Brands: Stake your claim. Make it small.
Seth Godin has written an interesting piece about the need for businesses to speak to the few not the many — the idea being that, if done correctly, the many will follow. So often the brief is to maximise reach, or maximise your audience. In order to do this we “dumb the message down, average it out” and reduce it to ensure we engage with the lowest common denominator. However, as he’s written, “when you seek to engage with everyone, you rarely delight anyone.”
The emphasis should be in staking out a defendable position that lies at the heart of your brands existential purpose, and not pandering to the naysayers, the uninvolved or the average.
A classic example of this is how we now perceive techno music. Once a hidden subculture with strong, distinctive qualities, is now a mainstream juggernaut whitewashed with mediocrity in order to dumb it down to be ‘accessible’ for the masses. Clubs that have become institutions spoke to the few and the masses followed. They carved out a small niche and did it well, elevating their subjects through education and boundary pushing. This in turn garnered their loyalty along the way, and word spread.

It takes a bold client to understand the investment of laying proper foundations in the way of elevating your message. It may seem an easier, short-term fix to dull your message and stay vanilla about everything so as not to offend, alienate or ostracise. But after a while, who are you really talking to? Who is really listening? By trying to be something to all, you’ll eventually fade into irrelevance. Good riddance.
