What is a no-brainer brand (and why do you need one?)
As marketers, we all know that your brand is one of your most valuable assets – it conveys what you offer and stand for and defines how your company is perceived by your audience.
A no-brainer brand means that choosing your product or service over alternatives is such an easy and obvious thing to do, your audience do it without even having to think.
It’s pretty much every marketer’s dream.
And that’s not to mention the other endless benefits of building and maintaining a no-brainer brand:
- more top of mind awareness
- better recall and recognition
- increased loyalty
- and totally smashing the competition out of the park (to name just a few)
So how do you get started with achieving all of this?
Cue the behavioural science…
A no-brainer brand is built on a genuine understanding of consumer motivations, it is memorable and distinctive and the experiences and touchpoints it creates feel easy and effortless.
It’s all about creating associations, mental availability, memories, habits and heuristics. And that’s where behavioural science comes in, the science-y bit behind the art of a building no-brainer brand.
In behavioural science terms, a heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows us to make judgments quickly and efficiently. We use the term “brand heuristics” to mean all of the visual and verbal assets of a brand – logos, typography, graphic devices and colour, photography style and sound. Clear brand heuristics are a key component of building a no-brainer brand thanks to their ability to increase mental availability and build shortcuts in consumer’s minds.
Another distinguishing factor of a no-brainer brand is how refreshingly effortlessly and easy its interactions and experiences feel to its audience. We’d recommend that would-be no-brainer brands should identify ways to reduce friction and increase cognitive ease in all that they do.
No-brainer brands don’t just roughly know, they really, really know what actually motivates their customers. We use the Why Axis dimension of our Influencing Behaviour Model to uncover these motivations for our clients – it explores status, belonging, self-actualisation and security.
An in-depth understanding of these motivations, coupled with other broader behavioural science principles, opens up a whole realm of opportunity to genuinely influence buyer behaviour, from cueing habits to building effective purchase triggers.
Is your brand a no-brainer?
Want to find out if your brand has achieved coveted no-brainer brand status? Our Brand CACHE tool is designed to do just that. It’s underpinned by behavioural science, and assess the extent to which brands are top-of-mind.
It’s what all brands are searching for – when the brain looks for the top answer, all roads lead to your brand.
We're The Behaviours Agency.
We’re a brand and digital agency who use behavioural science to make brands more motivating, more top-of-mind and easier to choose.
If you want our help to achieve this for your brand, get in touch today.
By James Ballinger
Board Director