What does it mean for brands to be salient, meaningful, and different and how can they use the meaningfully different framework to create value?

Marketing is typically seen as a series of discrete activities, at best as links in a chain where effect follows action. In reality, the world is dynamic and messy. The great marketing thinker, Jeremy Bullmore, once described brands as “fiendishly complicated, elusive, slippery, half-real/half-virtual things.”

The consumer lives in a spider’s web of marketing with brand connections all around. She is touched hundreds of times a day by brands, mostly in the smallest ways that she doesn’t make any effort to attend to. Only some of these connections are actively controlled by marketers, but all are part of the brand experience that shapes consumer attitudes and actions.

Equally, consumers are also creating many brand outcomes every day, some more obvious than others. A click, a search, a webpage view, a referral, a review, a moment of consumption, reading the packaging: all of these fresh connections are all potentially as important as a sale. Marketers are too frequently distracted by what is measurable easily, ignoring the broader and cumulative effects of their activities.

Kantar’s work with clients is designed to measure all these flows of value. The Meaningfully Different Framework measures the value of brand equity accumulated in the minds of consumers – its impact on penetration and market share; its impact on willingness to pay, and its impact on future growth potential.

Hear more about the framework in this episode of The Sleeping Barber podcast with myself and Jorge Alagon, Global Head of Data Science Innovations at Kantar. We discuss what it means for brands to be salient, meaningful, and different, as well as how they can use the framework to connect more in a meaningful way with customers, and create value for their brands and businesses.