What defines fearless, swing-for-the-fences marketing?

The recipe for transcendent business growth

What do marketers want to achieve?

• Sky-rocketing sales
• A growing legion of enthusiastic brand fans
• Advancing market share
• A profitable balance sheet

But what about:

• Making a difference in customers’ lives
• Recognition as a brand with a soul, standards and a higher purpose

What stands in the way of achieving these goals? Of course, consumers have to join you fully on the journey. However more often than not, what that journey is, how it’s assembled and executed, plays a significant role in calculating the anticipated outcomes.

The path to marketing success begins with redefining the task at hand and how the consumer can participate. It doesn’t start and end with selling product features and benefits. Rather, it begins with fundamental recognition that human beings are on a life-long hunt for resolution to their external, internal and philosophical problems.

In truth people are not actually buying products; they are attempting to become better versions of themselves.

Swing-for-the-fence marketing is on a mission to create transcendence, recognizing customers are ultimately looking to be:

Wiser

More respected

More valued

Better equipped

Healthier and more physically fit

More accepted and loved

More at peace

Happier and more fulfilled

Summarizing fearless marketing behaviors

Successful brands look beyond the basic functionality, utility and value proposition of the product, to envision how the brand can inspire and improve the customer’s life.

This means defining an aspirational, human quality which resonates with consumers. And further, considering how the brand can help their customers achieve those aspirations.

The best brand building answers the following important questions:

Who does our customer want to become?

What kind of person do they want to be?

What does their aspirational identity look like?

How can we help inspire and enable their goals?

When you reach for a higher purpose and deeper brand meaning, the foundation is set for the kind of marketing that inspires people. They want to be part of something that’s greater than themselves. For brands, the irony of being centered on the customer rather than the brand, is the very thing needed to facilitate what businesses want to achieve – consistent year-on-year growth that provides the grist for a healthy balance sheet. This occurs because your consumer truly opts in, becomes emotionally invested in the brand, and decides to participate.

The marketing fearlessness resides in the intentional vision to go beyond tried and true marketing approaches – to recast what the business is trying to accomplish by redefining its purpose and mission.

This strategic approach puts the brand in league with the consumer and celebrates them as the hero of the storytelling, with the brand operating as the expert guide.

What does this look like in practice?

It’s…

• The food company that works to inspire home cooks and help them on their creative culinary journey
• The beverage business that recognizes the consumers longing for improved health and wellbeing
• The pet food company that fully embraces the emotional relationship and connectivity between the pet parent and pet
• The technology brand that sees the consumer’s passion for human connection and creative expression
• The car company that enables the drivers’ quest for adventure and exploration

The opportunities are there when you look past the product and into the aspirations and desires of those you seek to serve.

What adventure can you enable?

What passion can you feed?

This is the right conversation to have at the center of your communications planning and marketing program development.

We can help you navigate this exploration.

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