Brands have to wrestle with reality and its perception every day.
Products can be positioned as fake, artificial or nasty by competitors causing brand managers to be on the defense and reactive. Or, products can be positioned as authentic, real and good by your brand team and you take on an offensive posture.
In either case as marketing professionals, we are dealing with perception management. It is part art, part science, and part creativity.
Perception management often means that you are emphasizing unknown features or benefits or changing the conversation. As marketers, we want to focus on some attribute not often featured or that provides new information.
What Type of Wine Do Do You Want With Your Slim Jims?
Nomacorc – When I worked in the wine closure industry for Nomacorc, we often had to deal with several competitive types of closures like natural or bark cork and screw caps. Nomacorc’s original product made from a synthetic polymer. It was plastic and plastic has negative connotations.
But this product also had several benefits over the competition, like the ability to consistently control and manage the flow of oxygen into wine. Managing oxygen is essential to winemakers because oxygen helps wine develop while in the bottle. We told the oxygen management story to shift perception about the brand.
The challenge that Nomacorc faced was how to manage the perception that the cork was “a plastic plug.”
We had to offer counter arguments about its recyclability, the technology that gave it consistency for managing oxygen and how it would never crack or break in a bottle of wine.
Marketing role is to manage perception through tactics from public relations, content management or a range of digital tools.
For seven years, I got to be part of this effort to help that product gain market penetration. We approached perception management as telling the part of the story our competitors never mentioned focusing on facts that no one said like a Nomacorc is 64% air and more natural to recycle because there is a significant waste stream for polymers and plastic materials.
We managed perception by shining a light on facts and information people didn’t know. In fact, we created a DID YOU KNOW video that help illuminates our story. Remember this was 2010 and few companies were using video in B2B to shift perceptions. By leveraging the phrase DID YOU KNOW, we told the wine community things they didn’t know about our benefits. (Hat tip to The Richard’s Group and Katie Myers who did most of the work on this project)
Slim Jim – When I worked on this brand, Slim Jim was considered a greasy, slimy meat snack that was artificial and not healthy for you. Instead of trying to tell the opposite story, we embraced its “junk foodiness and that it was the snack Mom didn’t want you to eat.” We celebrated that it was a forbidden fruit. We also shifted the conversation.
We once ran an ad that said, FAT-FREE but you have to pay for the other ingredients.
We managed perception by positioning the brand and our message as an antidote for boredom. We were irreverent in our messaging and never, ever took ourselves too seriously.
We used the late, famous WCW wrestling star Macho Man Randy Savage as the personification of our brand. Like professional wrestling, you know a Slim Jim isn’t real.
By working with Randy’s image, we shifted the conversation from junk food to the over the top image of Macho Man and discussions about breaking through the boredom of each day. Oh yeah.
What’s Your Perception Management Challenge?
To understand how to manage perception, you need to think about what your marketing message is and to understand what your brand represents. In a recent post, I discuss how marketing is how you want to be perceived, and branding is how your customer/consumer sees you. Perception management is bridging that gap.
Some considerations:
- Benchmark studies help identify what consumers believe about your brand. They help you form a picture of how you are perceived.
- Is the competition pushing you into a corner – (talking about you as artificial or plastic)?
- Where is the gap? Do consumers see what you want them to see, or are they telling a different story? Where is the disconnect? What can you do to alter that perception?
- What role can storytelling play to counter competitive positioning?
- Would a spokesperson bring equity to the conversation if they represented your brand that helps shift the discussion?
Perception management isn’t a short-term project. Start with quantitative facts and ask, what would need to be true to shift perceptions?
Then the work begins.
Need help snapping into a perception management issue?
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free and we can explore if working together makes sense. Try my new chat feature on my site if you have a quick question.
Photo by Jayson Hinrichsen on Unsplash
