Every marketer dreams about finding the promise and communication concept that hits the target audience in the gut – one that makes them feel something and act the way we want them to, which in most cases means buying more of our product.
“An only bird is a lonely bird” was developed by Murray Walker for Trill, a manufacturer of bird food. The story behind it is that the agency was fired after many years of cooperation since the customer claimed that the company now had >80% of the market, and that it would be hard and expensive to grow the market share further, ie there was no reason to invest in marketing.
The agency said “Let us try to find a new angle”. And with just a few words, they made the target audience empathize with lonely birds so they bought a partner to their bird – and at the same time automatically doubled the sales of bird food.
Another outstanding example is the launch of Lätta, as Swedish vegetable oil-based spread with less calories than butter fat. Instead of targeting people who needed to lose weight, as virtually every other low-fat brand did, Lätta adopted the customer promise: “For those who have decided not to become fat.” This positioning enabled Lätta to sell enormous volumes to people of normal weight, rather than competing with rivals in a much smaller market.
The same concept was adapted by Oatly. Instead of targeting people who could not drink milk, they targeted people that didn’t sympathize with milk. And a lot of teenagers responded.
The same principles apply in business-to-business marketing. For one of our previous clients, a company that develops and markets the world’s safest cable transit system, we created the customer promise: “Putting Safety First.” Few, if any, potential customers anywhere in the world would disagree with that promise—and it naturally leads them toward choosing the product.
Getting prospective customers to “do the right thing” is both simple and difficult. Modern research has made tremendous progress in understanding how the brain works and what drives our decisions, particularly through the work of Daniel Kahneman, Cialdine and other researchers in the field of behavioral economics.
When the strategy is grounded in the right insights and the solution is built around the right emotional appeal, it is sometimes possible to double sales.
And if you want to discuss communication, you are always welcome to contact ulf@sfinxagency.se
