Driving consumer decisions is more complex than ever given today’s marketing landscape, and both sector- and brand-specific insights have their place in shaping this, but there’s an important distinction to be made between the two. When marketers rely solely on broad insights from across their category, they fail to reach the granular precision required to make advertising that works for their brand, and their brand alone.
I think you’ll agree that it’s a huge opportunity for differentiation and brand recognition missed. So, how can brand leaders use what sets them apart to their advantage?
The nature of sector specificity
Category and sector insights provide high-level analyses of the trends, challenges, opportunities, and risks within a single industry or subset of it. These insights help you understand the bigger picture and are usually identified by political, economic, societal, and technological factors that drive consumer behavior. That said, the breadth of sector insights is also their limitation and a threat to effective advertising. While they provide the general context, they often lack the specificity needed to guide business strategies.
Burger King’s “Bundles of Joy” campaign fell into this trap. The ads tell the stories of mums giving birth, which is amazing and immediately very emotional. So far, so good. They then receive a Burger King delivery (the Whopper, of course), while the overlaid text states, “Over a third of mums surveyed wanted burgers after giving birth.”
Therein lies the problem. The foundation of this campaign is the idea that mums crave burgers. Not Burger King’s burgers—any burger. And although the creative depicts these insights well, if you took away the Burger King logo, the campaign could be from any one of its competitors.
Overreliance on category insights weakens the structure of your ads overall, undermining your storytelling power by failing to show any clear brand distinction (because it isn’t there to begin with). Despite being well made and surely salient, this campaign struggles to deliver a compelling reason why Burger King is the right brand for this message.
And Burger King isn’t the only one. A glance across the food advertising landscape reveals plenty more. In a Papa John’s Christmas ad, for example, a delivery driver sings a version of the carol Ding Dong Merrily on High with a quirky take on the traditional lyrics, while delivering a pizza to a girl that was clearly out celebrating the night before. Again, the ad leverages the broad knowledge that people would rather order food when hungover instead of cooking, without Papa John’s realizing that their ad promotes the wider fast food category more than their own pizza. Because, when you think about it, any pizza would solve the problem Papa John’s is addressing.
Adjacent to this you have the drinks sector, which is also guilty. Coffee brand Peet’s explains in its latest ad how its roast masters care a lot about the taste of their coffee. I’m pretty sure that’s not unique to Peet and does nothing to drive its distinction amongst competitors.
Delicious is not enough
Food advertising specialists face this challenge on a daily basis. Making food look delicious is their primary goal, but when you shoot an ad for, say, a pizza, the ingredients naturally look generic. From the dough rising and the cheese melting to a slice being lifted and a bite being taken, when the ingredients are shot in their innate form, they don’t trigger brand recognition.
A slice of cheese looks like a slice of cheese any way you cut it—unless you get strategic about it. Creativity can be used to codify its appearance, a visual cue that can be used consistently and frequently in your ads. Only then does it stand a chance at recognizably belonging to your brand. Otherwise, you just end up making people crave any old pizza. Deliciousness, in and of itself, is a category insight, not a brand one.
Do it right—or don’t at all
Using broad trends to inspire campaigns risks that you’ll end up promoting your entire category, but there are two scenarios in which this remains a viable option.
If your brand stands head and shoulders above the competition in its category and leads in market share, then you can choose to simply accept your advertising rubbing off on your competition. In this case, you know that as the category grows, your brand will grow the fastest. Most brands, however, are not market leaders.
The other option is to choose an outstanding and remarkable way of uncovering your category insight. In most cases, the storytelling not only delivers salience but also contributes to excess share of voice (ESOV), a building block of brand growth. Take Heineken’s “Forgotten Beers” ad as an example. It explains that connecting over a beer is more important than the beer itself.
Apart from the logo, not one specific aspect of the Heineken brand or product is mentioned, and many beer brands claim the territory of social bonding. But none of them have said it in this unique way: by boldly showing half-empty bottles and stale leftovers.
Outsmart them with the details
If you’re not Heineken or Burger King, then you’re better off digging deeper to uncover insights that are uniquely yours—a task that requires laser-sharp brand positioning and strategy. Product differentiation helps, but we all know this can be a challenge in commoditized industries.
Go into your archives, talk to your research and development team, visit a factory, read the history of the founders. Look at historical ads and product truths. Look at things that other brands could never ever claim to be true. Become a detective of your brand, and you’ll never be at risk of being mistaken for someone else.
Because, while sector insights provide useful context, their value is inherently limited by their broad scope and lack of actionable specificity. Brand-specific insights, by contrast, offer the granular intelligence that marketers need to make informed decisions. Whether it’s guiding a company’s strategy, informing investment decisions, or enabling competitive benchmarking, brand-specific insights deliver tangible benefits that sector insights simply cannot match.
Precision and relevance are paramount—always have been, always will be. So, it’s about time we all skipped the generalities and stuck to the specifics.