VSA's Jerry Stiedaman wrote an article for WARC, “With consumers craving stability, now is the big opportunity for big brands.” Read an excerpt below.
Ongoing consumer uncertainty means that for big brands, it’s time to shine. Despite the call to disrupt and reimagine business—a call that spawned a thousand startups—the national and global turmoil of the past few years (and in the financial sector the past few months) has brought about a significant shift in consumer priorities. The result is a renewed focus on the familiar and reliable.
According to PwC’s February 2023 Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey, 96% of those surveyed said they were planning on adopting cost-saving behaviors in 2023. The study also showed that 69% of consumers altered their nonessential spending in the previous six months. These statistics show that consumers are adopting much more careful spending habits in 2023, and brands will need to make their offerings feel truly valuable amid growing price sensitivities.
The antithesis of long-lasting value? A company with shady credentials or an unproven track record. Startups have been hit particularly hard with this brand connotation—failures have left thousands of consumers in the lurch. As one example, before its recent sale to e-commerce specialist Retention Brands, the subscription makeup service Birchbox left customers without their monthly boxes for some time. The brand posted a mea culpa on Instagram, citing “a host of unprecedented setbacks that are affecting all of you, our cherished members.” It’s no wonder that people seek safety over novelty.
The startup landscape is also getting walloped by financial factors. Rising interest rates around the world mean they are increasingly vulnerable to competition. VC funding is radically slowing after the worst Q4 since 2013. And the startup-friendly tech sector has seen more than 100,000 layoffs this year. This damage was further compounded by the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in early March. Many startups relied on SVB for banking and payroll—in fact, 88% of Forbes’ “Next Billion-Dollar Startups” were SVB customers.
With startups hurting from financial difficulties and reputation damages, more established brands have a clear opportunity here to reposition their offerings and lean into the demand for safety and consistency with a longevity well suited to the task.
So how does the big brand take advantage of these times? Here are three thought starters:
The last decade has seen a barrage of brands differentiating themselves with a veneer of friendly colors and unconventional marketing tactics. While that might get people in the door, it certainly won’t make them stay. By refocusing on stability and strength, you’re investing in your company’s future: Bain & Company says that “across a wide range of businesses, customers generate increasing profits each year they stay with a company. In financial services, for example, a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.” Put simply, existing customers spend more than new customers. Plus, their referral potential gives you a free, built-in acquisition machine.
Companies don’t always use data to power their brand positioning shifts. Often, it’s a subjective exercise that reflects what internal stakeholders are experiencing when they interact with customers.
That subjectivity can be dangerous for brand positioning work because it can root your brand in promises and messaging that won’t last over the long haul and may not reflect the needs of high-value growth targets.
When clients come to VSA for brand positioning work, we usually suggest their brand positioning journey start with Promise to Performance®, our proprietary quantitative research methodology.
Promise to Performance (P2P) was specifically designed to identify the key ingredients of a brand positioning that is true to your business, relevant to your customers and different from what your competitors are saying. In other words, it’s everything you need, and nothing that you don’t.
P2P provides the answers to three key questions that will help you prioritize the brand promises you should focus on in your brand positioning:
In this piece, let’s focus on promise alignment to high-value audiences—why we approach it the way we do and why it matters for brand growth. We’ll cover the other two areas in future pieces.
Our approach starts with prioritizing across a long list of potential needs—about 20 unique statements, on average—to find out which are most important to each respondent in the survey. The need statements are custom written for each study to capture a range of functional and emotional needs that represent different potential priorities within your particular audience.
We then use need segmentation to define the audience cluster groups. With any segmentation exercise, there are typically foundational needs that all segments identify as important for the category. These needs are important to be competitive in the category—so it’s important to have them covered—but they are not usually differentiating.
Here’s an example: We worked with a company that offers a technology solution for small businesses. First, we surveyed their total audience, and then we performed a need cluster analysis to reveal audience segments with different priorities representing unique mindsets. In this case, all SMB segments have similar reliability and service need priorities.
One of the big benefits of doing need-based segmentation is that it can uncover the hidden gems. These are the needs that don’t immediately rise to the top in overall audience ranking of importance, but they can actually carry outsized weight for certain audiences.
For a differentiated position, we want to isolate those needs that are uniquely important to different customer segments, and then act on them.
On average we find about 4.0 segments with each study, and each segment has an average of about 3.6 needs that shape that segment—meaning, they are both important to the segment and more important for that segment compared to the audience as a whole. Often, segment-defining needs are lower ranking overall, but they over-index in importance for a particular segment. In fact, when we looked back across our P2P studies, we found that 82% of segments have at least one middle-of-the-pack need. And 45% had at least two.
Take our SMB technology provider’s audiences. You can see that some of their needs are foundational to all audiences, and some are unique to just that segment. All segments believe that reliability and great customer service are important, but within each segment there are more nuanced needs that define that particular audience.
Based on these defining needs for each segment, we can now align product capabilities, brand strengths and other reasons to believe to inform both our positioning and our messaging to the opportunity segments.
And in fact, you shouldn’t try to be. As brand marketers face tighter budgets and scrutiny over returns, you need to focus your energy where it will have the most impact. Segmenting your audience based on needs allows you to see which ones have the highest potential for growth and which ones you should deprioritize because they don’t align with the category white space and what your company can deliver.
The risk of overlooking some of the middle-of-the-pack needs becomes particularly impactful when those needs are priorities for your high-value segments. That means more likely than not, there’s something important to your high-value target that’s lurking below the surface.
Back to our technology provider example: Of the four segments, we found that two of the groups (Control Seekers and Tech Skeptics) provided no opportunity for growth at all because of their complacent mindsets toward technology.
And then we found that one additional segment (Customer Advocates) was important but wouldn’t provide the kind of growth the company was looking for.
The fourth segment (Edge Seekers) was where the real opportunity was, and where the company could focus its positioning to accelerate growth. This is a group that (1) has one-third of the market size at 36% and (2) is actively seeking a technology that can grow its business. Both the segment’s size and its mindset make it ripe for growth—and a prime audience to focus on for positioning.
This approach yields more precise, differentiated positioning that will stand out from a sea of vague brand generalities, as well as ensure that the brand is focused on the places where it stands to gain the most. You don’t need to ignore your lower-growth audiences, but you can write positioning that primarily focuses on the accelerator groups while still appealing to the lower-priority audiences.
One of the best parts of P2P is how actionable it is.
After we identify our segments, we then build profiles of these different audience members that includes their needs and how to talk to them. These profiles easily onboard your marketing and sales teams to craft messaging that speaks directly to the things these prioritized audiences care about most. Using these audience profiles, you can also relate the need-based segments to other “addressable” audience profiles that your teams are using, which can serve as a great complement to demographic segmentations.
If you’d like to work with a partner that can identify the key ingredients of a brand positioning that is unique, ownable and aligned to your audience’s core needs, we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch here to learn more about P2P and how it can work for your business.
Addison Group, a prominent professional services firm specializing in staffing, consulting and executive search, recently rolled out a new website and refreshed brand. The change comes as Addison Group celebrates 25 years of empowering people through its tailored talent solutions, and embodies its commitment to the people it serves.
To conduct the brand refresh and website redesign, Addison Group tapped VSA Partners, a creative and branding agency. From messaging and strategy to graphic design and website implementation, the agency partnered with Addison Group across the rebrand and activation process.
“Very early in our work together, we uncovered Addison’s unique commitment to building long-term relationships with candidates and clients. That became the central truth that guided all of our work together, including its new mantra: ‘No one gets talent like Addison Group,’” said VSA Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director Bill Maday. “From specialized staffing solutions to consulting, this idea encapsulates the breadth of Addison Group’s offerings and their dedication to the real people they serve.”
With this mantra in place, VSA reimagined the Addison Group brand by centering it on what makes Addison Group so special: its people.
“Addison Group does a lot. But what all of our different offerings come down to is pretty simple, and that’s understanding people,” said VP of Marketing, Talent Solutions, Michael Barry. “VSA has been a great partner in keeping our brand messaging and visuals focused clearly on what sets us apart as a business, and unifying all our offerings underneath a clear and compelling vision.”
The new brand system is anchored by the hero graphics affectionately known as “gems,” which are a playful nod to the caliber of talent Addison Group recruits and supports. The gem shapes are flexible containers that can be used as framing devices as well as connective elements, particularly between Addison Group’s new people-centric photography styling. Other aspects of the larger brand system include a fresh and elevated color palette, custom iconography, and a friendly display typography.
VSA then took these foundational elements and translated them into a website redesign, teaming up with Dapper Digital to execute front- and back-end development. Along with a visual refresh, the team workshopped Addison Group’s user journeys. The workshop findings resulted in a focused navigation structure and an overall better user experience for two key audiences—job seekers and hirers—as well as improved usability for Addison Group’s internal teams.
“At the heart of this project was a focus on clarity and user experience,” said Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director YanYan Zhang. “Part of that was pulling the brand strategy—Addison Group’s story and purpose—through all the content on the site in a really clear way. And the other part of that search for clarity was getting precise on the user journeys, and how we could easily guide people toward the information and pages that are most relevant to them.”
As the talent acquisition landscape becomes increasingly competitive, Addison Group’s enhanced digital presence ensures it remains a go-to partner for businesses seeking specialized talent solutions. The website refresh is a key component of Addison Group’s broader strategy to leverage digital tools to better serve its clients and candidates.
