Does Your Brand Need Explaining? It Might Be an Intelligent Brand

By Tamara Francois, The XP Agency co-Founder and CEO

We in marketing love our buzzworthy labels. We have Challenger Brands, which win by questioning category norms. We have Disruptor Brands, which build entirely new models when the old ones stop serving the market.

But there’s another class of brand emerging. The easiest way to identify if you are one is if you answer yes to the following three questions:

• Does your brand need explaining?
• Does your audience need to understand a category or service before your value proposition makes sense?
• Is your target audience unaware there could be a better solution for their problems? 

If so, you’re likely marketing an Intelligent Brand.

Intelligent Brands compete in misunderstood categories. Their value is not self-evident. That’s the burden.

Consumers know what a sneaker does. They know what soda is. They don’t need education on why they need it. But with some companies, particularly in healthcare, financial services, enterprise software or insurance, the path is rarely simple.

It changes the job of marketing. You need to make people realize they need something they were unaware they needed. Here’s how:

Make the invisible visible

The first job of an Intelligent Brand is often to surface what people have stopped noticing.

Take Square. Point-of-sale systems tend to be clunky, forgettable and purely functional. Most consumers never thought about them, and many small businesses simply accepted the complexity.

Square changed that by redesigning the point-of-sale experience into something intuitive, sleek and recognizable. It didn’t just improve the hardware. It made the transaction itself more visible. If your category is overlooked, your first move may not be education. It may be making the category harder to ignore.

Build memory before understanding

Not every complex category can be explained in one campaign. Sometimes the smartest move is to create recall first.

Brands like insurance company Lemonade had a new vision on how to replace traditional insurance bureaucracy with modern digital tools. But first they had to explain why traditional insurance models were slow, opaque and misaligned with customer needs. That’s a heavy lift.

To relate to how complex it is to understand insurance policies and coverage, they created over-the-top, humorous ads instead of just product-first messaging. Lemonade realized people see insurance as a necessary headache, but are unlikely to think there’s an easier way to do it. By showing the insurance process in a light-hearted fashion, their strategy relies on helping people remember the brand when the need becomes urgent.

When the category is too complex to explain upfront, build mental recall first. Understanding can follow later.

Create experiences that accelerate understanding

Some ideas can’t be explained. They have to be experienced.

Look at Salesforce. Cloud computing was once an abstract concept for most business leaders. Salesforce understood that selling software wasn’t enough. They had to build belief around an entirely new way of working.

The company created Dreamforce not just as a conference, but as an ecosystem of ideas, demonstrations and community. It transformed abstraction into experience.

That’s what Intelligent Brands often need. They need more than messaging and storytelling, but active participation. When customers experience the problem and solution firsthand, understanding happens faster.

Bottom line

Too often, marketers assume weak performance means weak marketing. Sometimes the issue is simpler: The audience doesn’t yet understand the category, and as a result, they don’t value the brand.

Intelligent Brands face a comprehension challenge which creates a bigger opportunity for them in the future. If they can teach the customer why they are necessary, they can often shape the market.