S1E7 - The Familiarity Principle

Why is brand awareness an important component in marketing?

Understanding, if your marketing budget should be focused on awareness or converting sales, is a challenge for many small business owners. In this episode, Stacey touched on this topic. You will hear her insights about The Familiarity Principle, building brand awareness and key things that you could implement in your marketing efforts.

This episode is jam-packed with marketing advice, tune in to benefit from Stacey’s first-hand experience.

What you will learn from this episode:

• What is the Familiarity Principle
• Examples of how the Familiarity Principle works
• How to apply this principle to your marketing strategy

How to implement the Familiarity Principle

Think about how your audience wants to consume content

Make sure to have a tracker on your website

Key Takeaways

When exposed to something new or unknown most people exhibit a form of fear or avoidance

It can take seven or eight or even more touch points or points of contact before the individual is ready to buy

Increasing familiarity with your brand should always be a key consideration when designing your marketing pipeline

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome to the volt, tune in every week to unlock the marketing secrets, some of the fastest growing businesses you will have practical tips, strategies in case studies, will help you build incredible marketing campaigns for your business. And now here's your host, Stacy Kia.

Speaker 2: 0:32

Hello and welcome to today's show. I'm often asked, why is brand awareness important in marketing? Can we just put our marketing budgets into converting sales? Nobody cons. We've all felt that wound feeling where we recognize something or someone and it makes us feel comfortable, right? This is often referred to as the mere exposure effect. All the familiarity principle in social psychology. There's been extensive research into why people have a preference for the things they know. Successful businesses have managed to use this to their advantage and actually attract more customers. Have you ever considered why retailers play Christmas carols in their stores leading up to Christmas? Those savvy retailers have managed to take people's desire for the familiar and use it to increase sales. They use consumers positive memories and associations as a way to boost sales and keep people shopping for longer. Has the penny dropped yet? Building brand awareness is important in marketing and in this episode I'll give you a quick rundown of how it works. The familiar already principle. I love consumer psychology and it's linked so well to marketing. If we can understand how our customers think and make decisions at a subconscious level, it could actually help to boost our entire marketing effectiveness and our entire pipeline. So let's explore this familiarity principle. It's also known as the mere exposure effect. You know, we've all had those experiences where you're listening to a new song on the radio and at first not really enjoying it. Perhaps even finding it a little bit annoying, but after hearing it many times, you start to appreciate it and you actually catch yourself out, sort of humming along to it when you least expect it. That's a really great example of the familiarity principle is like the more that you hear something, the more that you begin to like it and in short, it's the tendency among human beings develop a preference for things. It could be people, it could be product, it can be songs which the more that we see it or heritage, the more we tend to like it. So for instance, in a relationship, it tends to be the case that the more often we see a process that will please, we are to see that person and the more we actually liked them, the more we see or hear something, the more we like it. Studies have shown that we're all attracted to what is the familiarity principle and it's the repeated exposure to people or brands or whatever it might be, and that increased exposure actually increases our attraction towards that being and it's a totally subconscious process, which I think is what makes it so interesting. Many of us are not even aware that we're making this choice or this decision. We're attracted to familiar people because we consider them more safe and likely to cause us harm. The same principle applies to marketing. We've seen it in Hollywood films with product placement, so which is the repeated exposure to a product in order to associate a positive effect. We see it in advertising, you know, through brands of cars. Technology could be drinks, products. They're often placed, you know, you can clearly see the logo clearly see the product in video segments and what's amazing about that as it doesn't give us as the end user the impression that we're watching a commercial, it's just really strategically placed placement. Did anybody see that movie? The Italian job on there was obviously in 1969 version three version. Think about the BMW mini cooper. So the real stuff, the Italian job is actually not the people, but the car, right? The car chase scene that would be famously featured, three BMW mini coopers in three different colors. The original film featured the old model of the mini cooper. So when they remade the movie in 2003, they actually approached BMW and sands. You know, can we use a newer model for the, for the movie remake. BMW agreed. They provided more than 30 cars the use of that movie and it absolutely paid off for them. So bmw actually saw 22 percent increase in sales the year after that film was released. So this initial concept was actually first notice by a man called Robert Zajonc. I'm probably pronouncing his name incorrectly, so excuse me if that is the case, but he noticed that when exposing something new or unknown to animals, they exhibited a form of fear or avoidance and that same thing actually happens to us as people, as human beings. And we have that same built in. We see things as a threat when we're not familiar with them. Another example of how the familiarity principle works, I guess in this context is when a popular TV series replaces an actor, um, then we might not necessarily be scared, but we definitely can sometimes feel that sense of wanting to avoid it or not liking it. So have you been watching a TV series and halfway through an actor's switched? I find it so annoying. I remember I used to watch the fresh prince of Bel Air when I used to come home from school and they decided to replace Vivian banks three years into the show that's 70 showed you guys remember that they recast the role of Laurie for the final year. Friends, Ross gallers from friends, his ex wife, Carol, was replaced during season one. If you're a fan of any of these shows, you may have felt shocked or disappointed that these answers were switched out and producers kind of hooked you didn't notice. It's not that the replacement wasn't a great actor necessarily, but it feels uncomfortable because you've become familiar with that character. Sure enough, over a period of time, you'll continually exposed to that new actor and you actually warm up to them and eventually forget that they would not even the original letter everyday example might be, let's say you're going into a coffee shop, um, every Friday to write some blog posts. You need to go to the bathroom and you look across the coffee shop and there are two tables. Opposites. You see a man sitting there who you've seen two or three times. He's there every Friday in the same shop. And think on the other table. You see another man totally unfamiliar to you. All things being equal. You're much more likely to trust the first man with your laptop while you go to use the bathroom. Despite the fact that you know nothing about him, you've never spoken to him, he could be a professional thief, he could easily walk out with your laptop and change coffee shops that he visits however he is more familiar, and then that makes you more likely to think positively about him and be more likely to actually trust him. The familiarity principle is exciting and it plays a crucial role in marketing as it exploits the psychological underpinning of human decision making. A simple way to take advantage of this exposure effect is to show your prospects your unique selling point over and over and over again. The more you feature your usp, talk about your usp rave about your usp, and display your usp, the more familiar your audience will become with your business. More exposure leads to familiarity, which leads to comfortability, which results and Ramapo rates of conversions and optimization as a whole. So overall, these examples show you how becoming familiar with something or someone can be enough to make us like that thing or brand more so, I always tell people is what's showing up to things like networking events or social events. It can be a really simple way to become familiar and become a likable face using what you know about the familiarity principle or exposure of fat to improve your conversions by displaying your brand in as many ways as possible to your ideal prospects. Let's think a little bit more about marketing and the familiarity principle. The impacts all of this principle in marketing is one of exposure, so in short, the most well known brand

Speaker 3: 8:44

wins.

Speaker 2: 8:46

This is true to the extent that customers will actually choose the more familiar brand even if they know nothing else about the brand or product, and even if the better known brands is actually an inferior product to a less well known brand. A common phrase don't salespeople is that it can take seven or eight or even more touch points or points of contact before the individual is ready to buy. This is another example of the familiarity principle. The symbol apps are becoming more aware of or familiar with a name brand. Logo proposition makes people increasingly likely to accept it. This can be utilized in a number of ways, but most simply it's good to just keep in contact with your prospects. Drip marketing is an effective way of continually putting your brand in front of consumers, so that can be done through email newsletters, social media, even personal notes at Christmas, even a coal, if that's appropriate to your prospects. The exact right approach will depend totally on your business and your target market, but increasing familiarity with your brand should always be a key consideration when designing your marketing pipeline. Okay, so I just wanted to wrap up with giving you a couple of key things that you could implement in your business today to help you take advantage of the familiarity principle or the mere exposure effect. So one of the things to think about is the way that you are producing content. So rather than just focusing on one form of content or two forms of content, you want to make sure that you're producing. Think about your audience and think about all the different ways that they might like to consume content. So you obviously want to focus on some written content. So in the form of blogs and social media posts for that, people can read through information about you. You also want to be producing some form of video content so that people can visually see your brand. You also want to be thinking about audios or something like a podcast or an audio book or something that people can listen to to get exposure to your brand. You also want to think about the ways that people can take action. So whether that's an online quiz or a download or a strategy sheet or checklist or something that they can actually do. And the reason that I say that's important when it comes to this particular principle that we're talking about is you want to be able to enable people to binge on your content so that when they do come across you that that you can hit them from every single angle that they could possibly want to consume from. So it's really, really important to make sure that you're thinking about that. I guess the same thing applies to different social media channels. So even though your primary channels with social media might be something like linkedin and facebook, make sure that you do have exposure on twitter and instagram, just making sure that you can be seen everywhere that your particular audience is using. So that's really, really important to consider. The second thing that I think is important to implement straight away is making sure that you have either a facebook pixel or some kind of tracking on your website so that you are able to retarget even if you're not choosing to run ads yet. Maybe on the businesses not in that position to stop pushing advertising out. I still still recommend embedding those pixels now so that when you do decide to run these sorts of campaigns that you've got loads of data to work with. So it's really about making the most, for example, of facebook targeting. So it's really, really good platform for making the most of the mere exposure effect because the network is. It's really suited to building brand awareness and you can do some really niche targeting based on the type of people that you want to get in front of. So a couple of examples of that might be newly engaged couples will be thinking a lot about where they gonna take their honeymoon. So that's a really easy one. If you are a tool company that offers those sorts of packages are really, really easy way for you to get exposure by targeting people that have recently updated their status to engage, for example, kind of going a similar line as people who are pregnant and pregnant woman fell overseas soon be looking for things like primes, loads of different baby products, maybe even upgrading their car for example. So you can kind of target those sorts of people by exposing your brand to them over and over again. So you can kind of think about that sort of thing. You can take advantage of things like facebook targeting. The reason I say that pixels are important to have on your website is you know that if someone has clicked through to your website that they are aware of your brand and you can then run a campaign. I need to do some facebook retargeting or even ad words display ads through Google based on people that have visited your website already, so it's a really good way for you just to continually stay front of mind right in front of that person no matter which website they're actually using. So those are a couple of tips that I recommend implementing sap to make sure that you can take advantage of the familiarity principle.

Speaker 4: 14:02

You've just been listening to the vote podcasts with stacy care. If you've enjoyed the show, she'd really appreciate you leaving a review on itunes and don't forget to head over to www dot the boat dock playbook. The more free content that will help you build an effective marketing strategy.