In our cool-hunting exercise so far we have discovered that those in the 14-34-year-age bracket reject with aplomb, operate seamlessly at either end of the price spectrum in their consumption patterns, and seek transparency from ‘their kind of brands'.
So, there's no point doing demographics-based vanilla-segmenting of the target audience even though as a marketer one is constantly struggling to minimise variables to be relevant to these cool folks.
In an earlier issue, we had shared findings from an open-ended probe where we cool-hunted 213 people across four metros on the relevance of brand. While we were researching this, we came across some responses that talked about the ‘iconic' characteristic of a brand. That was a bit surprising. How can the ‘iconic' stature of a brand feature as a response to a probe into ‘relevance'? After all, relevance is something that emerges out of the logical side of the brain whereas ‘stature' is not necessarily bracketed there.
So, we decided to probe this aspect further. During the brand relevance survey, while the ‘unaided' response threw up ‘iconic stature' as one of the factors that makes a brand relevant to about 14 per cent of the respondents (who used expressions such as ‘cult status', ‘prestige', ‘top-end' and ‘most admired'), the figures jumped close to 40 per cent for ‘aided' responses by pushing ‘empathy' and ‘my-kind-of-a-brand' aside.
The learning: Consumers gravitate towards iconic brands the moment they exert a pull and force themselves into ‘active consideration sets'.
We picked a few respondents from the earlier survey for a deeper probe and discovered that there is an underlying relationship between iconic and transparency. Psychologists and neuro-marketers see a link too. While iconic status and its influence are primarily at a sub-conscious level (no wonder it doesn't show up so strongly in unaided probes) – the imprint on the brain is formed by constant feeding of information about the brand. In today's wired world the iconic brands are the most written about and the most Google-searched brands. People not only know about their offerings but also much about their heritage, their environment-friendliness, their processes as well as what's being done in their research labs. Take the excitement, the buzz and the anticipation that surrounds each of Apple's product launches, or a Spielberg film release.
So, Mr Marketer, if you are aspiring to take your brand right up to the pinnacle of ‘iconic', transparency is your gateway! The manner in which you manage information dissemination where you do not have the liberty of concealing anything is a real tough ask.
Footnote: We are not yet done on this ‘iconic' stature bit. We will leave you with this input and hopefully come back with more after we have cool-hunted it: The iconic status of a brand certainly converts the ‘intent to own' but is it leading into an immediate purchase or is it leading to ‘not now' or ‘yes, but may be a little later – right now I will settle for something else' kind of responses?
(Giraj Sharma is an indepent brand consultant who’s also a compulsive cool-hunter.)