SD#15: Challenger brands, logic and career success
April 24, 2022
Hi friends,
Welcome to another edition of Seven Dawns, your weekly newsletter on marketing, productivity, psychology and more. As the newsletter is still in it’s infancy I will experiment with the way I send you ideas. Do let me know if you like or dislike something you see.
Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Marketing) Challenger brands can position themselves against the market leader for differentiation What do you do when you are number two in a market that is dominated by a big player who shows no signs of budging? Do you fight on the terms that the market leader set out? Or do you carve yourself space as an alternative to the incumbent? Meet Avis – a brand that chose the latter path and ended up creating one of the most iconic marketing campaigns of all times. Avis was founded by Warren Avis with an $85,000 investment. Throughout the next few decades it changed hands from one owner to another multiple times, but what remained constant was their rivalry and underdog status to Hertz. That changed in the 1960s when the company decided to fully adopt their underdog status with the tagline of ‘We try harder’, putting themselves face-to-face with their rival but also showcasing how they are different, how they can be an alternative choice. What followed was years of growth, building Avis brand to such an extent that they became the market leader in some countries around the world and had to replace the famous tagline. |
2. (Psychology) Heavy multitaskers are less efficient at multitasking than light ones Social psychologist Dr David McClelland from Harvard stated that the people we associate with determine 95% of your success or failure in life. His research came out a long time ago and there were question marks about whether the finding was causation or simply a correlation. It may very well have been the latter, but I think it is worth thinking about how people around us shape our thoughts and feelings. This doesn’t mean that if some of the people close to us had a bad spell we are suddenly in trouble. After all, those that go through hardship will often learn the most from those experiences and can teach us adversity. We may differ from our closest friends and even our partners in many ways, but more often than not, there will be major areas of fundamental beliefs where our views will coincide. What’s key is understanding how they affect our feelings and taking control of it. |
3. (Marketing) Differentiation has been overstated and distinctiveness has been understated. Both are underused I’ve previously discussed how only 16% of people remember and correctly attribute a TV advert. And that’s for a channel that is known to be more captivating than most others (think display advertising, PPC, which are usually scrolled past without any paid attention). The main way to combat this is to ensure your marketing is differentiated, i.e. you are being different from other competitors in a way they cannot copy you; and being distinctive, that is your brand is clearly recognisable through brand codes (logos, colours, sounds, smells). The value of differentiation has always been pushed down marketers’ throats and there are good reasons for it. If you can find a way to be different (see learning number 1 above), you can greatly increase your chances of brand success. Distinctinvess has always been more of an ugly distant cousin that people mentioned next to differentiation. It is now clear that the value of distinctiveness is just as great. If people cannot correctly attribute that it was your advert that they saw, then there is little point in running the ad altogether. A brand needs both – clear differentiation and distinctiveness to succeed in the market. |
4. (Productivity) Starting a task is the hardest bit. Start small and it will be easy to continue We discussed the Zeigarnik effect before – our tendency to remember and be affected by unfinished tasks. The tendency to put off difficult tasks that we don’t want to face is almost universal. As it turns out, the moment of starting a task is often so much harder than actually doing the task. Once we get started, there can be challenges (and we will want to switch to something else) … but if we can just start, then half the battle is already won. So getting good at starting something tough can be a powerful skill to master. Set yourself a challenge to do this once every day for at least a week or a month and watch the results. By doing it just once a day, you’ll relieve yourself of the pressure of trying to do it all day long. You can be deliberate about it and find a way of viewing the task that feels powerful and joyful. zenhabits |
5. (Problem-solving) Logical analytical thinking is good when you’re trying to solve a problem you know or seen before We’ve had over a hundred years of corporate history as we know it in humankind’s books. It is safe to say that most problems you will face in your career/organisation already occurred to other people, and companies in the past and we can also say with high confidence that someone already tried solving the problem that you’re trying to tackle. They most likely went through the same steps as you, brainstorming, analysing, looking for the root of the issue, thinking outside the box – all of that has been done. They probably arrived at the same solutions as you are thinking of right now. It’s only natural. And it’s most likely that their attempts at fixing the problem by conventional logical solutions also did not work (because you would’ve heard about it if it did). So why not try something different? Why not try something that does not make sense? We now know that applying a discount to theatre tickets actually reduces the number of sales it gets. If your challenge is to sell more tickets, you would be better off raising the price rather than the opposite. But no one that started with the issue of ‘we need more sales’ came to the logical solution to raise the price. |
6. (Marketing) Share of search could be areplacement for share of voice in the digital space We discussed several times in this newsletter the significance of gaining share of voice in the market. We know there is a high correlation between your brand’s share of voice and the market share. Grow your voice and your market share will grow. But how do you measure your share of voice in a world that is increasingly digital? Well, Les Binet suggests using share of search as an alternative metric that looks at how prominent your brand is among search algorithms. Share of search results are a lot more accessible to smaller brands as this is usually already tracked from your SEO efforts and can be supplemented by things like Google Trends. And Binet found that there is a correlation between share of search and market share in a similar fashion to share of voice. If you’re a small to medium business, share of search could be the closest metric that you can use as an alternative to share of voice. |
7. (Career) Intelligence is a much larger predictor of education and job success than grit There’s been many articles and studies recently that claim grit is the underlying success factor in your career and education. Well, there’s an alternative view in the house. A recent study suggests that intelligence is actually 48-90 times larger predictor of education success and 13 times of job than grit. Conscientiousness also contributes to success more than grit but only twice as much. Their findings suggest that although grit has some effect on success, it is negligible compared to intelligence and perhaps also to other traditional predictors of success. Sagepub |
Fun things to click on:
List of laws of the internet – isn’t it crazy how universal these are? Ever wondered if people in your country have similar dreams to you? Here’s a map of the most common dreams by country. Brain feeling foggy? Here are five ways to clear a brain fog.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom