How I Increased Ad Recall By 80% Using Customer Jobs
Does your brand connect to the better me customers have in mind?
Brand awareness and messaging that resonates with potential customers is essential to an enduring brand.
Traditionally, building a brand is a process that is imbedded with a lot of subjectivity. Meaning, brands should have an intentionally different point of view about the world, they should stand for something.
But, having a strong sense of style and purpose does not always lead to people understanding what it is that you can do for them or how your product or service helps them. You have to be able to articulate value.
I ran into this problem a little while ago.
A client that I work with called me and we began to discuss a brand equity ad campaign, to attract people who wanted to sell their home. It was clear that he was was so focused on what he thought was ‘catchy’ or ‘memorable’.
As a brand strategist I immediately asked him a few pertinent questions.
- What was the purpose of the ads?
- What was the problem that these ads are trying to solve? should they even be ads?
- Most importantly from a brand perspective — how are you going to communicate that you are different?
As soon as I hung up the phone I began working on the project, with the goal of “understanding how I could articulate the purpose of his brand, through these ads”.
The Road Block
I had defined the mission, I had developed a brand character and positioning statements devised to catalyze the creation of a moat in the mind of customers. But something was missing.
Even with all of this background work, all of the research about the real estate market, something did not feel right. When I tested some of the ad copy for recall with potential customers, the brand sparked inspiration, but the customer still wasn’t buying. What was I missing?
Enter The Job
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman
Immediately, I remembered reading Alan Klement’s book When Kale & Coffee Compete. I went over my notes and it dawned on me: I had been believing my own assumptions. When you don’t focus on the job to be done, almost all of your decisions that impact the customer are assumptions.
I had to do something, I had to rectify the assumptions that were implicit in the touch points, even the the assumptions that were implicit in the the strategy.
I got on the phone with Alan Klement and starting talking JTBD and it became clear what was missing. I had to focus on and understand two things…the subtle dance between
1. The anxieties that were holding back the customer
2. The the vision of the future self that the customer has in mind with the new solution.
With this new focus, it was time to do some interviews.
Authentic Moments of Emotion
Armed with a script of questions, I went to interview customers who had recently sold their homes.
As I sat down with one woman in particular. We went back in time and explored her purchase, as her story unfolded, she suddenly began to weep. She began to open up and illuminate the emotional struggle of leaving her home and the tension of a more joyful emotion, one of possibilities that were now available to her, the chance to explore. I had found the job.
The Completed Puzzle
After understanding the job to be done (i.e. the new me home buyers were imagining), and seeing the customer through the lens of their emotional struggle, everything started to click. When the strategy of the brand encompassed the job to be done, it felt less of an exploratory assumption and more of a strategic differentiation rooted in empirical moments of emotion.
Brand x Customer Jobs, Style Meets Substance.
As a brand strategist I love brands and the art of building a brand, it is now clear to me that the greatest brands in the world are rooted not only in their purpose or their mission. Rather, it is the confluence of traditional brand building methods with a deep understanding of the job to be done that enduring brands in the 21st century and beyond will be built upon.
