The Brand Should Act First to Offer the Give and Take
Marketing is the process of creating a mindset for a business and then communicating that mindset to customers.
Early stage founders — I know, I have been one — stumble a lot over getting messaging right and getting product positioning right, in the scope of language. They often made the same mistake I have made. They focus too much on what the product does and less about what is going on in the customer’s head.
I think seeing marketing as messaging misses the point when you are trying to shape an early product that hasn’t yet inspired much traction. What’s more important in these early days is to actually spend significant time with potential customers and learning their mindset, and then demonstrating that mindset in both behavior and language, when you establish messaging on social platforms and media channels that will showcase your brand.
Why Should Founders Think About Marketing as a Mindset Mirror?
In this regard, your marketing is really a mindset that you are reflecting back to a customer. It’s not a value proposition that establishes the virtues of a product or its features and its benefits.
Think about your own mindset as a human being. A mindset attracts certain people with a similar value system to you, because a mindset creates a type of action that demonstrates value. When other people see how you behave, they make a judgment and they immediately, subconciously or consciously, rank you or establish a measure of you. Why? Because nobody does things alone.
People are always scouting for people who can help them. This is where trust comes from. It’s an innate human need to be able to trust. Because otherwise, how could we be here now? If we didn’t know how to establish trust, our ancestors would have been wiped out by beasts of the savannah, or the terrible creatures lurking in the lagoons of Botswana.
This need to signal safety and trust is also true for a brand and a product.
A brand or a product that signals a mentality or a mindset framed by values attracts people with a similar value system, who are themselves trying to solve a problem with their value system. So, they identify solutions when the solutions look like something that emerges from their point of view.
Marketing has a tactical job to sell a thing, and nobody will argue the opposite. If you are a founder, or the marketing manager for a startup, you are living and dying by shipping and selling.
But. Mindset reflection can expand the momentum of selling and attracting buyers.
How can you do this? My favorite example of this is Snicker commercials.
Marketing’s strategic mission is to reflect or alter mindsets to accept new things, and to accept and interact with values that create solutions in people’s lives. What the Snickers commercial does very well is reflecting an entire range of human emotions and decision-making that utilises the product, or creates a need for utilising the product, to solve a problem.
In this case, the problem is a bitchy, moody diva. Sugar craving leads to satiated demeanors.
So, this is why in marketing in the social web, it’s more about communicating and interacting with customers, and reflecting their own action and value system, than it is about a call to action.
A brand has to show this action first. When it does, it will create a product feedback cycle and a virtuous cycle, which communicates vital information to the founder and vital information to the customer.
When you think about it, isn’t this how most good relationships start?
