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“Differentiate or die” is a common business mantra—or as the irrepressible Coco Chanel once said, “In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”
However, that world-famous marketing guru Jim Morrison of The Doors also once sang: “No one remembers your name when you’re strange.”
This view isn’t something that we often hear about in modern brand dogma, is it? We constantly hear about the importance of standing out or that brands must define their key point of difference. The industry has been told that brands have to carve out their “clear blue ocean” when it comes to what they offer to consumers.
But is the truth really so binary? Should we always be trying to stand out? Or should we—in most cases, when wanting someone to adopt a new way of doing things—make it seem as normal as possible? Maybe normalization is the holy grail.
Standing out doesn’t come naturally
Humans don’t normally like to stand out from the crowd. In days gone by, on the savannah, it got us killed. Standing out from the herd got us kicked out of the herd. And—in the days before policemen, TikTok or Bumble—not being part of a herd meant you didn’t feel safe, eat or get laid. Our natural evolutionary programming pushes us to shun the different and avoid the odd. Perhaps making our brands feel too different is rather counterproductive to adoption.
The key is to make something feel different whilst feeling simultaneously the most normal thing in the world. This is a concept in behavioral science called optimal distinctiveness: being just different enough to get noticed whilst being normal enough to make people feel they won’t be shunned or look like weirdos.
One person who really understood optimal distinctiveness was Uriah Smith, a Seventh-day Adventist preacher from Battle Creek, Mich. In 1899 he invented the “Horsey Horseless.” He was worried that people would think the new motor cars were too weird to adopt, so he added a wooden horse’s head and neck to the front of his version. Now don’t let the fact that Smith’s idea was actually a lot of rubbish distract you from the argument. In theory, he was making a lot of sense.
The key is feeling a little bit different, but at the same time wrapping humans in the warm blanket of familiarity. Brands in new categories shouldn’t focus on trying to be different, they should focus on trying to make what they’re doing seem normal. Let’s talk about championing normalization as a strategy.
Lessons from the recent past
Thinking back to the first digital wave—in 1996, it wasn’t normal to buy anything over the web, but slowly it became normalized. After all, in most cases, it was just a big global version of the Argos catalog but using a computer. Then it became weird to buy expensive things, high-ticket or high-involvement items like cars over the web. Then that reached a tipping point of normal.
Buying tangible things like books or music online was seen as weird in 1997 because you didn’t “own” it or couldn’t “touch” it. Then suddenly it became so normal it became weirder to go to a bookshop. My mum told me everyone would laugh at me when I turned up at the airport with my EasyJet code in 1996. Now they’re the largest airline in Europe. It’s the paper ticket people who are, well, strange. You’ve just got to make things feel normal enough.
McCarthy Stone is one of the U.K.’s leading providers of retirement living communities for the 65-plus audience. In the U.K., only 1 in 100 potential homeowners live in this type of age-exclusive development. In the U.S. and Australia, it is in 1 in 20, so it is quite normal and you’re likely to know someone who lives in a retirement community.
So, the main job we have in terms of marketing is to normalize this perfectly sensible, very attractive and often superior way of living the life you want to live as you get older. It’s not about being different—in fact, it’s precisely the opposite. It’s about making it seem mainstream.
When it comes to advertising execution, you must stand out, and when it comes to branding and recall, you will stand out. It’s also vital, when you are trying to find the emotional benefit of a brand, that you identify the category tropes or “sea of same” to escape from. But when it comes to the strategic approach of how to position a brand within a category, it is dangerous to appear too different. No one remembers your name when you’re strange. Jim said so.
Even if you are a massive “disruptor,” save that shizzle for the investor presentation—they love all that. When it comes to convincing real people to adopt your service, make it seem like a better version of normal. “People are strange when you’re a stranger,” so the holy grail is to make yourself always seem like a familiar face.
