The Power of a Great Rallying Cry
One of the quickest ways to an alluring vibe is to isolate the BS your customer faces and then create a compelling rallying cry that fires up your audience!
To spur your consumers into action, you need a strong rallying cry—a reason for consumers to get excited, take action, and buy your awesome product. And to make an exciting, authentic rallying cry, you need to intrinsically understand the BS that your customer faces.
This is what we mean when we say a product needs an alluring vibe. This is when an ideal customer can immediately sense what’s in it for them, and having a thrilling rallying cry is one of the proven ways to nail that vibe.
Because when a product taps into something we already feel passionate about - especially when it just shouldn’t be that way … we don't choose it. It chooses us.
How to Craft a Kick-Ass Rallying Cry
The road to a rallying cry starts by honing in on a primed mindset your ideal customers are already in when they find you (or you find them). There are lots of brands who do this well, and all those examples bucket into one of three strategies.
This article will tackle the first of those strategies: the Universal BS.
Universal BS is when marketers tap into an existing belief about something unfair or just plain wrong in their product category. Something that's straight up BS!
Here are three of our favorite examples of brands that have isolated the BS and made compelling rallying cries to solve for it:
Southwest Airlines’ Bags Fly Free campaign: It's BS that we get hit with a bag fee on top of an expensive flight!
Dollar Shave Club’s buy direct model, aka "Shave time, Shave money": It's BS to pay so much for stinking replacement blades!
The Savanah Bananas baseball team’s "We make baseball fun” approach: It’s BS that baseball games are so long and boring!
(As you can see, the Savanna Bananas brand is a trip - check out more here!)
Firing Up Your Audience
So you’ve isolated the BS and you think you’re closing in on a great rallying cry. Fantastic! Here are two simple exercises to use when brainstorming ways to fire up your audience:
If you're going up against big established brands, consider a problem your competitors create. Zoom in on solving just that. Check out how Clevr's Sleeptime SuperLatte goes after the crappy side effects of melatonin:
2. Consider if there is a villain worth conquering. A villain is not about bashing your competitor. It's about conquering the root cause of an emotional problem you know your audience really feels.
For example, CarMax knew the sleazy used car salesman was a “villain” of their consumers and created an exciting business model that nixed the need for ol’ sweaty Hal and his plaid jacket.
They fired up their audience by promising an easy buying process with no haggling, or "The Way Car Buying Should Be".
Ultimately, if you want your target audience to notice your message and lean in, there’s nothing better than an exciting rallying cry. So sniff out the BS, find a creative solution for it, and then fire up your consumers! Believe me, they’ll thank you for it!
For more on this, check out what Donald Miller - author of Building a StoryBrand - has to say:
VIDEO: This is How You Turn Your Brand Into a Movement (2-minute video)
ARTICLE: Your Brand Should Pick a Fight (2-minute read)
PS:
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