How do you know when different restaurants are part of the same chain? There are visual cues that are kept consistent across the franchise so you know what to expect. Red and yellow seats. Clown mascot. Golden arches. Good marketers intentionally reinforce these distinctive brand assets, investing in them through brand advertising, packaging design, and the website or store where the product is sold. Consistency breeds familiarity, building trust that the good experience you had with the brand previously will carry over into this interaction. Consumers trust that a company that spends hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising won’t easily throw that investment away by letting things slip below a certain standard. This is the reason why you can always recognize a McDonald’s restaurant and know what to expect from the food, no matter where you are in the World.
If certain elements of a brand become popular enough with consumers, they get adopted by the wider category. McDonald’s is known for its clean bathrooms, which puts pressure on other fast food restaurants to up their cleaning game. If they launch a McPlant burger, that spurs rivals to also offer a vegetarian option. When they start to offer online delivery through an app, their competitors follow suit. This memetic rivalry means that brands start looking like their competitors, converging on whatever proves to meet the market’s expectations.
There are some things you can’t copy. For example logos are protected by copyright. Nor would it be in your interest to copy everything. Customers would start to mistake you for your competitor. It’s hard to beat someone at their own game, and chances are you’ll start to bleed sales, as your experience doesn’t live up to expectations. On that basis marketers strategically choose points of differentiation or distinction, as in “a distinction without a difference”. The point of differentiation doesn’t have to be meaningful: you can simply be associated with the color yellow, and that may be enough for customers to remember you.
Even a meaningless distinction buys you a monopoly of the mind: if you’re the brand they remember they might not consider anyone else. If there is a true differentiation between your product and the rest, even better. Presuming competitors can’t easily copy your unique feature you will be the only good option for some segment of the market. As the saying goes: you can’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but you can be someone’s shot of whiskey. Economic theory dictates that under conditions of perfect competition where products are interchangeable commodities, profits get competed away. Therefore investing in a distinctive brand is one of the few reliable mechanisms for increasing your margin.
Measuring the memetic distance between two franchises of the same brand, or two competitors in the same industry, is strategically valuable. If different restaurants in the same chain aren’t memetically similar, they’re depriving their customers of a convenient sense of familiarity, and harming their chances at repeat business. If a brand evolves to be too similar to its rivals, they’ll start to bleed sales to competitors and deprive themselves of monopoly profits.
Consistency in reinforcing distinctive brand assets is a key consideration when testing new advertising creative, website designs, or when doing in-store merchandising. This is a tradeoff: if you’re not memetically similar across all your customer touchpoints, you lose the benefit of brand recognition. However if you always run the same ads and never update the design of your website or store, your brand will grow stale and outdated, as customers get tired of looking at it.
This phenomenon is known in the media buying world as “ad fatigue”, and it's one of the primary reasons performance marketers put in so many requests for fresh creative. This is a stronger lever on paid social channels where the audience mostly stays the same and sees a high frequency of impressions, and less of an issue on channels like search where a new batch of people are searching your keywords each day. The trick is to avoid tiring out the audience while reinforcing the brand is to strategically choose what elements to make non-negotiable, and let the rest be more flexible. New creative, packaging, websites, or in-store displays can look fresh, while still unmistakeably belonging to a specific brand.
Actually measuring memetic distance is possible, using the Root Sum of Squared Errors (RSSD) between the presence of elements. This is just a mathmatical technique for measuring difference, while penalizing larger differences more, and not ending up with any negative numbers. If you were doing this for two brand’s Facebook ads you might download a swipefile of the past 100 ads for each using the Facebook Ad Library, then tag what elements appear in the ads repeatedly. For example one brand might use a specific phrase or offer regularly, the other might reuse the same stock image, and both might use the same button text. Once you’ve tagged the important elements, you can tally how many times each tag appeared for each brand, or can apply some weighting based on the relative importance of each tag.
Calculate the differences and square them (multiply the difference by itself), because summing up the total and taking the square root (finding what number multiplied by itself equals that total). This is the Memetic RSSD, expressed as a number between 0 and 1, where 1 is perfectly identical and 0 is no similarities at all. Comparing this gives you a mathematical way to express memetic distance and track how it changes over time. This needn’t be limited to Facebook ads: it can be used to measure the memetic distance between the menu items of different franchises, recommend similar products, or compare what customers are saying in product reviews: anywhere where consistency or distinctiveness is important.
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Decomp RSSD: Optimizing for Politics | Blog |