The big ‘so what’

It’s just a short word. One syllable. Two letters. Conjunction. But my word, this bitty little word does a lot of performing in marketer statements of brand or product proposition.

‘So’.

It doesn’t normally sit there like that of course, in splendid if ungrammatical isolation in a paragraph kingdom of its own. Instead, it’s busy connecting this with that, humbly but inexorably linking two brand statements and doing it with an apparent even-handedness that makes you think each is the natural concomitant of the other, all the while tilting your gaze to the second part, with a kind of forward-leaning sleight of hand.

A classic example – for a painkiller, say – would be, ‘Brand X relieves your headache quickly and effectively, so you can get on with your life.’

So you can. And that’s nice to know. Except, you knew that already. It’s what comes with the territory. But it is a rare marketer that would leave the first statement alone, and not feel the urge to add something very much like the second, for all its banality. It’s a kind of reflex.

Researchers are always at it, not content to report back to marketers what respondents feel and do, and leaving it for them to judge the relevance, but instead pressing on with that ‘so’ addendum. ‘Brand X gives you lasting energy, so you can show up for yourself and for others’, as I saw suggested at the end of a research debrief recently.

Well, this one does move on from banality, but only to arrive at impertinence, presuming to tell consumers how they will react and throwing in a little guilt there for good measure, if you happen to be more selfish and weren’t thinking of using your newfound energy ‘for others’.

This reflex leap to ‘so’, after perfectly good statements of brand promise, rankles with me in the way any unthinking marketing practice is apt to do. And it gets me wondering why marketers and researchers feel compelled to do it – what theory, if any, lies behind it?

Well, some say it’s about moving forward to the benefit. Yes, the desired progression from product feature to human benefit is well established in marketing, dating pretty much from the inception of our discipline.

But what’s weird here is that marketers seem blind to the fact that the first of these paired statements is already a benefit. Relieves pain fast, gives you energy, saves you money, keeps you safer, goes further without recharging, reduces surgical site infection by 60%, frees you from diarrhoea for 48 hours: these are tangible benefits, deriving from superior product performance. Why the need to find a benefit for the benefit?

And what happens when you do? Inevitably, you miss out on the specificity of human existence. In their own minds, consumers can quickly imagine what the primary brand benefit will mean personally for them. For one, a headache-free afternoon might mean they can go ice-skating; for another, it’s about nailing the conjugations of irregular Spanish verbs; for a third it’s an illicit tryst in a downtown hotel. The variations are endless, and therein lies the wonder.

But big brand statements cannot live in the specific, so they bundle up, which is how you get to ‘get on with your life’. There’s something for everyone there – and nothing for no-one.

A spur to innovation

None of this would matter if it were just a personal niggle that I can give vent to in my routine midsummer rant on marketing’s strange ways. But the reflex urge to bounce from simple promise to extended ‘so’ can have real detrimental effects on brand performance.

The most insidious problem is the way the gaze gets drawn to the second phrase at the expense of the first. Discussion settles there; agencies work from there; focus is eased away from the first bit, before the conjunction, that is supposed to be the justification of it all.

Yet look hard at that first statement – the phrase that says what the brand actually does – and you might conclude that yours is weaker than it should be, but you hadn’t really noticed before because you were too carried away with the touchy-feely second part.

You might opt to strengthen the language in the first statement, of course – and this might well be a help – but more sober reflection might prompt the conclusion that what the brand or product is actually offering amounts to table stakes. From that point it might be about starting afresh and focusing on innovation to be able to claim something truly compelling. But only if you get to that point, only if your enthusiasm for the ‘so’ nugget hasn’t blinded you to the pallor of what precedes it.

A more serious corollary of this is when you do have a genuine breakthrough innovation that you seek to communicate, but with the same two-part formula. Let’s imagine a painkiller that works faster than anything on the market, for example.

Your first statement of promise can now be gutsy and uncompromising, because you can use unequivocal, pre-emptive language. But how do you manage to dramatise the significance of your breakthrough in that second bit? ‘So, you can now get on with your life even faster?’ Is that it?

In the end, nothing on this side of the semantic divide is going to quite capture the power of the innovation, and yet your agencies are likely to seek to dramatise this bit, and you’re likely to end up with communications that seem pretty much par for the category. The factual fragment is enormously strong – but the ‘so’ continuation has the effect of levelling things out.

OK, enough. While it’s felt good to get my rant out there and say my piece on this arcane facet of marketing, I know there will be marketers and researchers begging strongly to differ. No, they’ll say, we do need to move on from concrete benefits to what they mean emotionally in people’s lives, we do need to ladder up from what the brand can do for them to what they can then do with that potential, we do need to chart a course from product power to personal empowerment.

Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course. But in my experience, it just isn’t so.