Do You Have A Strategy Or Are You Just Confirming Your Biases?

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to do a project for an Asian frozen food brand. One of their products included spring rolls with a variety of sauces. The young brand manager working on this brand LOVED the sauces. For her, this was the best part of the product line. So, she felt very strongly about positioning the product around these sauces.  A series of focus groups the team did to assess consumers’ reactions to the product confirmed her opinion, according to her, as a few consumers had mentioned how delicious the sauces were. Out of hours of focus group discussions, this is what she remembered most. This is called the confirmation bias.

In this article, we’ll explore biases, how they affects decision-making and our approaches to brand strategy, and why adopting a bias-free approach to brand strategy development is crucial for creating a more successful and impactful brand strategy.

What Are Biases?

Biases refers to a preconceived notion or tendency that leads someone to favor one perspective or outcome over another. It’s a cognitive shortcut our brains use to process information quickly. While bias can help us make quick decisions, it often causes us to overlook essential details, skew facts, and ignore alternative viewpoints.

Biases can be both implicit (unconscious) or explicit (conscious). Common biases in business decision-making include:

• Confirmation bias: Seeking out information that supports existing beliefs (just like in the case of our brand manager above).
• Anchoring bias: Relying too heavily on the first piece of information encountered.
• Recency bias: Giving more weight to the most recent information rather than the most relevant (a new piece of research, for example)

Why Biases Can Be Good

Biases aren’t always harmful. In some instances, they allow us to make quicker decisions, especially when we don’t have time to evaluate every piece of information. Here’s how biases can help:

• Speed of decision-making: In fast-paced business environments, biases allow you to act quickly rather than being bogged down by analysis paralysis.
• Leveraging past experience: Relying on biases based on past successful decisions can sometimes lead to more efficient outcomes.
• Efficient use of cognitive resources: Biases can simplify the decision-making process by focusing attention on the most familiar or easily accessible information.

How Biases Can Be Bad for Your Decision-Making

However, biases are often more detrimental than beneficial, especially when it comes to brand strategy. Here are some reasons why biases can lead to flawed decisions:

• Ignoring Data and Insights: Biases can lead you to dismiss valuable data that contradicts your preconceived notions, causing missed opportunities or misaligned strategies.
• Over-Simplification: By oversimplifying complex consumer behaviors or market trends, biases can lead to cookie-cutter strategies that don’t consider your target audience’s nuances.
• Confirmation Bias: If you already believe in a specific brand strategy, such as focusing solely on brand purpose, you may only seek out information that supports your view, overlooking potential pitfalls.
• Tunnel Vision: Biases can cause you to hyper-focus on a single idea, such as your brand’s culture or purpose, while ignoring other crucial aspects like product quality or customer experience.
• Lack of Innovation: Biases can make you resistant to change, leading to outdated strategies that don’t evolve with the market or consumer expectations.

Examples Of Biases In Brand Strategy

There are several prevailing brand philosophies that shape how companies approach branding today. Here are some of the most prominent ones:

1. Cultural Branding: Cultural branding, which seems to be witnessing a revival, focuses on aligning the brand with cultural movements (or subcultures), values, or trends that resonate with consumers. Instead of just promoting products, brands become part of larger social narratives and address cultural shifts. This approach can create deep emotional connections with consumers. Or not.
2. Brand Purpose: This philosophy emphasizes that brands should stand for something beyond their products or services. A brand’s purpose is its guiding principle, and it reflects the brand’s larger role in society. Purpose-driven brands aim to solve social, environmental, or ethical issues and make a positive impact. The belief here is that People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.
3. Human-Centric Branding: This approach focuses on putting the customer at the center of all branding efforts (shouldn’t it always?). Brands seek to understand human emotions, needs, and desires, and craft their messaging, products, and experiences to serve them.
4. Experience-Driven Branding: In this approach, which became even more popular with the advent of the internet (and the ability to create online experiences), brands focus on creating memorable experiences for their customers, whether through digital interactions, in-store experiences, or product use. The idea is that the brand experience is as important as the product itself.
5. Storytelling Branding: This philosophy sees brands as storytellers, with a focus on narrative as a way to engage consumers. Brands craft compelling stories around their history, values, and purpose, which can resonate emotionally with audiences.
6. Community-Driven Branding: Brands with this approach focus on building strong communities around their products. They often rely on user-generated content, customer advocacy, and fan communities to foster loyalty and engagement.
7. Disruptive Branding: Disruptive brands seek to challenge industry norms, introduce radical innovations, or change consumer expectations. These brands thrive on shaking up the market and offering new perspectives. Think Liquid Death.
8. Inclusive Branding: Inclusive branding, a more recent philosophy, focuses on ensuring that the brand is accessible and representative of diverse audiences. This approach emphasizes inclusivity in messaging, product development, and corporate practices.

There are others, such as “Archetype based branding” or ” Challenger Branding”, but you get the point.

These philosophies reflect a shift from traditional product-centered branding toward more values-driven, experience-based approaches that seek to build stronger emotional connections with consumers.

All these philosophies have merit, and it is fairly easy to find examples to support and justify each and every one of them. Each of these philosophies also represent a specific and preferred world view, a preferred lens through which the marketer looks at building markets and brands. And often, these worldviews are influenced, or biased, by the beholder’s values and belief systems.

The Problem With These Philosophies

The problems starts when these philosophies or world views turn into biases and therefor inhibit impartial judgment. In fact, while say “cultural branding” works in some cases for some brands in a specific situation, it doesn’t always work for every brand in any situation as the proponents of “cultural branding” would want to make us believe. The same is true for a brand purpose driven approach, and for the matter for any of the philosophies described above.  

If this becomes the exclusive lens through which you look at your business and brand, you seriously limit the number of potential solutions at your disposal to solve your business problem. In fact, you will:

• Only seek out information that support your worldview
• Ignore or discard information and data that is inconsistent with that world view
• Oversimplifying complex consumer behaviors or market trends
• Inhibit and limit your assessment
• Etc.

You get the picture.

Why a Bias-Free Approach to Brand Strategy Leads to Better Results

Adopting a bias-free approach means making decisions based on objective data, comprehensive market research, and a clear understanding of consumer behavior rather than assumptions, beliefs and biases. Here are five reasons why this approach is more effective:

1. Data-Driven Decisions

When you remove bias, which is not easy, you allow data to speak for itself. Data-driven decisions provide a clearer picture of what’s working and what isn’t, helping you make more informed strategic choices. By focusing on measurable outcomes, you avoid the guesswork and can tailor your strategy to align more accurately with market realities.

2. Holistic View of the Brand

A bias-free approach enables you to consider multiple factors that influence brand success, such as product quality, customer experience, and market trends, not just emotional aspects like brand purpose. This comprehensive view leads to a more well-rounded and adaptable strategy.

3. Better Alignment with Consumer Needs

Instead of assuming you know what your customers want, a bias-free strategy involves actively listening to them. By conducting thorough research and avoiding preconceived notions, you can identify the actual needs and desires of your target audience, resulting in more relevant and impactful messaging.

4. Encourages Innovation

Biases can lock you into old ways of thinking, but a bias-free approach encourages you to stay open to new ideas. This willingness to innovate ensures that your brand remains dynamic and adaptable, able to meet changing market conditions and consumer expectations.

5. Reduces Risk of Missteps

Brands that rely on biased strategies often fall victim to costly mistakes, such as launching a product or campaign that doesn’t resonate with consumers. Think New Coke or Bud Light or Victoria’s Secret. A bias-free strategy reduces this risk by grounding decisions in reality rather than assumptions. You’re less likely to misinterpret market signals or overestimate the impact of a strategy that lacks real consumer support.

Practical Tips To Help Avoid Biases

Avoiding biased thinking is not easy. So here are five practical tips to help lower the risk of biases impairing your thinking when making brand strategy decisions:

1. Use Data to Guide Decisions

Tip: Rely on objective, data-driven insights rather than gut feelings or assumptions. Use analytics tools to track consumer behavior, market trends, and campaign performance. And be open-minded for data that doesn’t fit the patterns or stands out.

Why: Data helps ground your decisions in reality, reducing the influence of biases like confirmation bias or over-reliance on past experiences.

Example: One of my project had a very strong DE&I component. During the qualitative phase of the project, we spoke to 80+ potential target audience members, including many women of color. One theme that consistently came up was the importance of representation in the companies they wanted to do business with. This is no surprise; we were expecting it: They wanted to do business with people like them. This feedback very much reflected the public sentiment and discourse. So, it would have been easy to recommend a brand strategy primarily rooted in inclusion and diversity. The surprise came when we quantified our learning (always quantify your learning) and asked respondents about the relative importance of various criteria when choosing a specific brand within that category. Representation and “doing business with people like me” suddenly ranked much lower in the list of decision-making criteria. This information contradicted our accepted beliefs to the point that we questioned our data at first. More important to our respondents were the category-specific benefits and the ability of the brand to deliver against those benefits. To use an analogy, the decision to go to a restaurant (and return) is primarily based on the quality of the food and the service, not the owner’s ethnicity. That is not to say that representation isn’t important, it just showed us that other criteria were perceived as more important in selecting this brand.

2. Seek Diverse Perspectives

Tip: Involve people with different backgrounds, roles, and viewpoints in the decision-making process. This could mean bringing in team members from different departments or seeking external opinions. Be open to their opinions, especially when they contradict or are inconsistent with your way of thinking.

Why: Diverse perspectives challenge assumptions and provide a more well-rounded view, helping to mitigate groupthink and narrow focus.

3. Test and Validate Hypotheses

Tip: Before committing to a strategy, develop a series of hypotheses and validate or refute them. Validate your ideas with real-world data and feedback from consumers.

Why: This helps you see what works in practice rather than making decisions based solely on theories or assumptions, reducing anchoring and availability biases.

Example: on a recent client project, a stakeholder came up with an hypothesis about the way a consumers segment changed its behavior to address a specific need. There was no data available to validate or refute this hypothesis. And no third-party research firm (Mintel, etc.) covered this area in their analysis of the category. Only when we tested this hypothesis through our own quantitative research were we able to validate and size this opportunity. It turned out that over 40% of consumers had adopted this behavior without any expert really noticing. This in turn became the basis for this clients new brand positioning platform.   

4. Question Your Assumptions

Tip: Regularly challenge your own beliefs and ask whether they are backed by evidence. Consider the possibility that you could be wrong, and explore alternative strategies.

Why: This helps combat confirmation bias by forcing you to consider options and data points that you might otherwise ignore.

5. Use Structured Decision-Making Frameworks

Tip: Implement decision-making frameworks like SWOT analysis or decision trees to systematically evaluate your options. This ensures all factors are considered objectively.

Why: Structured approaches minimize emotional decision-making and help ensure you weigh pros, cons, and risks without falling into cognitive traps like recency bias.

By applying these tips, you can approach brand strategy decisions with greater objectivity, leading to more effective and unbiased outcomes. It can also lead to more innovative strategies. In fact, let’s not forget, your competitors suffer from the same biases as you do.

A Better Approach?

Obviously, I am biased, but I believe that the philosophy I describe in the Brand Positioning Workbook is a more rigorous one. It is based on the analysis of over 1200 case studies of successful brand building and identifies 26 sources of what I call brand associations. But these sources of brand associations can also be perceived as “branding philosophies”. In fact, the 26 “territories I identify include all the branding philosophies described above, including cultural branding, purpose driven branding, disruptive branding, etc.  

A systematic exploration of these 26 areas when trying to position a brand will allow you to look at your assignment from all these different perspectives and identify the most relevant and promising one. Sometimes it will be a cultural branding solution. Sometimes a disruptive solution. Sometimes a brand purpose driven solution. And sometimes a purely functional solution (if the products are substantially superior).

Don’t take my word for it. In the words of a client that when through one of my positioning workshops “(Ulli’s) methodology led to a deep team discussion and new insights around how to optimize our brand positioning and also gave the team confidence that we had explored all potential options.” No fear of missing out here.

Conclusion

While brand strategy theories like brand purpose and culture can provide a framework for decision-making, they are often clouded by biases that limit their effectiveness. By adopting a bias-free approach, grounded in data and consumer insights, you ensure that your brand strategy is not only relevant but also adaptable, innovative, and aligned with actual market needs. Ultimately, this leads to better decision-making and more impactful, sustainable growth for your brand.

Trying to position or reposition your brand? I’d love to help.

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