Building a brand is easy—just think ketchup.
Ketchup is the last item on your grocery list.
You went to the grocery store, very organized, with a list of things to buy on your phone to ensure you’re not getting swept away by the lovely music and the small font on the price tags. You don’t feel like spending money on groceries you don’t need.
Now you stand in the ketchup aisle, and there are a lot of options. You don’t have much time—your partner needs the car in 20 minutes and you’re getting close to rush hour traffic.
How do you pick your ketchup?
- Do you make a spreadsheet with price and weight, and pick the best option?
- Do you read the ingredients of the different brands and pick the one that you believe is the healthiest?
- Or do you just pick the brand that’s familiar, and maybe it’s on sale too?
Most people will likely use a process similar to answer 3. Let me tell you why.
The first two options are System 2 thinking. System 2 thinking is an effortful way of making decisions. Human beings prefer not to use it too much.
System 2 thinking is mostly deliberate. It’s when you make a pros and cons list right before a large purchase, for example.
The third option is System 1 thinking. You use your intuition, habit, history, and experience with ketchup to make a decision that’s almost effortless. A lot of things go through your mind simultaneously, and nonetheless System 1 thinking comes easy. You snatch a ketchup bottle off the shelf and race to the checkout.
You use System 1 thinking when you drive home from the grocery store, and you do all the right things and arrive unharmed. You can’t remember actively focusing on driving. But you do remember that you were thinking about an upcoming birthday party.
System 1 thinking is more than 95% of human brain activity (Binet and Carter, 2018). If we build a brand, it’s important to consider that our customers will mostly evaluate us with System 1 thinking that requires less effort.
So if you’re a ketchup brand, what do you need to do?
- You need an exciting and fresh red colour and a white label that makes the red pop even more. You might use a picture of tomatoes to indicate to customers that your ketchup is made from real and juicy tomatoes.
- You need consistency. You need to show up again and again in your customers’ lives, at birthday parties and on pasta cooked in a rush, and you need to be tasty every time and not let your customers down.
- You need familiarity. People need to know your name and your font and the shape of your bottle. They need to recognize you immediately as that brand their grandmother proudly placed at the end of the table.
- You need exposure. One day you’re on a billboard, another day you have a big display in the grocery store. People need to see you and be reminded again and again that you exist.
- Oh and it’s good to make a splash—you need people’s attention.
Many small businesses focus on providing great value and helping their customers make the right decisions. This is very powerful.
But as a small business, it can be harder to be top of mind for your customers. After all, you don’t have the advertising budget of a major ketchup brand.
When you build a brand online, keep System 1 thinking in mind. Repeat your colours and your style, and make yourself easily recognizable.
When you show up with everybody else in people’s feed, you want your potential customers to linger on your post or essay because you’ve made a good impression over time.
People don’t need to consciously remember you, but they need to recognize you. Can you make your brand stand out like a bottle of ketchup?
Source:
Binet, Les, and Sarah Carter (2018). How Not to Plan: 66 Ways to Screw It Up. APG.