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Brand Strategy Featured Psychology

Bridging The Identity Gap

 

Brands exist in the space between how people perceive themselves and how they behave.

Our self-perceptions are the building blocks of our reality, and when the way we act doesn’t measure up to who we believe we are, it feels very uncomfortable. Oftentimes it’s the kind of pain that we will do nearly anything to resolve.

All brands are vehicles for closing this gap. The bigger the gap the bigger the cognitive dissonance, and the bigger the opportunity for the brand.

Eight Sleep is a premium bed cooling and sleep monitoring system made for professional athletes, but that’s not their core audience.

Think of the average person who has bought into hustle culture, or is on the wellness fastrack, or is an entrepreneur, or generally sees themselves as a leader. Their self-perceptions hinge on their ability to be productive, and if those people struggle and fail to get out of bed at 5am over and over again in order to have a productive day, or if they struggle to focus, or if they don’t treat their bodies like the hardware to their mental software, then their identity is threatened.

These people are not the elite athletes that Eight Sleep was designed for, but they are the performance-minded people that Eight Sleep’s brand captures. They pay for Eight Sleep not only in high cost, but also in the time it takes to rearrange their bedrooms and the commitment it takes to learn and use the app over time.

People pay these high costs because they are not merely solving for sleep. They are solving for their cognitive dissonance. The one thing they want (or perhaps need) more than rest is to feel like they are performing at a level that matches their self-perceptions.

Eight Sleep website, 8/14/2023

Strong brands have cognitive dissonance at their core. They understand that while the product may solve a real-world problem, the brand is solving a much more valuable identity problem.

Social psychology identifies three ways to solve for cognitive dissonance. Each pathway gets us from a state of high dissonance (discomfort and pain), to a state of lower dissonance (comfort, ease). Each one speaks to different user needs in a market, and has its own challenges and opportunities.

1. Change belief – Change one’s beliefs to be more aligned with one’s actions.

2. Change action – Change one’s actions to be more aligned with one’s beliefs.

3. Change action perception – Rationalize or justify the difference between one’s beliefs and one’s actions.

Each of these three pathways shrinks the gap between someone’s identity and behaviors, and thus lowers their cognitive dissonance.

However, I’ve seen a fourth pathway emerge that not only works, but is indicative of where successful brands are headed over the next few years.

4. Adapt action – Change the outcomes of one’s actions to be more aligned with one’s beliefs.

In this fourth pathway, people get to enjoy lowered cognitive dissonance without the labor of changing their beliefs or actions, nor the mental gymnastics of changing the perception of their actions.

Each pathway is uniquely suited to a certain kind of market problem, and a certain kind of solution.

The four pathways to solve for cognitive dissonance

Most brands fail to recognize the true cognitive dissonance they are up against, and then either take the wrong pathway or take none at all. For brand owners, CEOs and investors, these pathways also reveal the durability of a brand, namely its ability to continue serving a significant need for customers even as competitor brands put pressure on the marketplace.

You can study your user inside and out, but if you don’t know the cognitive dissonance that shapes them, then you don’t know how to build a brand that will serve them.

Change Belief

Many brands are limited by a pervading belief in the minds of their users. A bias like “Only rich people buy art” or “Vegans are weak” will keep someone in a high state of dissonance when in fact they do appreciate fine artwork or care about their health. These biases will also keep them from buying the painting or trying the plant-based restaurant.

Dissonance that comes from biases oftentimes explains why your audience may have the means and resources to convert, but instead chooses to spend that money somewhere else. They’re usually spending it where they feel less cognitive dissonance (in this case it might be new furniture or the gym).

The unique thing about this specific pathway for relieving cognitive dissonance is that new information or ideas, education and exposure are not what change beliefs. To change our beliefs we must change our identities.

People resist changing their beliefs because in some part, it means losing a sense of self. Belief and identity are so deeply intertwined that when people change their religions, their partners, their jobs, their diets or their politics, they often describe the shift as leaving an old version of themselves behind.

We can’t change our minds until we are able to see ourselves as new people. We have to be able to grasp what this new identity looks, feels and thinks like.

In their “In Case of Adventure” series, Rivian is selling a car, but also selling a new identity. When people wonder to themselves, “Who buys a Rivian?” the answer will be clear: the urban adventurer. This identity clearly pops up in Rivian’s content, testimonials, gear shop and PR.

Rivian’s “In Case Of Adventure” series, 7/25/2023

It’s a move straight out of the premium vehicle playbook. Porche’s home & lifestyle line, Mercedes-Benz’s coffee lounges and Harley Davidson’s community pilgrimages (which I’ve written about before) are all methods for signaling the identity of the driver.

When you give people a sense of new identity, it’s easier for them to drop their biases and change their beliefs. They can be more certain about who they are and how they should move through the world.

I’ve seen this dissonance pathway a lot in B2B as well. In our research with high performing B2B salespeople over the years, we’ve seen brands like Gong emerge as preferred platforms not because of their technology (in this case a sales intelligence platform) but because of how they celebrate a new identity of the salesperson. Gong exalts salespeople as bold and passionate heroes. The Gong user has a clear identity.

This pathway to solving cognitive dissonance is well suited for brands that face strong biases, which may sound like “A person like me can’t do things like that” or “People who do that look like this.”

These biases explain why many food and foodtech brands have failed in the market, despite innovative products. Surprisingly, food is highly personal and identity driven. What we eat is a big part of how we see ourselves in the world.

Change Action

When a category of users can be characterized by having fear, apprehension or even shame that holds them back from doing something, there is likely a pent up demand for new behavior.

People who are stuck in this form of cognitive dissonance don’t necessarily need to change their beliefs. Instead, they need to change their actions, and that typically only happens when there is enough psychological safety to try something new.

The explosion of kidult play — adults playing with kids toys — is a great example of brands creating enough psychological safety to change a behavior that has been historically limited by shame or fear of judgment. Brands like Lego have created inviting, thoughtful and safe environments for adults to engage in play — so much so that adult fandoms are propelling Lego’s revenue and market to unprecedented levels.

Adult-themed product extensions, research on the adult-child relationship in play, and deep adult Lego communities and conventions give this consumer the psychological safety they need to turn what may be considered a childish hobby into a valid and rewarding adult experience.

Today’s adult Happy Meals, adults-only bouncy houses and the Barbie movie were perhaps a natural response to the joyless years of Covid, but they are also all branded efforts to make play more of a safe zone for adults.

There are other brands, however, that have failed to create the same kind of psychological safety for their adult fans and are likely missing out on a valuable segment. In a recent Washington Post article, a 27-year-old referred to as “Nick” divulged his obsession with Squishmallows (which are round pastel-colored plushies) on condition of anonymity because he was fearful of losing his job if his employer found out. Meanwhile, a Today Show post about the kidult craze drew especially harsh criticism that revealed just how severely our culture continues to judge adults who play with toys.

Some of the replies to @TODAYshow’s tweet about the kidult craze, 12/20/2022

The cognitive dissonance gap may be narrowed in Lego’s corner of the market, but it is wide and thriving in other areas where shame still overshadows play for adults. That is a clear opportunity for brands who are willing to invest in branding, positioning and product innovation that creates psychological safety for their users.

Over in the sexual health category, Dame creates psychological safety through high quality product design and calming, artistic visual branding that stands in great contrast to the salacious and bawdy brands of most competitor companies.

The repeated message of “for women by women” also creates a kind of psychological safety that is sorely missing from this market — one that removes the male gaze from the conversation. Dame is a safe space for women to explore desire without the shame, stigma or limiting beliefs that usually govern their shopping habits. However, even more importantly, Dame matches the self-perception of a huge user base that rarely sees themselves reflected in other brands.

Change Action Perception

There are times when the barriers to changing action are so high, even psychological safety won’t likely work. In those instances, changing the perception of the action may be the strongest way forward.

Parents, especially new mothers, are a prime example of what happens when there is high dissonance between how someone perceives their identity, and the nearly impossible actions it will take to live up to that perception.

New mothers have new identities, usually shaped and informed by shiny Instagram mommy influencers and long-held narratives about a mother’s role in the world. But I have seen in my research with parenting brands over the last 10 years that the vast majority of these same mothers simply cannot make their actions match this new identity, no matter how hard they try.

In early motherhood, women are reborn themselves. With a new baby and a new perspective, they often start new businesses or careers. This generation of mothers is also the first to not look to their own mothers for guidance on the motherhood journey, opting instead to educate themselves and form their own intuition (no small feat). They are also highly concerned with reversing the parenting mistakes they experienced as children. In short, new mothers today want to grow themselves as they grow their families.

But the truth of the matter is that they do not have the resources. They do not have the tribe, the money, the support systems or the time to live into this exceptionally demanding new identity. They will have to make heart-wrenching compromises between themselves and their babies nearly every single day, and in this quiet suffering, they further cement the dissonance they are trying to run away from.

The right path forward for brands in this space is to change the perception of the action, and in order to do that, brands must create a movement and/ or a community.

Boram is an interesting new concept in early motherhood care that changes the script around parenting. Described as a ‘postnatal retreat’, the all-inclusive center offers 5-star accommodations, a 24/7 care team of doctors and clinicians who help people ease into motherhood while teaching them the mountain of skills and knowledge they will need when taking the baby home. This all happens within a routine of nourishing chef-prepared meals, massage services, night nurse coverage and recovery support.

Boram’s website, 8/15/2023

The vast majority of mothers who don’t make it to Boram will not experience a single one of these things in the usual postnatal experience.

Boram isn’t about luxuries. It’s about honoring the integrity of a woman who has just given birth. It may not be for everyone, but it is possibly the beginning of a new movement that centers the mother and her health, surrounding her with a community of care.

In this experience, mothers who want to live up to their new self-perceptions are not forced into failure. They are lifted into possibility. The cognitive dissonance between who they want to be and their actions toward that identity is greatly lowered in the crucial, early days postpartum.

While mothers may be a self-aware group, an important thing to remember with this pathway is that the user in other categories may not always understand, or even be aware of, their hidden desires. Norms and social conditioning can make them out of touch with their own needs, despite how high the underlying cognitive dissonance may be. You might even find that the higher the cognitive dissonance, the greater the self-denial.

If you do discover a high, invisible dissonance, community is especially important. Communities have specific rules, which I have written about before, but the most important rule is to know why you gather.

A former client in the bath and candle space had a unique user base of middle-America women that were especially obsessed with the company’s jewel candles: large theme-scented candles that melted down over a number of hours to reveal a piece of jewelry hidden inside. Users loved the scents and candle jars, and really loved collecting the silver gemstone rings, earrings and necklaces that were buried under the wax.

It was always assumed that these users saw their candles as a luxury, or fun pastime, but as we got deeper into our conversations, we realized that there were a lot of strong emotions tied up with the experience. Users would save for weeks to buy special drops, with the company seeing a spike in sales on payday every month. People traded candles and jewels, traveled with other fans, and most interestingly would use the candles while taking a bath in a locked bathroom.

What we came to learn was that many of their customers were dealing with incredibly stressful events, either from physical disability, stressful jobs, or personal circumstances. They may have thought the candles were frivolous purchases, but they used them very seriously. They saw them as stress-relieving tools that made them happy, and after a scented candle-lit bath, also made them feel whole again. It was the most sincere form of self-care: finding a small way to care for their own emotional needs.

But when we asked them directly about it, the idea of candles as self-care seemed completely alien. Self-care was something they felt they had no business investing in, and yet, that was exactly what they were doing.

We gently built the community around the concept of self-care and created new products with a self-care slant, while still maintaining the whimsy of the original brand. The goal was to not let people think this was a frivolous purchase (which caused their dissonance) and help them see that this bath time was a fundamental part of being mentally and emotionally fulfilled. It reduced the invisible dissonance that users felt every time they felt strongly compelled to buy, but couldn’t justify why.

It also helped center the company around a deep and meaningful “why”.

Adapt Action

While changing action and belief are valid pathways to success, it’s also important to consider how the customer journey around everything is evolving. According to a new Edelman Trust Barometer report, Gen Z is upending the purchase funnel in surprising ways (emphasis added below):

Gen Z’s true relationship with brands often begins at purchase…”Our data showed that that purchase is not an end point. It’s the starting point… According to the study, 78% of Gen Z respondents say they “uncover things that attract me and make me loyal to a brand after my first purchase,” with 50% saying they do most of their brand research after they buy.

People are increasingly creating brand relationships after the fact of conversion. That means you may not have much time to change belief or action beforehand.

In that case, adapting action may be the best pathway forward.

Instead of changing people’s beliefs, or changing their actions or perceptions of those actions, you must find a way to let them engage in the same behaviors, but with outcomes that are more aligned with the identities they hold for themselves.

Adapting action means people make little or no change to their beliefs and behaviors, but enjoy a different outcome that is more aligned with their identities.

Sollis Health is a 24/7 members-only medical center. They remove a lot of the friction that comes in the usual doctor’s office or urgent care visit, and replace it with comforting experiences. Members enjoy a private space where medical care is the way it should be: highly attentive, calming in nature, extremely well staffed and resourced, and designed to make patients feel like VIPs.

Sollis Health
Sollis Health’s website, 8/15/2023

But people don’t pay annual memberships ranging from $3,500 to $6,000 for convenience and amenities alone. What makes Sollis a strong brand is the hidden cognitive dissonance it aims to ease.

Throughout Sollis’ brand, the big promise is clarity and handholding. Sollis members feel like a unified team of elite professionals is actively watching over the health of them and their families. They have a sense of clarity in their medical care, and they feel confident in the condition of their health.

People generally want to believe that they are responsible in managing their wellbeing. They want to believe they eat right, exercise, get their annual exams, stay on top of blood tests and so on. But that doesn’t square with the fact that so many of us avoid the doctor’s office or the hospital, delaying important visits and skipping treatments altogether.

Why do we hate the doctor’s office or hospital so much? Because it tells the opposite story of responsible wellbeing. Oftentimes, conversations with doctors and nurses leave us with more questions than answers. Practitioners don’t speak to each other and we nervously work to make sure each new doctor has our history and up-to-date records.

The experience, especially if you have a significant condition to deal with, feels highly disempowering. When we go to these places, we do not get to act like the health-forward people we think we are. Instead we leave aggravated, feeling bad about ourselves, and anxious that our behavior does not live up to our self-perception.

And this is the genius of Sollis. Instead of asking more of us (like the empowered patient movement), or asking us to do something different (like functional medicine), Sollis allows us to keep the same behavior but experience a very different outcome. We simply go to the doctor’s office and we get to be the responsible, health-forward people we believe we are. Everything about Sollis reinforces this identity.

Adapting action is usually the quickest way to close the dissonance gap because it lowers or erases the bar to action.

The brands that succeed in this pathway oftentimes look like crossovers. They borrow from complementary categories to create new norms in how people behave, and what they expect the outcomes to be.

Education is a notoriously tough industry to crack into, but edutainment is a crossover that both lowers the barrier to action and changes the outcomes to be more in line with our self-perceptions.

While platforms like Masterclass and Patreon made great strides in this direction, TikTok has mastered it with their education content. There are many stats that show just how powerful TikTok is in edutainment, including the fact that a surprising 51% of college students use it for homework help.

Education on TikTok is a crossover between intimate conversations with your favorite parasocial friends and bite sized insights that pique your interest in things you may not have cared about otherwise.

We can continue our deeply ingrained action (scrolling on a phone watching 30-second bits of content), but enjoy a much more identity-aligned outcome (valuable learning).

I believe the adapt action pathway will be one of the most successful and defensible paths for brands over the next few years because as the world becomes more noisy and culture becomes more fragmented, we will have less and less time to do the hard work required of the other 3 paths.

Adapt action bundles brand defensibility with product defensibility in a way that we rarely see in the marketplace, creating new spaces and norms for users. If you can cheat cognitive dissonance so that the same actions produce different results, you can win over a much wider audience.

 


 

While it may be tempting to choose a pathway that seems obvious or easy, or to choose adapt action because it offers lucrative opportunity, you must always choose the one that is best suited to your problem.

In fact, you don’t usually get to choose the path you must take. Given that the problem you are solving, the user you are solving for and the pressures of the market are not in your control, the path will usually choose you.

Step away from your product and instead look at the motivations of your user. Where is there a mismatch between who they are and who they believe to be? Where do they suffer the pain of not meeting their own expectations? When it comes to your category, product or service, who do they see themselves as, and how do they work against that image? Find the path that is required of your brand.

We live with dissonance everyday, and the best brands understand that. They use it not only to shape their branding, but also their products, services and user experiences.

Each pathway, when properly explored, will reveal new opportunities throughout the business and the marketplace. Your reach, engagement and defensibility will all be more impactful.

It’s a great path to innovation, while staying true to the people you’re looking to serve.

[This piece is a sequel to an earlier piece I wrote about cognitive dissonance called The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands]

Categories
Psychology

The 14 Rules of Identity

 

This is a companion piece to The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy.

 

Image credits clockwise from top left: Mihai Stefan, Carlos Arthur, Emil Vilsek, Erik Lucatero, Kyle Loftus, Almos Bechtold, Ethan Haddox, Ali Marel.

 

Identity precedes everything in brand strategy.

Before your company, before your product, before your market, there is your user’s identity, and that identity dictates the world your brand gets to play in.

Everything we do as consumers is an expression of who we are.

From conversion to consumption to churn, every action we take is aligned with how we see ourselves, and identity is the underlying code that makes those behaviors happen the way they do.

Identity triggers behavior.

If you can understand that code, you can radically change your relationship with the user — so radically, that your users pivot even their most deeply rooted behaviors and beliefs.

We’re constantly feeding our minds with meaning and narrative, bringing our identities to life every day through the stories we tell ourselves.

Whether it be zoning out during the ride to work or the way we treat the barista at the coffee shop, we not only live in these moments, but also observe ourselves through a third (extremely subjective) eye as they happen — “Beautiful woman is lost in her thoughts on the the way to the office”…“Man with kind eyes tips the barista a little extra because he has character.

It’s the nature of identity to experience something in the moment while also contextualizing that experience for meaning.

That eye is a perpetual reinforcement of who we are and where we belong, and the single most personal story we tell ourselves.

The story is also the world in which your brand will live.

While most brands only consider the observable world of their ideal users, truly smart brands look for the hidden inner world that operates within each user.

That’s the world where decisions get made. If you can understand that world, you can make the right decisions happen.

In order to know how to speak to your user, you have to first understand how they speak to themselves when no one else is listening.

The best brands among us already demonstrate this:

  • TED created a new world of ideas, but also let us see ourselves as casual experts without the usual mental and emotional labor involved. They realized that while we may have wanted to learn, what we really wanted was to just know something.
  • Trader Joe’s started a food movement, but also constantly evolved their inventory and rearranged their stores, creating the thrill of discovery so that we could tell ourselves we were not only healthy people, but health tastemakers on the bleeding edge.
  • HBO’s daring and intelligent content changed television, and also allowed us to see ourselves no longer as just viewers, but as active participants. We once told ourselves we were an audience, but now believe we are active agents.

These brands changed not only the outer world, but our private inner worlds as well… and that is the most powerful way to build a brand.

They understood that identity was the starting point.

The quickest way to get there for your own brand is to understand how our identities form in the first place.

This is a list of the most important identity constructs we’ve learned at our agency. They are the rules and truths that guide any internal monologue in any audience.

Time and again, they’ve helped us get past the distractions on the surface and into the minds of the people we’re trying to speak to.

There is an inner world hiding in plain sight.

Use these guidelines to get there.

 


1. If you believe something, you will find the proof to support it.

I never thought I was very athletic, although I desperately wanted to be athletic growing up in high school. The story (which felt as real and deep as my DNA) was that I just didn’t get that gene.

I dropped out of tennis lessons and chickened out of kayaking not because the story was true, but because I was looking for proof of the story I believed.

Then I had my DNA sequenced at the age of 36 and it turns out I have the ACTN3 gene, which is in fact associated with athletic performance in elite power athletes.

My surprising 23andMe result instantly changed my internal story.

 

The moment I read that, my relationship to my body changed and a new script started playing. I suddenly felt something inside of me that was always there, but I simply did not believe in.

Nothing in reality had ever changed. I had that gene for 36 years, but when my internal monologue shifted, so did my beliefs, and thus my behaviors. I got a personal trainer, started tennis and kayaking, and began to treat my body very differently.

We will always find proof for the stories we believe.

Our internal scripts are so powerful, it’s nearly frightening.

  • Vice changed our script about serious journalism
  • WeWork changed our script about work that doesn’t look like work
  • Tinder changed our script around the shame of casual sex

You, too, can change the script for the betterment of your users.

Look for the story that needs changing and then create a new reality where that story can live. Give your users new proof, new evidence, new rules. Give them a new architecture to build their stories on top of.

Give them all of the props and staging they need in order to step inside the new narrative.

(More on this here: Dig Deeper — The Secret To Gripping Brand Narratives.)

2. Income doesn’t really mean anything.

If people want it, they’ll find the money for it.

Most of the people in your local Verizon store shouldn’t be spending $1k on an iPhone. But they do. And most of them upgrade every year, too.

Don’t waste your time with two-dimensional demographic info that only tells you what people should do, instead of what people want to do.

We spend our money on the things we believe in.

Look at psychographics instead.

Understand what permissions people give themselves in order to do or buy something outside of their usual scope… or better yet, what permissions they’re still waiting for.

Remember that Apple gave us the permission to make electronics a signal of our self-worth, before we even knew we wanted it.

Oftentimes gender, age and socio-economic background don’t matter, either. The people who can afford your product are the people who can afford to have their minds changed.

Ask yourself who those people are, and what drives their purchase behaviors more than their budgets.

That’s where you’ll find your answer.

(More on this here: How To Create Powerful Brand Messaging — 5 Truths and a Framework.)

3. What people really want is to learn about themselves.

Most brand positioning takes one of three forms:

  1. This is what our product does.
  2. This is what you can do with our product.
  3. This is who you can become with our brand.

The third positioning, This is who you can become with our brand, is the most powerful position to come from, and the only direction that the consumer mindset is headed for in the foreseeable future.

Ikea knows that even affordable modular furniture can reveal something on an emotional level.

This year, they’ve announced a slew of daring collaborations with not only breakthrough fashion icons like Virgil Abloh and OFF WHITE, but also musicians like Solange and her arts and culture hub Saint Heron, perfume creator Ben Gorham, and childhood throwback Lego.

The message is clear — you can become a creator with IKEA. This isn’t about furnishing your apartment anymore.

It’s a realization that changes your relationship with both the company and yourself.

There is perhaps nothing more valuable for your user than the experience of realizing who they are.

Every action your brand takes is a reflection of your positioning. It’s easy to go with This is what our product does, or This is what you can do with our product, but that’s leaving money on the table.

Push yourself to create a different a story that weaves both you and the customer into the future. A story that will deeply change both of you.

(More on this: How To Be Different, Not Better.)

4. Values rarely change. Beliefs change easily.

Short of a life changing event, consumer values typically don’t budge.

The beliefs that sit on top of those values, however, do change easily.

Cannabis startup MedMen knew that changing peoples’ anti-drug values was a dead end, but changing the belief that sat on top of that value — the belief that drug users are bad people — could in fact be changed.

MedMen ads challenge your beliefs with a heavy dose of empathy.

 

MedMen’s new narrative gave people room to understand that you can be a drug user and still be a good person.

And logic only dictates that if you want to use marijuana, you can still maintain your values and stay a good person, too.

The ads above literally crossed out the old belief and inserted the new one. Now your drug use didn’t define you. Your humanity did.

Changing our values is extremely uncomfortable. Changing our beliefs is a lot easier.

Brands that keep your values in tact but change your subsequent beliefs allow you, the user, to grow without the pain of changing your worldview.

Make sure you separate beliefs from values and know where to insert your narrative.

Yes, you can change values if that’s really where you want to go, but sometimes people only have room to shift their belief systems.

5. Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t always correlate with wealth.

Somewhere along the line, we started believing wealth pushes people up Maslow’s hierarchy.

But oftentimes it doesn’t.

Not everyone gets to the top of the pyramid. Not even the wealthiest among us.

Source: Big Think

 

While it may be largely true that increased prosperity moves people up the bottom three tiers, we’ve found in our work that the top two tiers actually correlate a lot less with wealth than you’d expect.

Many consumers in the top 5% have the disposable income to donate to charity, give back to their communities, volunteer, partake in immersive travel, become more spiritual, expand their world views or philosophies (all behaviors that reflect self-actualization and self-transcendence), but get stuck somewhere between the love/ belonging and esteem stages.

Wealth doesn’t move you up the pyramid. Confidence does.

It takes more than money to move up Maslow’s hierarchy.

Mindset, not money, defines where we are.

If you’re surprised that your wealthy neighbors hold xenophobic views, or your prosperous family members won’t give change to homeless people, it’s likely because their money moved up the pyramid faster then their hearts could.

Similarly, just because your customer is affluent doesn’t mean your corporate social responsibility program will resonate or your environmentally friendly practices will keep them from churning.

Make sure you understand where your customer is before you make any assumptions.

If you can help them move up a little faster with your brand, that’s even better.

6. People can have different identities in different parts of their lives.

I call this Poly Identification, and as more and more rules about class, gender and social roles begin to evaporate around us, the more comfortable we have become with letting people carry multiple identities at once.

As I wrote in Business of Fashion last year:

When Chiara Ferragni dresses in head-to-toe Chanel one day and Supreme and sneakers the next, she’s not just mixing styles, she’s moving between spaces.

It’s indicative of a much larger trend of millennial consumers willing to simultaneously identify as preppy, bohemian, emo, street, glam or any other number of subcultures.

Indeed, young consumers increasingly travel between styles instead of committing to a singular diehard identity. Rather than breaking out of the box, they collect boxes that reflect different senses of self at any given moment, on any given day.

It’s obvious in fashion, but also evident in our careers, love lives and social circles.

Kim Kardashian and Howard Stern can travel between wildly different identities without friction. That wouldn’t have been possible a generation ago.

Instead of fitting into boxes, people are increasingly moving between them.

Identities are a mosaic.

You can find a way to let people explore a different dimension of their identities or make a certain dimension fit in with others, but you can’t assume your user looks the same to you as they do in other parts of their lives.

7. You can’t leapfrog fear.

No matter how positive, hopeful or uplifting your brand promise is, you have to resolve any fear that may precede it.

Food tech companies tend to struggle with this.

Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats and Perfect Day have compelling brand messaging, but it all sits on a house of cards. Consumers still have a fear of the unknown in modified foods just as they always have with GMOs.

You can’t skip messages when it comes to fear. Fear must be resolved before any higher message can be adopted.

You already know a confused buyer never buys. Confusion is a form of fear. There are other common forms of fear, too:

  • Hate
  • Anger
  • Misunderstanding
  • Phobia
  • Bias

A2 Milk is from regular dairy cows while Perfect Day creates dairy without the animal.

Granted, A2 doesn’t have the same battle against consumer biases that Perfect Day has, but they still understand that the fear must be alleviated first before the optimistic horizon can be introduced:

A2 Milk homepage.

 

Their messaging turns unspoken fear into a simple story that consumers can tell themselves whenever those uncomfortable feelings crop up.

Perfect Day, on the other hand, let’s an unspoken fear sit in the mind of the consumer:

Perfect Day Homepage.

 

Do a sense check of your brand and see if fear is creeping up anywhere in your user experience. It can be sitting right under a positive sentiment.

Consumers can skip over most other emotions if something bigger is on the horizon, but fear is like quicksand.

Don’t let people get stuck.

8. Everyone has a garden.

Everyone has something they hold dear. Something they nurture often. A place where they focus the expression of their identity.

The mistake we make as brand strategists oftentimes is stopping short of finding that garden.

The garden is that one expressive outlet that reveals far more about your user than any other insight.

You’ll know it when you find it:

  • It will be where you user feels the most comfortable to be themselves
  • It will reveal what your user values the most
  • It will usually tell you when and where you can break the rules

Life hacking is a fascinating garden that reveals a lot about the men and women who spend time in it. Tim Ferris podcasts, Bulletproof Coffee and https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/ all live there.

It’s a garden where men, especially, can obsess freely over their bodies, reveal values that can easily be mistaken for vanity, and give you one important insight that goes against many other commonly held beliefs — that men will pay a lot of money to feel good.

HVMN knows this. That’s why their branding taps directly into a psychographic that wants to “Be Impossible”.

The video’s adrenaline-laced visuals tie in things like aging, mood and cognition, metabolism, obesity, inflammation, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.

This is hyper self-care for men.

It’s compulsive wellness. All-consuming self indulgence.

And if you didn’t look in that garden, you may have kept believing the stereotype that men are far less concerned about those things than women.

There is always something valuable in the garden.

If you can find it for your consumers, you’ll hit on something important.

9. We will do a lot to ease our cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance occurs whenever we believe something about ourselves, but act in a way that diverges from those beliefs. For example, we may believe we are healthy lovers, but fail to stay in any long term relationships.

That rift between what we believe and what we do creates an unease, and usually points to where we have the most dissatisfaction in our lives.

That’s why the love industry is so big and people are willing to spend immense amounts of money on both legit forms of help (books, therapy) and more questionable ones (reiki practitioners, fortune tellers and energy workers).

Sometimes our entire identities are driven by the motivation to narrow that cognitive gap.

Esther Perel understands that as desperately as we want to see ourselves as enlightened romantic partners, we do very little to actually get there. That’s why she’s positioned herself as a relationship explorer.

Instead of offering relationship advice in the traditional form that only creates more distance between who we are and how we see ourselves, she offers a path for self-discovery.

The Esther Perel experience allows people to see themselves as experts instead of disciples, and that brings our behavior a lot closer to our beliefs. She teaches us not how to fix, but how to think.

Look for gaps that need closing in the minds of your own audience.

Solving a problem for your user is great, but easing their cognitive dissonance can have a much greater emotional impact.

There is likely something that your user wants more than just a solution.

[More on that here: The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands.]

10. “Everyone is a hero in their own story” … but there are different kinds of heroes.

If you’ve read my writing, you know this is one of my favorite quotes.

It forces you to identify with anyone, and without judgement. I often refer to this quote when I find myself bothered or turned off by a customer profile because it brings me back to a place of empathy right away and helps me see the goal my user sees.

Empathy is a great homing device.

Keep in mind, however, that different people are different kinds of heroes:

  • There are the anti-heroes that look like villains on the outside and need someone to see them for who they truly are
  • There are the reluctant heroes that not only need the motivation to take on their destinies, but are secretly hoping and waiting for someone to give it to them
  • There are the catalyst heroes who act heroically, but rarely want change much themselves in the process
  • There are the tragic heroes that believe they will continue to stumble and fail, and may resist a narrative that says otherwise
  • There are the willing heroes who are eager to take on the challenge, and expect to get the Hollywood ending

Every kind of hero needs a different kind of message, but every one of them can be motivated to act.

Understand your hero, and you will understand how to make them move.

An anti-hero (like Harley Davidson’s customer) needs to be discovered while a willing hero (like Nike’s customer) expects you to already know who he is.

11. The journey is starting to matter more than the destination.

Something has started to change in the psyche of most post-boomer American consumers.

The end goal is starting to matter less, and the experience of getting there is starting to matter more.

Consumers are gradually entering a constant state of evolution.

Rather than defining themselves as who they are (a state of being), they are defining themselves by who they are turning into (a state of becoming).

Our ever-evolving co-working setups, our daily experiments in beauty and nutrition, and the transformative experiences we fervently search for in everything we do (from spiritually uplifting SoulCycle sessions to healing travel) show how the becoming piece matters more and more.

I refer to this as the treadmill vs. the step ladder. Previous generations understood social class and the incremental step ladder you moved up into in each rung.

Today we are moving along something that looks far more like a treadmill — no destination and no gatekeepers, but a constant experience of moving upward.

When people move from a ladder to a treadmill, you need to center your brand around the journey, not the end point.

That’s an important difference.

[More on this here: In The Transformational Economy, ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming’ Have Started To Merge.]

12. There are utility users, and there are premium users. You can’t speak to both, but you can turn one into the other.

Every client we work with wants to move upmarket to a more premium user, but many of them get scared when they realize that premium positioning will likely box out their core utility user base… even when that core is limiting them.

You can’t win over both with the same branding, but you can turn a utility user into a premium one.

Utility users need to be educated into caring about the right things. You need to find something more important than value-for-price that they can latch onto.

Lululemon didn’t miss out on a mainstream market. They turned a mainstream market into a premium one by educating and transforming those users into discerning yoga wear addicts.

Lululemon hired Vice to help explain and expand to the mainstream.

 

If you feel yourself sweating in the brand strategy process because you don’t want to leave your non-premium core behind, change your perspective.

You don’t have to leave them behind. You have to change them so they’ll come with you.

Give them a message that will make price irrelevant.

13. There is value in the ‘in-between’ spaces.

Consumers in every vertical of every category are looking for greater meaning, and they’re finding it in the connections between spaces.

Health is no longer just a doctor’s visit. It’s mind-body-spirit. It’s a juice cleanse, a heart-to-heart with your partner and a colonic. It’s a trainer and a nutritionist and therapist.

Beauty is no longer just an eye cream. It’s a non-inflammatory diet, a 24 karat facial and stem cell serums.

Career success is no longer a well paying office job. It’s a personal brand, an active blog and a creative side gig.

The connections between spaces have put new life into old paradigms.

Connections give consumers the answers (and narratives) they’re looking for.

All of these examples create a narrative of how and why we do things.

They add meaning and value in a way we can control. Instead of just trusting a drugstore eye cream brand, you have an empowering story of how and why your beauty routine is working.

Just like religion and folklore, connective stories become part of our hardwiring.

Look for how your brand can connect to more than just one part of someone’s life. There is a story to be told that is much bigger than your product.

Make the connection and go deeper into your consumer’s world.

14. Identity is a story.

Truth has very little to do with identity. How we interpret that truth is what matters.

To change a person is to change the stories that define them.

Every construct on this list culminates in this one, simple fact.

If you want to really see a person, look beyond the ‘truth’ of their external lives — listen to the stories they tell themselves internally.

Behavior, belief, bias, conversion all weave together to tell a tale. No one of these things can demonstrate who your consumer is. But together, they do just that.

Don’t get distracted by facts and statistics. Don’t chase after trends.

Instead listen for the story arc that emerges from them.

(Here are some common ones we all like to tell ourselves: Pain, Villains and Fuck You Money)

 


Reaching For Identity

Searching for identity can feel like grabbing at clouds. Just when you think you’re holding the truth, it slips through your fingers.

That’s because truly understanding someone else’s identity is an out-of-body kind of experience. It’s one thing to see it on paper. It’s another thing to feel it your bones.

“The shortest distance between two people is a story.”
― Patti Digh

But no matter how you cut it, identity is where it all starts.

You can’t know where your brand belongs if you don’t know what world it’s living in.

 

This is a companion piece to The 16 Rules of Brand Strategy.

Categories
Psychology

How To Reverse 4 of the Most Dangerous Consumer Biases With Your Brand

Start from the beginning. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the blurring line between story and science when it comes to branding, and I’ve noticed something interesting.

Consider these:

Greek myths, western literature, eastern philosophies, childhood fairytales, and any number of narrative “windows into the soul” many times fall in parallel to scientific cognitive biases.

    • When we quote Tennyson’s poetry and say, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” we are brushing against both Status Quo Bias and Loss Aversion in the same breath — a preference to maintain the current baseline, and a preference to avoid losses over acquiring equal gains, respectively.
    • Pygmalion, who fell so deeply in love with his own carving of a woman that he asked the goddess Aphrodite to give him a living, breathing version of his statue, is reminiscent of the IKEA effect — a cognitive bias where we “place a disproportionately high value on products [we’ve] partially created.”
    • The tragedy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a blend of confirmation bias —our human tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of our pre-existing assumptions and beliefs — and the related congruence bias — where we fail to consider there may be alternatives we haven’t yet thought of.
    • The story of the Ugly Duckling (which was heartbreaking for a sensitive kid like me). This story is a demonstration of the in-group bias — where we favor those in our group over others — and more darkly, the essentialism bias — “the view that certain categories (e.g., women, racial groups, etc.) have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly.”
    • And who can forget Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer? You know why you can’t forget him? Because of the von Restorff effect — where non-homogeneous items are more likely to be remembered.

The stories that define us show the fingerprint of human thinking.

In his incredible Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet, Buster Benson decodes and groups the hundreds of cognitive biases in our minds as answers to simple, live-or-die questions:

The amazing Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet, by Buster Benson, codex designed by John Manoogian III. I highly recommend you read the full article.
You don’t need to understand every bias. What you need to understand is how they work in the flow of logic, according to Benson:

1. Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.

2. Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.

3. Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.

4. This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.

Cognitive biases reveal our nature as consumers. We think and decide in non-sensical ways on a granular level, but pull back you’ll see the coping mechanisms that these biases afford us.

Information processing is basically storytelling, and biases are a shortcut to creating meaning.

That’s why your brand strategy is so crucial — it tells the story that facilitates the decision to purchase. It creates the meaning the customer needs in order to buy.

Yes, you can control (or exploit) consumer biases with product, UX and customer service, but none of these touch points can frame a belief before it has even been established.

I’m going to show you how biases can be leveraged through brand story instead.

The story is always what matters.

Without it, we drown as consumers searching for meaning in a pool of meaningless information.

Understand the biases that reveal what your customer wants, and then give them the meaning they’re looking for… before they misinterpret it for themselves.

4 Consumer Biases That Threaten Conversion, and How to Reverse Them

1. Ambiguity Effect

We tend to choose options for which the likelihood of a favorable outcome is known, over an option for which the likelihood of a favorable outcome is unknown — even if the unknown option has the potential for better gains.

Thinx is a fascinating case study on what happens when you attack the ambiguity effect head-on.

I was hesitant before buying my first set. They were expensive, unlike anything I had ever bought before, and the real big question was — would they work?

There is no way to understate that last concern. The idea of “period-proof underwear” possibly not working was a non-starter. As it is for nearly every woman, the shame, embarrassment and fear feels insurmountable.

Thinx turned the ambiguous into something concrete by being everything a period brand isn’t.

  • Instead of demonstrating with blue liquids as so many brands have done for generations, they used blood bags and red colors throughout their advertising.
  • They resisted using euphemisms and analogies, and instead used language like “This is the story of a girl who bled a river and… it was fine” or “No, they don’t feel like diapers, and it’s not like sitting in your own blood. Boom.”
  • They resisted generalizations and used real measurements of blood capacity, flow and wearability.

A day in the life of a real menstruating human.

Sure they were more comfortable, more eco-friendly, and safer, but that didn’t matter. When consumers like me suffer from the Ambiguity Effect, the potential for better gains don’t fully register — not when the status quo of pads and tampons are dependable and safe (no matter how uncomfortable or archaic they are).

That’s why Thinx got straight to the heart of the matter. They had to break taboos to get there, but by doing that, they marginalized their competition.

“There are so many ways to go wrong. All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.”

― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

There is constant anxiety about the unknown, about getting it wrong and missing the mark… especially in a space where no one has the guts/ permission to say it in plain terms.

If your customers are resisting conversion from a competitor brand because of the Ambiguity Effect, consider finding new ways to tell a story where ambiguity is eliminated and the very DNA of your brand story celebrates a new, known reality free of risk.

2. Reactive Devaluation Bias and Semmelweis Effect

Reactive Devaluation: We devalue thoughts and ideas if we believe they originated from an antagonistic figure, even if we may have otherwise found them valuable.

Semmelweis Effect: We have a strong tendency to reflexively reject anything new because it doesn’t match up with our norms, standards or beliefs.

Blu E-Cigarettes was dealing with a lot of shame-based beliefs and mentalities among their intended audience when they launched a few years back. There was a huge cognitive dissonance between what smokers knew (smoking kills) and what they did (smoked).

They understood that presenting their E-Cig product solely as a healthy alternative (which was at the time supposedly deemed 95% safer than smoking regular cigarettes) would only reinforce that dissonance and shame, especially if it was told by a member of the health community (an antagonist) so they had to tell a new story.

They had to tell the story from an insider’s point of view.

And just as importantly, they, had to tap into a different set of secret norms and beliefs.

Stephen Dorff flips the script.

As I wrote in my article on The Cognitive Dissonance Hiding Behind Strong Brands:

All you had to do was take it from the rugged, free-thinking Stephen Dorff himself when he said, “I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I want to light up […] We’re all adults here. It’s time we take our freedom back. C’mon guys, rise from the ashes.”

Those are fighting words. Those are words that make it ok to be a smoker… words, I’ll add, that smokers never hear. It flipped the script and said you’re not the bad guy, you’re the victim. You don’t deserve to be vilified.

Blu tapped into a secret belief — that smokers aren’t bad people. It was a very different kind of message that wouldn’t have been heard if it didn’t come from someone on the inside.

If you want to combat Reactive Devaluation and the Semmelweis Effect for a group, create a story of empowerment and tell it from the inside.

Create a new truth that acknowledges peoples’ secret desires.

“And perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humor. We all think the one we’ve got — or haven’t got — is just about right and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It’s everyone else who’s out of step.”

— Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of

The Blu story changed the behavior by acknowledging an unspoken belief.

[Read more about cognitive dissonance and easing the customer’s tension here.]

3. Self-Serving Bias

We tend to take personal credit for our successes by attributing them to our inherent characteristics, yet distance ourselves from our failures by ascribing them to external factors beyond our control.

I was an early adopter of Digit — a lightweight app that siphoned small amounts of money out of my checking account and placed it in a separate savings account in the background. It was a brainless way to save money that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

And I loved it. Eight months of Digit afforded me a trip to London.

But when the company announced they were going to enforce a new $2.99 monthly fee, I disconnected my account.

My Self-Serving Bias was saying, “I can save that money on my own. What do I need to pay $2.99 a month to Digit for?!”

Digit: Always just a money-saving app on top of an algorithm… when it could be so much more.

Even though the fee was small, the “irony of paying money to save money was too much” for some, including me, and I never reconnected my account. Digit failed to spot the bias and just kept sending me innocuous email reminders to update my banking details.

What they missed was a big opportunity to change the story and shift my perspective.

Imagine — what if they had repositioned themselves from a money saving/ money management app to a self-care tool? (stay with me here…)

Digit is a new kind of self-care platform. Every 6–8 months, Digit makes sure you can treat yourself to the vacation, spa weekend, shopping spree, dinner party, home upgrade, or paid off credit card debt you need to live a happy life.

If they had told that story, I would have framed my relationship with the app very differently.

I believe I can save a little money every week if I have to, but a memorable self-care experience every 6–8 months is not something I can do on my own.

“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”

 

― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This new story would have forced me to bear witness to what was truly gained when I had the app, and then lost when I gave it up.

4. Functional Fixedness Bias

We use objects the way they are traditionally meant to be used. If we need a paperweight, but only have a hammer, we may not think to use the hammer as a paperweight.

Functional Fixedness keeps us from experiencing old things in new ways, and in my experience that goes for any kind of product, not just objects.

About a decade ago, denim was the clothing staple for women everywhere in the US.

For nearly every day-to-day occasion, from daywear to casual evening, jeans anchored a woman’s outfit.

At that point Lululemon had been around for a while, but they began to see a change in the way customers wore their athletic and yoga-inspired clothing.

As a small niche of women increasingly wore Lululemon gear outside of the gym, overall jean sales were starting to decline and Lululemon made a pointed discovery — they were no longer just in the athletic/ gear business. They were in the fashion business.

Their styles evolved into fashion-forward cuts and prints, aesthetic began to take precedence over performance, and their story expanded into a brand-led vision for who the modern, active woman was… all while the new ‘athleisure’ category was beginning to emerge.

Well said.

While it’s unclear where the athleisure name came from, Lululemon took it, owned it, and ran with it. They became the poster child for athlesiure and thereby gave mainstream women a clear signal of when and how to wear their clothing.

If Lululemon had continued to run their company like a pure workout brand in those early days, the mainstream consumer would have kept using it merely as workout clothing — in the gym, for a limited purpose, and clear-cut use case.

That Functional Fixedness Bias was reversed with a refreshed brand story.

People can’t properly discover your new product if they expect it to work like an old standard. After all, our expectations frame our experiences.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

As I have written before, new languages and narratives that force your customer to engage with your product outside of the typical consideration set can help you get past the bias.

You have to knock users out of their fixed mental boxes in order to come to your product free of preconceived notions.

Only then will they accept the experience you’ve intended.

 


 

Our biases are always among us. We are either letting them guide the way, or deliberately working against them.

The key to getting through to your audience is not only to understand what those biases are, but what they reveal about the person who holds them.

“We find comfort among those who agree with us — growth among those who don’t.”

Frank Clark

Whichever side of that equation you’re on, make it count for your customer.

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