For the past few weeks, everywhere I look, I feel that someone is trying to sell me something, make me fitter, make me smarter, make me more beautiful…. All of these brands are trying to attract me by loudly shouting about them, themselves, what they do.

If this happened on a date, I would be making a quick excuse and hot-footing out of there.

What these brands are failing to understand is that it is not about them at all. To win the hearts and minds of customers they need to reframe their messaging and rather than focusing on them and their product, they need to focus on who the customer is and the problem that they are solving for them.

Graze, CEO Joanna Allen, put this beautifully in the recent Bread&Jam D2C summit (get the full highlights here). First and foremost, your role as a brand is to solve a problem that people have. Rather than obsessing over channels or formats, you should "focus on the people that you’re designing for and what is the problem that you’re solving for them (...) and be where you need them to be to solve this problem". Joanna Allen, Graze CEO. Once you have defined this you wrap creativity around it and connect the dots to the consumer.

A great example of a brand doing this is THIS, the meat-free meat, designed for flexitarians- people who love meat but are consciously looking for plant-based alternatives. They chose to launch the brand in January, a time of the year when people re-evaluate their life choices and in recent years been referred to as Veganuary. THIS™ knew that good intentions often wane in the first few weeks, so they positioned their product as the solution. They did this through the creation of a comedic hotline that supported meat lovers on their intrepid journey to being plant-based. A small media buy of carefully selected billboards enabled PR shots to be captured and the juxtaposition shared far wider than the local proximity of the ad. What sets this campaign apart is that it was inherently shareable, the message was around solving a well-understood problem that the customer experienced. The brand just happened to be the solution.

IKEA also do this to great effect. Whilst many brands either paused their marketing or used it as a time to create a generic message of goodwill. IKEA did something very different. It understood that people were now needing home offices and there was the pressure to home school and entertain kids. They created DIY guides on how to turn ordinary objects into play spaces and offered a glimmer of lightheartedness at a time when the rest of the media landscape was very bleak.

As start-ups and challenger brands, you do not have the same budgets as your competitors, so you need to look for unique and novel ways that you can stand out, be distinctive and get people taking about you. This starts by first understanding the customer and the problem that you solve. To do this, we have a free- guide that can help, click here to download.

Sprowt is a marketing consultancy that helps purpose-driven challenger brands stand out and scale to become the household brands of tomorrow.

Pssstt… it’s not about you.

I'll have a side of mould with that.

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