding and advertising being unique from their competitors, consistent in how they communicate so that each advert, flyer, social media post or other form of communication all builds the brand and finally their branding is recognisable as them, they don’t get confused for their competitors, their logos, slogans and colours are chosen to be clearly recognisable as them.
So when you are refining your branding and advertising, ask yourself, is it unique? Is it consistent across all of my communications? And will consumers recognise it as me?