In the past, when I worked in the ad biz, we spent a lot of time with clients discussing the functional benefits of a brand versus non-functional attributes. Rational versus emotional. Getting this balance right was essential for great communications.
Nowadays I talk to clients about brand trust and ‘job delivery’. Essentially this is the same sort of balance: a brand needs to be both trusted and deliver a unique ‘job to be done’.
If either of these elements is missing, a brand’s growth will be less than optimum.
This is the problem that faces all new product introductions.
If a new product comes from a well known and trusted Company it has a higher chance of trial than a completely new brand lacking any heritage or ‘trust stability’.
If a new product comes from a well known and trusted Company it has a higher chance of trial than a completely new brand lacking any heritage or ‘trust stability’.
So completely new brands have to gradually build trust over time while delivering on the job that is their main reason for being.
That’s why we often see very competitive new products doing pretty well from a zero base but still remaining ‘niche players’ for quite a long time until they achieve a critical level of trust. Then they set off on a long term upward trajectory of massive growth.
It’s essentially a bell curve of acceptance: a period of steady growth until trust is achieved, followed by a rapid acceleration and accumulation of users to reach the top of the curve.
Facebook showed this characteristic: slowly gaining acceptance, until it became widely trusted. It took 4 years to achieve a 100 million user base, but then it added another 500 million users over the next 2 years.
Apple was a niche player not too long ago. But it recently recorded the biggest profits in corporate history in a single quarter: US$18 billion.
Apple is a brand that gradually gained the trust of publics across the globe, and then delivered a stream of new products which kept delivering ‘jobs to be done’ in a better way. Trust in the Apple brand underpinned all new product introductions.
The issue for Apple, Facebook, and many other trusted brands is: when do they reach the top of the bell curve and begin to slide down the other side?
The answer is when they fail to keep innovating and delivering market relevant jobs they are doomed to stagnate and then start to slide. No matter how much a brand is trusted it will lose market relevance. Nokia, Kodak, Abercrombie & Fitch...
Others lost the plot and then regained their market relevance when they recaotured the job that needed to be done. Lego, Jaguar…
Does your brand have the right balance of trust and job delivery?
What are you doing to build on a platform of brand trust to introduce new products and stay market relevant?