Scott Saunders | A smart brand starts with knowing its audience and knowing how to talk to them intelligently.
How and what a business communicates to its audience says a lot about its brand. If the business wants to be perceived as having the best product or being the best choice for a service, the brand needs an aura (so to speak) of expertise and intelligence. Communicating that your brand is the smartest choice for the customer starts with assuming that you serve a smart audience.
Great leading brands are ones that are usually associated with being innovative, intelligent, and resourceful. Those brands know their audience — and their audience appreciates the assumption that the brand makes about them – that they are intelligent consumers. By choosing their brand, they are affirming that the customer has made a wise choice. When they communicate, they “speak” to the marketplace with a certain level of authority and intelligence. However, many businesses make the mistake of trying to make sure they are communicating to “everyone in the room.” This means their brand’s communication is always trying to accommodate the “least-intelligent person in the room.”
For instance, if a business is selling hand salves and focuses on explaining the simple benefits of using a salve to their audience, they are only talking to a part of their audience. They are not really talking to the consumer that knows what salves are and is looking for the best salve on the market. They run the risk that those customers will most likely pass over their particular brand for perhaps others on the market because the brand is not meeting their caliber of criteria. What the customer (that knows and uses salves) wants to know in the brief moments of brand exposure is whether that salve is the best and smartest choice for them as a consumer. But most of the business’s effort went into making sure people know what a salve is, versus why their salve is the best. Time and energy is spent proclaiming their salve hydrates cuticles, heals dry skin, or smoothes chapped lips, rather then proclaiming that their brand is all-natural, locally sourced, or has a unique ingredient that might single their product out from the rest of the pack to the more discerning customer.
In addition to knowing what to say, smart brands intelligently identify who to talk to. Remember, if you are speaking to the lowest denominator in the room, you will be ignoring the rest of the audience in the room. Now, if your desired audience is that person and you want more customers like them, then continuing to speak to them will eventually gather more of the same audience. However, if your business and brand desire to gain a share of the market space that is more knowledgeable about what it is you are providing (product or service), then you need to focus on speaking ONLY to those people in the crowd.
Bottom line, knowing how to communicate intelligently means making sure your brand is talking at the level of the audience your business wants to have, not necessarily the audience it has at this moment. Like a college professor explaining physics to 3rd grade students, sure the 3rd graders will understand some basic physics but the college students have left the lecture hall.
