Using Familiarity for Brand Awareness
By: Kimberly Grant
In marketing, it is harder to get new customers than to retain your current customers. It’s even harder to introduce a new product into a marketplace. Before that shiny new “thing” that will be talked about and entered into the zeitgeist can make its debut, there is a lot of planning involved. Strategies, key performance indicators, and lot of coffee are in order to really plan out a product launch.
One way that marketers have decided to market new products is to use the familiarity of an established and well-known product as a vehicle to generate awareness of a new product. Familiarity marketing is essentially using the established audience for a brand or category and marketing your product of a different category or brand to that audience. The idea being that someone who is interested in a brand or category will probably be interested in a similar brand or category. In order to do this effectively, segmentation and audience targeting is a must with a capital “M”.
Without Examples, It’s Like it Didn’t Happen
This familiarity marketing model worked for Beats by Dre when it launched in 2006. Dr. Dre and his collaborators decided to use sneaker culture to promote their new headphones with superior sound quality (at that time). They sold the Beats headphones at a premium price and used celebrity endorsers to bring awareness to the product. At the time, they were trying to address an audience need for better sound quality in headphones. It worked. Almost a decade later, Dr. Dre sold Beats to Apple for $3 billion.
Another example of using familiarity for marketing is when a little-known music artist collaborates with a well-known musical artist. These collaborations are one way that a new artist can generate awareness of their brand. When Nikki Minaj was first trying to set herself apart and make a name for herself, she was featured on music tracks with popular artists like Beyonce. Now that she’s a mega star, she still collaborates with other artists. Only these days, her collaborations are to bring awareness to up-incoming artists.
Birthing A Spin-off
The last example I can provide is television spin-offs. Many iconic television series were the result of other successful shows. All in the Family is the reason that The Jeffersons was one of the first mostly black television series on network TV. A Different World would not have been conceived if not for The Cosby Show. Major TV networks like CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX have just about cornered the market on spin-offs as familiarity marketing. The formula for this marketing is to weave in a pilot episode of a new TV show into a regular episode of an iconic show. This allows the new show to introduce its main character and to generate awareness of the new show.
Think: Black-ish and Grown-ish, NCIS franchise series, 911 franchise series, Chicago franchise series, Law & Order franchise series, and my favorite DC’s the Arrowverse. If not for the Arrowverse and the CW’s diligence, we would not have had the pleasure for enjoying The Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow, and of course Stephen Amell’s chest in Arrow. To make a nod toward familiarity marketing, the CW sponsors yearly crossover episodes each year so that the super friends of these DC shows can come together, like last year’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.
While these spin-off series seem like just forms of entertainment, they are a type of marketing. As you can see, this type of marketing has existed for a long time and is here to stay. It also represents the best in out-of-the-box thinking; when it is effective.
Want to get familiar with the K. A. Grant brand, you can read my last post here and you can head over to your Amazon account and purchase my novels.
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