Studies and statistics regularly report declines in human attention spans. Standing out as a brand worth paying attention to is increasingly difficult in today’s world. Customers have their inboxes inundated with emails, and Big Tech companies compete for their attention. So, how is it that some brands manage to excel in this chaotic attention economy? This article aims to answer that question with some key insights from our recent webinar, How Curious Brands Dare To Do Different & Win.
Getting to the root of the problem is finding a way to stand out in a landscape of content overload. Content overload comes down to basic economics—when there is too much of something, things have to change. There are two traditional ways to adjust to content overload:
In either case, it becomes more expensive for your brand to stand out. For many companies, the growing cost of standing out is unsustainable. Few companies have marketing budgets anywhere near that of the most well-known brands.
Thinking outside the box is really what drives the ability to stand out among content overload. It’s important to point out that being different for the sake of it is not likely to reap rewards. The obvious example is Pizza Hut pivoting into perfume. Most important is to ask the right questions about how your brand might stand out and then take the risk of executing a strategy based on those questions.
If you really know your audience and what they want, you can make game-changing adjustments to your marketing strategy. Returning to another example in the pizza industry, Domino’s asked customers what they wanted through social media, and a popular answer was the ability to place an order for their favorite pizzas with a simple emoji.
Emoji ordering proved extremely popular and helped Domino’s stand out among the plethora of other food companies vying for attention. The three fundamental aspects at play were:
Radical shifts in marketing instigated by the Internet began accelerating around 2012. The power started transferring from big media companies and broadcasters to individual influencers. Individuals with little more than Wi-Fi, a computer, and a keyboard, started to create their own spheres of influence and their own audiences.
Influencer marketing then became a legitimate marketing channel largely conducted through Instagram.
To get a solid return from any content, you have to be passionately curious, carefully observational, and playfully imaginative. These ingredients are needed whether you push content out on Instagram, YouTube, or a blog. More important, though, is the power of collaboration in helping to join unlikely things together.
Being creative and standing out with innovative ways of doing things requires asking the right questions. Here are five firecracker questions that can provide a strong foundation for new ideas:
Curiosity is really just a gap between what we know about something and what we want to know. This is important because for there to be any curiosity at all, you have to know at least a little bit about the topic of interest. For example, if you have no idea how TikTok works or what the point of it is, you won’t be curious enough to explore its use as a marketing channel.
You can subdivide curiosity into two broad types:
To create business opportunities from curiosity, you need to apply that curiosity to some change you perceive in the world. The best way to do this is for brands is to put themselves in the shoes of their customers and be relentlessly obsessed with what customers want. In other words, interrogate like a toddler (the average four-year-old girl asks 213 questions per day!).
There are tools available online to help find out what questions people are asking about any topic. These tools include BuzzSumo, Semrush, and AnswerThePublic.
In a ten-year study by McKinsey dissecting over 200,000 customer journeys, they found that two-thirds of marketing happens without the direct involvement of a brand’s own marketing messaging.
The takeaway from this stat is that successful marketing is less about imposing your message on people and more about earning your way into that two-thirds of marketing. To do this, you need to create something so unmissable or conversational that people can’t wait to talk about it or tell their friends.
People trust each other over and above brands or advertising. You’ve got to earn the chance to be a part of the conversations people have.
Being dynamically different means doing something meaningfully different for your brand that helps you stand out, energizes existing fans, and helps you attract new customers. To spark this dynamic difference, remember the following acronym:
Surprise with smart storytelling
Personalize for powerful connections
Amplify to attract your ideal fan/customer
Relate to people in relevant and timely ways
Kickstart a fan-led content movement
One example of being dynamically different is the English soccer team Accrington Stanley giving away 1,200 free football kits to children in an effort to acquire a next generation of fans who’ll support the team and attend matches. Another example is a small local cafe offering customers an interactive chance to win prizes by spinning a wheel that is sectioned into different rewards. Both of these examples hit that sweet spot of doing something meaningfully different and sparking conversations.
There’s no doubt that it’s getting harder to stand out as a brand and capture attention. But no matter the size of your company, a relentless dedication to curiosity, putting yourself in customers’ shoes, and collaborating with your team can lead to ingenious ideas that spark conversation and result in customers doing two-thirds of your marketing for you.
