Brand Fluency – the secret to a memorable, growing brand.

Coca-Cola. Nike. Apple. Cadbury. Guinness. Jack Daniels. Some of the greatest and most memorable brands in the world. But what makes a great brand? How do these brands have the power to stick in your mind and continue to grow year after year? In this article, we’ll unpack the secret sauce underpinning the world’s greatest brands and show you how you can create a memorable brand positioning that drives growth.

Mental availability drives brand growth

It’s now a commonly held belief amongst marketeers (thanks to the great work of Byron Sharpe) that brands need to be distinctive and memorable to grow. A brand with strong mental availability has the power to influence consumer choice to their advantage, pushing its way into your subconscious shopping list when you are deciding what to buy.

This is easier said than done. Mental availability springs from high brand recall and intuitive links to a high number of buying situations or needs. In a crowded market, that’s getting harder and harder and comes with a hefty price tag vs. CPG budget and efficiency pressures.

So how do you build a brand that has mental availability, as effectively as possible? To answer that question, we need to go back to some basic fundamentals.

We all know that a brand is more than a logo or name. It’s the emotional connection that people have with a company or a product. Most believe that perception is built by a brand’s identity, values and voice, making up a typical brand onion or pyramid. These things need to be communicated consistently, distinctively and across multiple touchpoints to makes them memorable and mentally available. This is what most marketeers spend their time and budget occupied with.

People don’t buy brands, they buy promises

The trouble is that people don’t really buy brands, they buy the promise of a rewarding experience. Brands are experienced in 3D, in full technicolour – with all our senses and within a complicated and deep-rooted set of social norms and cultural beliefs which drive our behaviours. This is never truer than in food, drink, where brands are bought to be shared, tasted, felt, smelled, seen and heard - the ‘snap crackle and pop’ of Rice Crispies, the rich and creamy taste of Cadbury Dairy Milk. So, the reality is that brands are also shortcuts for the promise of an experience that people believe they will get.

If the promise a brand makes is meaningful and fits into a particular moment, it will cut through the noise and bubble to the top of the shopping list, encouraging you to try it. Brands that promise you something you really needed in a particular moment and speak to you in a way that fitted your world view compel you to buy them.

We believe that if your brand is not promising a meaningful experience that people want to buy or does not deliver on what it promises, it will not grow. Marketeers need to look beyond pyramids and onions to see the real promises their brands are making and the reality of their experience.

We recently helped a brand to discover why it was declining in market, despite high penetration levels. Our fluency exploration unearthed great immediate attraction and appeal, ticking boxes in the way it communicated a compelling emotional, functional benefit but the experience of the brand was disappointing vs. the promise. The result was a leaky bucket – for every buyer who came into the brand another left because the experience did not live up to expectations.

Brand fluency must be regularly reappraised

Brands also need to regularly reappraise what their brand means to people, as well as the changing needs of their consumers to ensure their promises remain relevant. What was once relevant may no longer be as attitudes and desires change. For example, promises made by traditional, sugary breakfast cereal brands are becoming less relevant as cultural and functional shifts towards better for you breakfasts that are higher in fibre at protein.

We helped Smirnoff reappraise its brand fluency and took it’s raspberry SKU from delist to No.1 flavoured vodka in just 12 weeks. Through understanding the role flavoured vodka played socially, the emotional and functional benefits it gave people and how to express its delicious taste semiotically, the brand was reborn as Smirnoff Raspberry Crush with a promise of ‘cheeky glamour’. Raspberry Crush was responsible for 97% of growth in the flavoured vodka category within one year of its July 2021 launch, delivering £19.5million of the £20.2million year-on-year growth and becoming the number one NPD in both spirits and flavoured vodka.¹