Reilly Newman | Before you declare your value to your audience, you’ll need to determine what your brand means to them. How do you figure out what your brand means to them?
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This is a major sticking point for many businesses because they may be too focused on the value they deliver through their offering and not focused on what it means to their audience. This meaning can make or break your business.
To determine value without considering the meaning is leaving money on the table and more importantly not seeing from the perspective of your buyer. The mistake in determining the meaning is assuming it is derived from your offering. This sounds logical, but human psychology tells us otherwise.
We don’t derive meaning from anything, we assign meaning to everything.
With this in mind, we can see the importance of assisting our audience in assigning the proper meaning to your business so your brand can be properly formed.
Since the meaning of something is up to the beholder, it can vary and be subjective to that individual. The meaning of your business is now subject to the beholder’s opinions, perspective, and past experiences. This isn’t anything new because we are all aware of perception and that it is the true way we see the world. However, I want to walk through what this means for your business.
What’s the Meaning of This?
This is exactly what we ask ourselves when we come across something. We quickly try to categorize the thing and makes sense of it. Our first initial instinct is to determine if it is a threat or not. This is due to our evolutionary biology that has brought us to this point by surviving the many predators around us. In the business world, this is how we determine if a business is trustworthy or not — if they’re “legit”. Yes, we do judge books by covers and this is exactly why the pattern on a snake or spider say danger and a sleazy salesman signals “buyer beware” loud and clear!
By first determining the safety of something, we are then able to lend it a little of our trust because we have assessed some of the risk. This moves the business relationship closer to a transaction.
We now need to categorize what this thing is. Quickly, our eyes look for clues. What are they selling? What’s their logo of? What’s the name of their business? What’s their price point? These signals are all clues we use to paint the picture of their brand within our mind. We are constructing the meaning that we are going to assign them based on how we perceive these many aspects of the business.
As humans, we are continually looking for meaning. This is why we constantly ask this about things. This is why kids love to ask “why” over and over and over. When we assign meaning, we make sense of our surroundings. We feel safe and things are understood for not just what they are, but why they are.
You Better Mean it
The fact that the meaning we are assigned actually means more than what we do may be a wake up call for many. However, we see examples of this in all kinds of markets. The meaning we assign to our favorite restaurant or our favorite drink or even our favorite clothing brand. What’s truly fascinating about this is that “favorite” is completely subjective and can vary per individual. Yet, the meaning applied is a general understanding of just how much value we place on our “favorites”. This common understanding of the meaning of “favorite” shows that the object is not important as the subjective value we assign to it. If you don’t see this, look no further than the 1975’s infamous Pet Rock which generated $15 million in sales for its ingenious inventor who was simply selling rocks.
As for the many signals that your business uses to communicate to the world, we must be conscious of them and the clues we are leaving for our audience to discover. Simply said, we must mean it. We must make sure every signal we are providing our audience points them in the direction of the meaning we are wishing them to assign to us. This can be as subtle as the color palette we use or select word choice or it can be as blatant as a descriptor statement “We are Uber of wine tasting” or “We are like Target, but exclusive to members” — these kinds of signals help the framing of your business to assist your audience with their assignment of meaning. This is commonly accomplished through associating with a known, but also disassociating with something through contrast. When we are deliberate about our signals, we show our audience that we mean it and they are the ones who determine if they find it valuable.
At the end of the day, we need to keep in mind that we are all humans. We are constantly looking for information to intake in order to make sense of the world around us. We look for meaning and we don’t derive meaning from anything, we assign meaning to everything.
