Who’s Rocking in Your Brand Neighborhood?
I love the ballsiness of Gymshark in their Halloween social campaign this year. They literally exposed themselves bare and hoped that they’d get some bites.
Picture from Elfried Samba, Head of Social Content at Gymshark's LinkedIn post.
Luckily they knew their audience and got those bites. And then some.
I’ve no doubt that this was no mistake.
I’m sure that they knew exactly who they were challenging, and those brands were chosen with intent.
Because they’re similar brands.
Not in category, clearly, but in positioning.
If you look at who Gymshark challenged and ask:
what’s their tone of voice?
what are their values?
what’s their purpose?
you’ll see the patterns emerge.
This is because Gymshark clearly has a very clear steer on their own brand strategy, purpose and positioning.
In knowing that, they can clearly identify their peers, their ‘brand-friends’ or who else is rocking in their brand-neighbourhood.
And if you ask me, it’s a pretty cool neighbourhood.
While I’m utterly delighted by the marketing outcome of this, the researcher in me also finds this a useful exercise to do when clients are creating and refining their brand strategies.
Creating strategies is not an easy thing to do. After all, these are meant to be your long term blue prints, so the idea is not that you’ll review in a year and change things up (although nothing wrong with being agile if the situation demands it.) Many big companies, especially, struggle with this; not because they aren’t excellent strategists, but because they’ve been around for a long time and their purpose might have evolved. It’s one thing starting a company because you believe in something and want to change that; it’s another when your brand was born in the 1950s and the world has changed dramatically since then (hi Barbie!).
There are many exercises to help teams put their collective thoughts on the brand together to derive the strategy, but like I said, brand neighbourhoods is one of my favourites. It’s also REALLY fun to implement and people find it a lot easier talking about other brands, rather than their own (not sure about you, but I’m far better at analysing other people than I am at analysing my own behaviour!)
It’s so simple too - quite literally who would you say are your brand’s friends (or would like to be)?
Analyse the list and see the patterns emerge. Some starting points for that (as above):
what’s their tone of voice?
what are their values?
what’s their purpose?
If it’s in line with what you want your brand to be - great, you’ve got a brilliant starting point!
If not, it’s time to dig deeper and start understanding why you think your brand is hanging out with these other brands when your brand isn’t like them. You might even find some unexpected themes emerging. Maybe you’re the Outlaw, or maybe you’re the Caregiver. (As you can see I quite like to use Archetypes.)
And if you find the exercise extremely difficult, then it's safe to say, you really need to work on your brand strategy and work out what you stand for. If it's a real struggle, start simple - are you more M&S, more Aldi or somewhere in between?
Once you’ve created your brand strategy, it can’t hurt to sense check your brand neighbourhood again (which acts as a strategy sense check too), because ultimately you do want to land in a neighbourhood that feels like home. You'll know it when you do because it will feel so damn good.
