Excerpt: When the brand comes to mind - that’s what matters.

The power of “when.”

This is one of my favorite concepts to play around with. Because it’s something I’ve seen get short shrift in marketing, with its obsessive focus on “what people think of my brand,” yet comparatively little thought to “when people think of my brand”, which I’d argue is maybe even more important. 

“What” asks people to evaluate the brand. “When” asks whether the brand shows up in the moments where evaluation can even begin. And I can think of a few ways that thinking about “when” can give you an edge on your competitors. 

For one, most brands will stick to “what” territory; this is where most marketers feel most comfortable. But they shouldn’t! Because you’ve just learned that “what” is where people perceive very little difference among brands. By definition, it’s very hard to build distinctiveness here. (Another stake through the heart of Myth #6.)

Here’s another. When you focus on “when,” you shift the emphasis from you, the brand, to the buyer or user. Your proposition is now about them, not you, which makes it inherently more interesting and you inherently more empathetic. That’s just how human nature works.

Now, the obvious answer to the question “When should people think of my brand?” is “When it counts, of course: in buying situations.” But just as there are trick questions, I’d argue this is a trick answer. Because I think what we’re really asking is, “What’ll it take to get people to think of my brand before the buying situation arises? Because if they don’t think about me at least once in a while outside of buying situations, how likely are they to think of me within them?”

Complicating matters, there are already plenty of marketing terms floating around that scratch the surface of “when” in some fashion. We have the so-called “need state”: essentially, why the product category exists. For pain relievers, the need state would be “when you experience pain.” We also have the “usage occasion” or “use case”, which gets a bit more specific about the context: like “when you feel a headache coming on due to muscle tension.”

We also have the “first moment of truth”, the point in-store when the category buyer is triggered to make a purchase decision. Similar in name but completely different in meaning is the “aha moment”, the point where a new user of a product first experiences the value in that product. Tech startup founders and SaaS marketers will know all about this.

We also have the newish concept of “category entry points”, developed by Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. These are contextual cues meant to help a buyer recall brands in a buying situation. (Although I’m not convinced they really work this way, as I’ll get into in a minute.)

One final “when” to consider stems from “jobs to be done”, the theory developed by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. The concept here is that people don’t buy products and services per se; rather, we “hire” products and services to perform certain “jobs” for us. Christensen found that innovators who better understand buyers' needs create solutions that address more of these “jobs” and consequently get “hired” by more people. (If you think that sounds like a good way to win the popularity contest, you’re absolutely right.)

One of Christensen’s most-cited cases involves McDonald’s milkshakes. Conventional thinking says that milkshakes are for pairing with burgers, yet McDonald’s was selling huge numbers of shakes in the early mornings, before the burger menu was even open for orders. Jobs To Be Done research uncovered the reason: commuters were buying these milkshakes to have something filling, tasty and easy to handle that would make their commute less boring – a completely different “job” from the conventional task of complementing your burger.

The Jobs To Be Done concept aligns beautifully with our sense of the “power of when” because, much like the milkshake example, what’s at stake for the buyer is always context-dependent. So there’s always a specific “when” that creates or reveals jobs your brand can be hired to perform. 

We’ve now amassed a small mountain of ways to think about when brands come to mind. Why do we need another? Because one question still remains: if brands benefit from being recalled earlier in buying moments, how does a brand achieve that advantage?

Need states and the other existing ideas, useful as they are, generally apply equally to every brand in the product or service category — not to any one specific brand. (Even Prof Sharp’s category entry points are category not brand entry points.) So they won’t help make any particular brand more competitive. 

We need a different kind of cue that reflects what’s really at stake for the buyer – something that doesn’t just bring a category of product or service to mind, and that can be distinctively branded by a single brand. Claimed, if you like.

One such cue is the mechanism I call a wedge — a portmanteau of “when” and “edge”, for reasons that will become obvious.

Here’s my logic. We work to make a brand strongly associated with a particular set of stakes. When these stakes arise, this brand comes to mind first and enters the choice process ahead of competitors. That association acts like a wedge. And a wedge makes your brand the one that shows up first in the buying moment.

Like a use case or a Job To Be Done, but unlike those category-level concepts, a wedge is claimed by a specific brand and is branded accordingly. That’s how it can function as a structural advantage. Provided the brand promotes and reinforces this wedge consistently over time – so it can compound, like the brand’s other assets. 

This metaphor may make more sense if I tell you where it comes from.

When I was a kid growing up in rural New Hampshire, we heated our house with three wood stoves. So I spent a lot of time chopping firewood. And I became intimately familiar with the splitting wedge: the tool used to split fat logs into skinnier pieces that fit into the stove. The action of the wedge felt similar to what I’m trying to describe with the marketing wedge. 

Give it a tap, tap, tap and the wedge goes further into the log. Each tap on the wedge forces the pieces farther apart. That’s how it works in the firewood sense. In the marketing sense, repetition drives the wedge deeper into memory; as it goes deeper, it separates your brand from competitors. That’s why distinctiveness plus repetition equals competitive advantage.

I’m guessing some examples would help. Here’s a fairly simple one for beer.

“I’m thirsty” is a need state, “Rewarding yourself for a hard day’s work” is a usage occasion and “The sound of a bottle opening” a category entry point. A corresponding wedge would be: “When I want to knock back a few cold ones and unwind with workmates without having to explain anything to anyone.” And this very wedge was defined and branded through the long-running “Miller Time” campaign from Miller beer in the US. (Fun fact: even though the Miller Time campaign was retired years ago, the Miller Time phrase still carries the same connotations … for beer drinkers of a certain age.)

Let’s try another example, for Snickers – a wedge that does double duty.

“I could use a snack” is a need state. “Hanging out with the guys” is a usage occasion. “Quick energy boost” a category entry point. A long-running wedge for Snickers bars is: “When your mates can see you’re weak and whiny because you’re hungry.” What makes this wedge effective is not so much the “You’re not you when you’re hungry” observation - that could apply to multiple snack brands. It’s the fact that Team Snickers have branded it so distinctively, and so consistently well, it’s become untouchable for any other snack brand.

Let me reinforce this with one last example that illustrates the wedge’s full advantage-building potential. 

“I need to buy a gift” is a need state. “Find a special gift for someone I love” is a use case. And “Romantic gesture” a category entry point. So far, so good. But the diamond company De Beers recognized a higher-value wedge: “When you’re trying to impress the woman you want to marry.” With this, they essentially invented the “tradition” of the diamond engagement ring – and created a whole new line of business.

You’ll notice these wedges don’t simply restate the need state. Instead, they raise the emotional stakes. Brands can only do this relevantly and credibly if they’ve observed and understood what’s at stake for their buyers in ways competitors haven’t (or haven’t promoted yet). 

And folks: this is your source of competitive advantage.

Digging into what’s at stake for your buyers should also make your brand more noticeable – because it shows that you’ve grasped something meaningful about the buyer’s life that your competitors haven’t.

But maybe best of all, building competitive advantage through smart wedges doesn’t require you to develop an objectively superior product or service. It doesn’t require you to outwork or out-execute your rivals. It only requires you to be astute enough to spot hidden but important “jobs” your buyers want to “hire” for, but your competitors haven’t yet discovered.

Understanding wedges and how they work opens up a whole range of opportunities. You can boost your brand’s mental availability by giving category buyers new reasons to think of it. You can increase your brand’s popularity by appealing to new types of buyers. You can create new competitive advantages, by blocking other brands from leveraging a powerful category-level observation, like Snickers has done. Or, as with De Beers, you may even create an entirely new market.

For anyone who understands marketing as “how the business competes”, the wedge offers a clear opportunity to create advantage. There’s nothing mystical about them; the ingredients have always been there. So I’m not claiming this is a blindingly novel concept. What’s surprising is how rarely brands try to claim these moments deliberately — and reinforce them long enough for the advantage to take hold.