532. Consistency & Cereal 🥣
How positioning and messaging get better (and stickier) with age
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Consistency & cereal: How to make your message more sticky
How many of these (American) cereal brands can you name based off their tagline alone?
Snap, crackle, pop
They’re grrrrrreat!
Silly rabbit, ____ are for kids!
Kid tested, mother approved
Bee happy, bee healthy
The breakfast of champions
They’re magically delicious
(Answers at the bottom.)
A person must hear about your brand seven times before they’ll remember it, let alone be moved enough to buy something from you. This old marketing adage might be due for an upgrade in the age of the attention economy. Instead of seven times, it might be 70 times! (Almost to the point of being annoying, right?) (Also, I’d argue that the number needs to be a lot fewer if you are creating some truly unique and authentic brand moments, but that’s a topic for another newsletter.)
I know these cereal brands because I’ve heard these cereal taglines again and again and again over the years. No wonder they are seared into my brain.
Consumer brands are models of consistency, and tech brands can take some inspiration.
When you are coming up with your brand’s positioning and messaging, the internal debates and wordsmithing are only half the battle. The other half is about applying whatever you come up with consistently and repeatedly until it sticks.
Fifty percent craft.
Fifty percent stubbornness.
You often see this in the tech world of category creation.
Category creation is the process of you determining a new name for the type of thing you sell because all the current names just don’t quite fit. The process is incredibly taxing and resource intensive as a marketing team because you must define a new category and then go out and own that category, while doing all the other necessary parts of marketing like brand and product and growth.
Another quiz: how many products can you name that are associated with these categories?
Learning Management System (LMS)
Content Management System (CMS)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
To a degree, the companies you can name have spent some time consistently calling themselves this particular thing, associating themselves with a category.
Since category creation is a big onerous project, the good news is that you can also drive home consistency in many, many other ways with your marketing. A lot of this starts with your positioning and messaging foundations. I love a good foundations document with articulated elements of purpose, mission, values, positioning, use cases, value props, etc. Each of these things can—and should—be applied consistently so that you drive memorability with your marketing.
Not interested in category creation? My favorite alternative is a use case.
How many products come to mind when you think of these use cases?
I need to design graphics and visuals easily and quickly
I want to engage my audience through an email newsletter
I need to know how my blog is performing with keywords and SEO
Not interested in a use case? You might pick a catchy tagline or slogan that you can consistently communicate again and again across all your channels. In other words, go Full Cereal Mode. (Semantically-speaking, a tagline is a more permanent, catchy phrase to describe your brand over the long-term, whereas a slogan is a bit more of a fleeting phrase tied to specific campaigns.) Brand research can do a great job at revealing just how good you are at creating this memorable messaging; ask people how they’d describe you to others and feel super proud anytime someone uses your own words to describe you.
No matter what you choose to drive home consistently—be it a category, a use case, a tagline, a slogan—one of the most important things to remember is this:
You are unlikely to discover the “right” answer for how to describe your brand. Instead, you get to create the right answer.
Do some customer research. Listen to how people talk about you. Figure out what you believe about you. Don’t wait for a consensus on any of it.
Pick something.
Go for it.
Keep going for it, for at least six months.
Reconvene, survey people, and be amazed at how far you’ve come!
Cereal tagline answers:
Rice Krispies: Snap, crackle, pop
Frosted Flakes: They’re grrrrrreat!
Trix: Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!
Kix: Kid tested, mother approved
Honey Nut Cheerios: Bee happy, bee healthy
Wheaties: The breakfast of champions
Lucky Charms: They’re magically delicious
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
