Think Twice Before Updating Your Brand

0:00Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crocs store today. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

0:47Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

0:59Roger Martin:It has become very popular in the world of branding and business in general to think about the importance of customer loyalty and how you need to promote loyalty. You know, it's a good thing. You'd want people to be loyal to your product and keep on repurchasing your product. But it turns out that there is something more powerful by far than loyalty. You should think about loyalty as the tip of an iceberg, but the 95 % that you don't see below the water is habit. It's the subconscious saying to you, you should do this thing again. The modern fantasy about, wow, business is changing so quickly, you've got to keep morphing and changing, updating your brand, getting a new visual identity, all of those things, they're just bad.

1:49Bad, bad, bad, bad. Don't do them. Why? It's because you interrupt habit.

2:00So rather than a consumer thinking about, oh, wow, I'm loyal to, let's say, Tide. I'm loyal to Tide detergent. I really should buy it.

2:14Roger Martin:It's actually that person's subconscious saying, you know, the most comfortable thing to do, The thing we, in your subconscious, are most confident of is that thing that worked for us before. So please, please, please don't think about buying something else. Tide's been around for 76 years, and it has what we call cumulative advantage. Cumulative advantage is what you increasingly build as the customer becomes more and more comfortable with using your product or service. Each time they use it and get the benefits they wish, you get more cumulative advantage that causes the subconscious to say, I'm totally comfortable with this and I would be uncomfortable if we did something else.

3:10That's the win of cumulative advantage. When you rebrand, the subconscious is saying,

3:21Roger Martin:whoa, whoa, whoa, where's that thing we were comfortable with? And in some sense, it puts you back to square one. You're now competing to establish a new habit. So Tide was the dominant powdered detergent that worked in this new thing called the washing machine as of 1946. On the basis of that, it had the greatest cumulative advantage 30-ish years later when chemists figured out how to formulate liquid detergents. P &G created a fantastic liquid detergent called ERA and brought that out and they said, well, we need to do ERA, a new brand, because this is a new product. TIDE stands for powder detergent and ERA will stand for liquid detergent.

4:07Roger Martin:It was a complete bust and never got anything but fractional share. And then some smart person at Procter & Gamble said, how's about we do this? How's about we put it in an orange bottle with a target on the front that says Tide all across it? And it quickly became the number one liquid detergent. Number one, and it has been ever since. Even with that huge advantage in detergents, You couldn't switch and get people to say, I want this entirely new brand. You needed to double down on the habit of buying Tide. And every once in a while, the Proctor people, even though they're super smart, make a little boo-boo.

4:48When they came out with a detergent that could wash entirely in cold water, they said, you know, that orange Tide bottle, that's a warm color, right? Hey, Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local croc store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest croc store today. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, Use Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

5:35It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. We need a cool color. So we're going to put it in a blue bottle. What happened, do you think? Disaster. It was just a disastrous launch. What did they do? Put it in an orange bottle, and it became the dominant cold water brand.

6:17All of that can only be explained by the subconscious. Because the conscious should be saying,

6:26Roger Martin:oh yes, that's cold water, blue, blue equals cold, etc. That story is a conscious story. The unconscious is saying, where is the familiar bottle? Where is it? You've taken it away, you've put this weird thing in, I don't want to think about that. And that's the story of your subconscious saying, I want to keep this habit.

6:56An example of what not to do on this front was the Instagram change in logo. It's just a self-inflicted wound where you've got a camera that everybody understands as Instagram, and then you've got some designer saying, well, that's old-fashioned.

7:17Roger Martin:Yes, it was. Yes, it was. It was an old-fashioned looking camera that everybody understood meant Instagram, and they created something kind of new that looked really new. Who cares, right? Literally, it just, it's boggling to me. I'm blown away at how often websites get enhanced. It drives me nuts. I have a favorite sports app. My favorite sports app did a refresh and everything was in a different place than it was before or how you clicked on it. I finally said, enough already, and went back and picked a new one. They put themselves back to square one. Keep as much of the cumulative advantage you can keep.

8:07Does that mean don't ever mess with the product?

8:11Roger Martin:No, no, no, right? If the product is advancing in your competitive set, you have to advance it as well. But you can advance it in ways to say, here's how I connect this product to the previous product. So how much has your iPhone advanced since that kludgy thing back in 2007? Enormously in almost every way. Have the visual cues changed dramatically? Does it look a lot different than it did? Heck no. It's always had similar visual cues, look and feel, operation, or cues to the subconscious that said, you know that last iPhone you had that you loved so much? This new one is very much like it, only better.

9:05Roger Martin:And the subconscious is like, that's great, that's awesome, I'm happy, go get the 13. So, for cumulative advantage, if I had a choice between using new and using improved, it's a no-brainer. Improved creates a link to the past. New, if anything, suggests a break with the past. What I'm saying is hard to do. There are people who are absolutely, utterly convinced that refreshing something beloved is a good thing, that it's just a bad thing to let something get kind of old and tired. Unfortunately for them, now all the behavioral research, like all of it, says exactly the opposite. This lies beneath the rational conscious mind.

10:07Think about appealing to the subconscious, and you appeal to the subconscious when you help the subconscious feel as comfortable as possible.

11:00We'll see you next time. Keep your projects moving. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-CONTACTS. Get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card.

11:38With unlimited 2 % cash back on all eligible purchases. Unlimited 5 % cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online. And a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business. You'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of$1 ,500 cash back after you spend$50 ,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership. Terms apply. Learn more at go.amex.com.