No, it’s not a spelling error.
What is ‘blanding’, and what does it mean?
It’s where a company chooses to sit in the shadow of a much larger competitor, that has a similar product, yet much higher market share, a greater marketing budget and similar offering. A bad place to be, we hope you agree.
A fundamental principle of brand design is the concept of ‘MAYA’, an acronym of ‘most advanced, yet acceptable’. It’s a position to define where a brand’s personality should sit that’s enough away from its competitors to be remarkable, yet close enough for those to gauge what sector you work in without too much guesswork. The ‘most advanced’ element is the notable component of the idea, as it highlights the importance of being easily memorable to maximise chance of long-term success.
Business success isn’t wholly dependent on a single thing (such as a logo, or a tagline), it’s a multitude of different things that compound together to increase the likelihood of success - such as a good product or service, an engaging outreach team, marketing efforts, attracting and retaining high quality people, creating a buzz around a company, the list goes on.
But what happens when a company chooses to bland itself?
We define this as purposely concealing itself inside a sea of similar organisations with similar brand personalities to avoid standing out. This could be for many reasons, such as internal conflict, lack of creatives in the company, a culture of groupthink and / or destructive consenting by senior decision makers.
The problem with this strategy is that innovation is slowly lowering the barriers of entry to many business sectors, therefore many will gain competitors rather than losing them (due to the ever lowering costs to business in them), so in the long term, it’s a strategy that’ll lead you into defeat.
Ultimately, a company’s success depends on the person (or people) who are at the helm making decisions. If they don’t have the confidence or the vision to give themselves a unique position, they’ll get overtaken by those that do.
The pandemic has shown us that focussing your profile-raising activities purely on physical and word-of-mouth interactions is a critical vulnerability for businesses.
It limits you to people in your geographical area of the ad placement, but also that your target customer happens to see it and takes a positive perspective of your organisation afterwards. It doesn’t allow for engagement outside of the local area, and we suspect, that it won’t lead to organic marketing (that is people talking about it) unless it really is remarkable.