Do you know multiplication? What is 90% reach times zero cut-through?

I’m always amazed by how very industry-generic almost all communication is. Why do so many marketers think that “blending in” is the right strategy in a world of 3,500-5,000 messages per day (Yankelovich)? What is keeping marketers from breaking free from expectedness? Why do I even have to write this seeing how obvious it is?

Let me give you a tool here and now that I call “guess first”. It’s not rocket science. The next time you are going to look at one of your ads, close your eyes and guess what it will look like, and if your guess is right, that’s not a good thing. The reason is that if you’re right, more people will be right, meaning that it will be very expected and people won’t turn their auto-pilots off just for you. This is valid for all assets such as TV copies, print ads, blog posts, tweets, videos or similar.

The truth is that if you don’t have a unique, sticky and different way of communicating it’s going to give you a much lower ROI on your communication investments vs what you could get. You don’t want that. Industry-generic communication is a disease.

It’s important to stand out because people will notice your communication if you do. If it’s also clearly branded they will attribute it faster and more accurately to your brand instead of a competitor brand, driving a competitive advantage over time.

Some people might object and say that they don’t want to stand out because it’s not true to their brand. I don’t agree. I believe that you can both stand out and be “on equity”, i.e. true to who you are. If not, then you probably have a creative agency review coming up.

So as a CMO I suggest that you start using the tool “guess first” to coach your team, and that you start finding your unexpected way of communicating by asking for it from your creative agency.

Do you know what 90% reach times massive cut-through is…?