You have to be authentic to who you are as a brand, otherwise you’re not going to win, and you’re not going to get new customers or keep your customers if you’re selling them something that you’re actually not.

That authenticity also maybe even starts with the product and making sure that your product is on brand.

Suzy Davidkhanian

Your brand is a story, an expectation, and a promise.

Staying true is hard, but chasing trends usually isn’t a formula for long-term success.

Let the trade war begin

The White House announced" a 10% tariff “on all imports from all trading partners”, plus additional tariffs for 57 countries, including:

• Vietnam: 46%
• China: 34%
• Taiwan + Switzerland: 32%
• India: 27%
• South Korea: 26%
• Japan: 24%
• Germany + Italy: 20% (via EU)

Creative analysis and optimization is top of mind for me right now, so I really like this flowchart from DTC Daily

More than half (54%) of American consumers say they don’t pay attention to the brands they buy, as long as the product meets their needs

57% of American consumers have switched to own-label brands because they are more affordable and 55% think the quality of own-label products is comparable to branded products.

Branding is more than just slapping a logo on the package and calling it a day.

People don’t care about your brand unless you give them a reason to.

Be different. Be better.

via MarTech

If you’re always thinking about your audience and how they’re going to feel when they experience the thing that you’re making, then it becomes a bit more achievable.

James Acaster’s answer when asked if making something that’s both hugely accessible and innovative at the same time is something that can be designed for.

When talking about the song Hey Ya, naturally.

If you’re someone…who’s like “this has to be true to me and what I want to do” but also it can’t just be just for me and nobody else. I think if those are your priorities, then you can kind of accidentally on purpose do that more often than not.

Audience obsession is rarely the wrong choice. (Unless you lose yourself on the way.)

Shane Parrish shares the root of good marketing and brand building (though I think he was just talking about behavior change)

If you want to understand someone, figure out the narrative they tell themselves about themself.

If you want to change your behavior, change your narrative. If you want to change someone else’s behavior, offer them a more compelling narrative they can tell themselves.

Brands are narratives

Where the Venn diagram overlaps is where the magic happens.

An HBR article shares the findings of an ecommerce pricing study undertaken using A/B testing.

One finding:

Among the 54% price tests with a non-control winner, we found that 59% of winning price points were lower than the control price. This means that e-commerce retailers commonly overprice their products and, thus, leave some profitable demand uncaptured.

To which shoppers responded

Availability trumps loyalty.

From David Gottlieb on the Behind the Numbers podcast:

In our specific primary research, we find that 40% of shoppers will brand switch when they can’t find the item they’re looking for.

But if you’re buying a consumer good like a soup or a mac and cheese or a home cleaning product, people are brand loyal to a point, but if they need something for a recipe or to complete their shopping mission, they’re probably not going to go home empty-handed.

That’s a real challenge for brands because brand loyalty is built slowly over time and it can erode very quickly if somebody is forced to try a competitive product, you’re giving them an opportunity that you don’t want them to have essentially as a loyal brand shopper.

The art of the offer from Kay Allison via Rusty Blazenhoff:

How to craft an offer. And, as it turns out, an offer isn’t just telling people what you do. No, no. As I’ve learned, people don’t buy what you do. They buy the promise of transformation.

a great offer doesn’t just describe. It shows you the outcome. It paints a picture of what life looks like after you say yes.

People don’t buy a widget, they buy an emotion.

They buy their way to an aspirational state.

They buy a future in which they’re a different version of themselves than the one of now.

[A business] is defined by the want the customer satisfies when she buys a product or service. To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.

-Peter F. Drucker

Business don’t exist without customers (at least not for very long).

Everything is customer service.

The DO Lectures sent an email last year that I keep coming back to about a framework for writing better.

Hook > Story > Close

Which is, of course, a framework for marketing better.

Hook

This is where you appeal to the reader / watcher to catch their attention.

The offer will tell them about the transformation that this will give them.

Stop the scroll / swipe / page turn long enough to get them to stay with you.

The hook is at least 40% of the reason you will be successful.

Story

Sharing your perspective. Doesn’t need to be about you, but needs to answer why you.

Here you can share your one belief about this offer.

Why are you unique? Why should they keep giving you their time / attention? Why should they give you their money?

Close

This is the part where Alec Baldwin yells at you about coffee and Cadillacs.

The questions DO recommends answering:

What’s in it for me?
How do I know this is for real?
What’s been holding me back?
Who is to blame for that?
Why should I trust you?
How does it work?
How can I get started?
Why now?
What do I have to lose by NOT doing it?

It’s almost about pushing your potential customer away so that you only pull in the ones your offer is truly for. And you put them in control of the decision so they don’t feel tricked later.

(Not in the framework, but understood, make sure to deliver what you promise. Doesn’t matter how good your messaging is if it turns out to be a lie.)

Set the hook.
Tell the story.
Close the deal.

YouTube Shorts are commonly viewed as a vehicle for clips to function as marketing / awareness tools for longer form content. Looks like Netflix wants to expand this thinking with a dash of UGC.

Last fall, Netflix released “Moments,” a new feature that lets users clip and share parts of shows they’re watching via links that point back to Netflix. Now, the company is considering expanding that effort — perhaps with more prominent billing in the product itself — according to a new job listing.

On consumer modes:

People respond far better, purchase more often, and remain more loyal when marketers design campaigns that are targeted to their situations. Not to their personalities. Not to their preferences. And not necessarily to their past purchase behavior.
…
A mode is a mindset and a set of behaviors that people get into temporarily
…
The brands that understand consumer modes can effectively target the mode and support the buying process of anyone who is in that mode.

Seems a much better model than personas and funnels.

More from EMARKETER about tariffs but really about brand building in any economy:

as a brand you can no longer rely on undercutting your competition and tariffs only underscore that. You need to make sure that you have a loyal customer base or you’re trying to have a loyal customer base because you’re not going to be able to slash prices forever.

It used to be: better, faster, cheaper; pick 2

But faster and cheaper is pretty much impossible to achieve now, so you need to be better in some way.

One client (who owns their own factory) was told the worst case scenario for Trump’s Trade War (at the time) was a 33% price increase.

EMARKETER reports potential impacts like:

​auto prices could rise as much as $12,000
&​
an extra $3,300 or so to annual expenses for a family of four
&
​43% of people are already seeing tariff related price increases

And of course tariffs beget tariffs.
​ Who knows where Trump’s Wheel of Trade War stops spinning, but consumers will pay.