The Three Fool-proof Ways These Brands Are Standing Out

You’ve nailed your audience, your strategy is based on bleeding-edge best practices, your creative is super smart. But none of that matters if nobody is paying attention to your advertising, and throwing a large media budget at the problem doesn’t guarantee a thing. In the words of American businessman William Birnbach, “If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic”.

In 2022, your brand’s main challenge is to stand out and one of the most effective ways to stand out is through innovation. Innovative products automatically comes to mind for most, but pricing and personalization can also be leveraged to capture audience attention. None of the methods are mutually exclusive, so there is no reason to limit your brand to just one!

Innovative positioning is the thing that sets you apart from competitors, but that thing doesn’t have to be complex or expensive. Your innovation can be as simple as reducing information or using clever naming to deliver value through surprise and delight.

Millions of gallons of orange juice are sold in Europe every day.  Intermarche’s Freshest Fresh campaign cuts through the competitive noise with a powerful and intuitive value prop — the best way to prove the freshness of orange juice is to show the exact hour and minute the juice was made!

Each bottle is produced onsite, ensuring that supply matches demand, then printed and labeled to reflect the time it was hand-pressed.

Result

In the first 3 days, sales were multiplied by 4,600% per store, and the overall in-store traffic increased by 25%; 50 million media impressions were generated in the first 3 hours of the launch.

Sold in Singapore in the 2010s, Anything and Whatever were a fun pair of soft drinks poking fun at the non-committal answers “anything” or “whatever” answers when people were asked what they wanted to drink.

The Whatever range included six mystery flavors of non-carbonated teas, and the Anything range included six mystery flavors of carbonated soft drinks. Since the cans were identical, you didn’t know what flavor you were going to get until you drank it.

Result

3.5 million cans were sold in one month, in a country with only 4.5 million people!

The product disappeared in 2010, but there’s an ongoing debate about whether that means it  failed (poor sales when the novelty wore off) or succeeded beyond imaging (bought out by a scared competitor.)

Gaining attention through pricing innovation isn’t as simple as lowering prices. By addressing hot topics or using dynamic pricing  to respond in real-time to what is happening in the market, you’re more likely to arouse consumer interest.

In the Swedish winter, trains are often delayed or canceled due to weather conditions, leaving travelers waiting at the station in the freezing cold.  Swebus, Sweden’s most punctual public transport, took the occasion to “steal” customers from the railroad company with their “SWEBUS TRAIN SWITCH” campaign.

If a train was late, Swebus rewarded customers with coupons for discounted bus rides made accessible through a web app. For example, 4-minute delays equaled a 4% discount, and canceled trains equaled a free ride.  

Only one discount ticket was generated per delayed train, so potential customers had to scan the web app regularly to get a deal. The combination of consistently bad weather and this built-in mechanism ensured high usability of the web app during the campaign.

Results

During the 2-week campaign, 9607 trains were delayed and 750 trains were canceled.  Even with all the discounts, SWEBUS saw a 6.1% increase in revenue.

A personalized experience creates a higher level of connection and loyalty — especially among Gens Y and Z. In fact, when it comes to purchasing decisions, almost 40% of millennials report personalization and self-expression as essential. Giving consumers the option to personalize your product — or to literally change it according to their preferences —  is almost always guaranteed to resonate.

What’s Your Whiskey created an experiential questionnaire to help consumers discover their personal whiskey taste profile.

Instead of using vague terms that speak only to whiskey experts, they asked simple questions in a video format to evoke the user’s senses of taste and smell, so consumers could discover their own unique taste profiles.

Leave it to Nike to take personalization to a whole other level. Nike allows users to choose the shoe they want from among dozens of models and then design the dream shoe to suit their unique tastes! This level of customization is simply unparalleled.

• Highlighting or obscuring information can set you apart from your competitors
• Connecting yourself to events or conversations is a good way to make your message part of the story
• Your customers – especially Gen Z – wants a version of your product just for them