Frequency Footprints: From Obscurity to Familiarity

In my years of work working with both B2B and B2C brands, I always begin by asking a simple question—have I ever heard of them? If so, where? If not, why?

Sounds stupid, and if the answer is “no, I’ve never heard of them”, we might get shy about admitting it to our clients, but this is a valuable piece of information that often gets overlooked.

If as a marketing strategist, who lives and breathes brands, I have never heard about your brand, there could be several reasons why:

1. I simply wasn’t the target audience;

2. The brand did a poor job at appealing to me in the midst of the crowded commercial landscape;

3. The brand might have a great story but has done a poor job at telling it through the right media channels;

4. The product quite frankly could simply suck (but even if it sucked that bad, the notoriety that comes with being bad is almost as big as of a brand that is great);

5. Or the product/service is a low purchase frequency brand or low usage frequency brand (or in worst case scenario, both).

Let’s unpack point #5 a bit more.

If you’re anything like most Canadians, you wake up in the morning, shower, get dressed, and drink a cup of coffee on your way to work while listening to some tunes or a podcast.

This simple daily routine puts most people in touch with several high usage brands—Starbucks coffee, Jeep vehicle, Levi’s jeans, Spotify, etc. Chances are that you know every single one of these brands.

High usage brands are blessed with the gift of frequency. The more you use something, the more share of mind it can have in our heads. The more share of mind, the more habitual a brand’s relationship with their customers can become. But high usage brands also come with a highly competitive playing field. Take, for example, the following list of the Top 10 coffee brands worldwide—Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Nescafe, Tim Hortons, Gloria Jeans, Peet’s Coffee, McCafe, Dunkin Donuts, Folgers, Maxwell Hours. You likely have heard about most of them (geography dependent), so the fight for customers in this category is fierce.

Now, usage frequency is different than purchase frequency. There are several products and services that you buy occasionally but use often (ie: your vehicle), whereas there are brands that you use occasionally but buy often (meaning you only use them when you buy them, ie: your haircut).

The brands that fall in the quadrant of high usage and high purchase are trying to build habits with their customers; whereas brands that fall in the high purchase but low usage are trying to extend their touchpoint through post-purchase add-ons or experiences. This means that, if you’re Geek Squad and your customers only interact with your brand when they need tech support, you want to create a subscription model or partner with a famous retailer to give them more usage touchpoints in order to keep your brand relevant in their minds.

I’ll give a personal example—my barbershop, Foundation Barbershop right here in Calgary. I typically get a haircut once every 4-6 weeks. It’s an OK purchase frequency, enough to keep the brand top of mind for me. However, the owner at Foundation (who happens to be my old college buddy) does a fantastic job at keeping his customers engaged in between visits: he’s created amazing barbershop swag, partnered with local artists to create custom art for his shop, posts on Instagram daily, throws parties for his customers, has an open-door policy for people to come in and watch the soccer game (even if they don’t need a haircut), and so on. This simple strategy of creating more real or artificial touchpoints is enough to make his independent business a staple in the hip neighborhood of Inglewood.

Now, let’s move to the bottom right quadrant: high usage but low purchase. This is where the entire vehicle category exists. Most Canadians buy a vehicle once every 7-10 years. That’s an abysmal purchase frequency, yet most people know Ford, Dodge, Volkswagen, Honda, Toyota, and so on.

The reason why that is is because car companies invest billions of dollars every year into advertising with high reach and high frequency (such as TV). This is done on purpose: a few years before someone needs a car people already start thinking about what will be their next vehicle. Unless they’re a brand enthusiast (Ford vs Dodge), most folks are open to switching brands. Therefore, car companies’ ad spend lives in the world of shaping opinions about their brands so that when the time comes to buy a car, their vehicles are more than just a functional aluminum box on wheels—they represent a lifestyle, an attitude.

By creating experiences at racing events, having an open-door policy for test drives, partnering with celebrities, paying for product placement in movies, and most importantly innovating their yearly line launches to create a buzz on the roads, people end up having far more touchpoints with competing brands than just at the time of purchase. That’s why your car brand offers you dealership services for scheduled vehicle maintenance and keeps in touch with you on the regular—it’s all about customer satisfaction and retention.

This brings us to the final and most dreaded quadrant: the low usage and low purchase space. This is where the company that installed your home heating comes in. Think about it—while in the winter you use your home heating every day, it’s automated therefore you don’t even think about it. If I asked you what’s the name of the HVAC company that does the maintenance of your furnace, I can bet that the chances you’ll remember the name of the person who provided the service is higher than remembering the company they work for.

Companies in this quadrant have two issues to deal with: people don’t transact with them often enough and they don’t consciously use their services/products often enough.

Increasing purchase frequency is simpler than increasing usage, but it needs to be done very strategically. If you’re a life insurance company, there are very few ways you can do that. But if you’re Traeger and people buy your BBQs only once every 20 years, you need to find a way to transact with your customers more often—that’s why they sell pellets.

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On the other hand, increasing usage is all about building habits. Usage is what makes a brand become part of someone’s life—such as that Starbucks coffee you pick up every morning on the way to work. Loyalty programs, such as Starbucks Rewards, solve for both purchase and usage frequency, giving incentives for customers to come back again and build a habit.

But here’s where brands can start to get creative—building habits doesn’t necessarily need to be through a direct transaction with your brand; it could be with a partner of yours. Take Starbucks’ partnership with Delta.

At some point, Starbucks marketers realized that people who drink their coffee also like to travel. By partnering with another brand that their customers already use, they were able to add more brand touchpoints to their journeys—drinking Starbucks coffee at 30,000ft and collect points while they’re at it.

If you’re a brand with low usage and low purchase frequency, you need to think strategically about where you’ll choose to invest your efforts: is it at creating additional services/products for your customers to transact with, or at inserting your brand into your customers’ habitual consumption journeys?

Look at your brand through these frequency lenses and you’ll be able to identify what strategic move you might need to prioritize next.

PPA