When Audiences Shape A Brand

Effective branding is about a business and a brand keeping one step ahead of what their audience expects, needs and wants out of them.

Often this is the most difficult part of a campaign because most successful companies have a broad and diverse customer base, each of which gets something different and new out of the brand, product or service.

This makes it difficult to balance the different demands whilst also being at the forefront of a particular market sector but not so far ahead as to alienate this audience.

However, in some cases, the audience will do some of the branding work for you by reacting so strongly to a campaign or marketing decision that the next step becomes exceptionally clear.

Here are some of those serendipitous stories of when an audience shapes a brand.

1. Compare The Market

Compare The Market was a muddled price comparison website trying to compete in a sea of websites such as GoCompare and Confused.com, each of which was themselves trying a huge number of different campaigns to see if one would stick.

Compare The Market’s initial branding was largely the same, mostly featuring their dark blue and emerald green colour scheme and an array of odd imagery.

However, that changed when a talking CGI meerkat with a Russian accent complained on television about the confusion between the price comparison website and one where he rates other meerkats.

To say it caught on was an understatement and Aleksandr Orlov and the rest of the meerkat characters have been regular advertising fixtures ever since.

1. Computer Engineer Barbie

The Mattel line of Barbie dolls is one of the most popular toys for girls in the world, and because of this, the blonde figure has portrayed nearly every type of career and life one can conceive of in order to fuel the imagination of young girls and highlight that they are capable of anything.

A great example of how Mattel’s hand was forced in this regard was when they created a poll for which career would be depicted next. The winner, thanks to the influence of a viral campaign by the Society of Women Engineers, was computer engineer.

The SWE’s CEO, Betty Shanahan was consulted on how she should look and the result is a refreshingly different career path.

1. Prego

The story of Prego, the Campbell’s Soup brand of pasta sauce, has been retold many times, most famously by Malcolm Gladwell.

The short version of it was that Prego was a higher quality sauce, but struggled in the market. They went to psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz, who noted that people do not want a perfect sauce but instead perfect sauces.

They made a wide variety of different sauces and tested them with audiences, finding a hidden market of people who wanted extra chunky pasta sauce and creating a product for them, making hundreds of millions of pounds in the process.

For more information and advice from a branding agency in Berkshire, get in touch today.