Investment Comparison. Why Claims is the Best Investment You Can Make on Your Brand

Should a winning claim be a mandatory brand communications fundamental?

 If you are responsible for a Brand, chances are you are involved in Business Reviews at this time of year. The ultimate question in any Business Review boils down to “where and how should we invest next year to hit our short & long-term financial objectives?” 

 A powerful Claim delivers superior ROI compared to anything else a Brand owner could invest in.  If a Brand can develop a winning Claim -- a statement about a key benefit of a product or service that overcomes the Shopper’s barrier to purchase and differentiates your Brand vs. competition -- that Claim can be used in all existing Brand assets including packaging, display material, e-Comm content, website, social content and media. That is why a winning Claim can produce such high ROI – it makes your existing investments work harder. In fact, in our experience Claims leveraged at point of purchase drive item sales +10-200%.

 But if Claims seem to be so simple to produce and so valuable to a Brand plan, why don’t all Brands already have winning Claims prominent on their packages, on their shelf trays and on their e-Comm sites? 

We work with clients across many industries across the globe, and in our experience, Claims are underutilized for three main reasons:

 1)     The Brand’s tagline or slogan, rather than a Claim, is used to convince the Shopper to buy their Brand instead of the competition. Taglines create awareness, recall, and purchase intent for a brand or service. Done well, they’re catchy, memorable and inspiring. Claims, on the other hand, close the sale by overcoming a very specific Shopper barrier to purchase or overcoming doubt at the point of sale. They are very specific, highly competitive, and far more rational.

2)     The Brand team develops Claims but “the Legal department won’t allow any of them to be used”. We hear this from almost all our new clients. But Legal doesn’t need to be a barrier, quite the contrary. When enrolled early in the process, your Legal team can be an enabling partner by defining the “requirements to support this Claim” with sufficient time to address with low-cost, high-base-size research.

3)     The Brand team has not validated that their Claim increases its Brand choice vs. competition. A Brand may go with the Claim that the team or business leader likes the most without committing the minimal and quick effort required to field high-base-size research to validate which Claim wins vs. competition. Or they do run research but it’s simply to identify which of the list of Claims the respondent liked the most – measured in isolation, not recognizing that barriers to purchase at point of sale exist because competition exists and inspires doubt, either with a performance Claim of their own, a lower price, or a better package design.

 If you have experienced any of these situations and would like help developing a real Claims muscle for your business, give us a call, we’d love to help. Developing winning Claims should be a critical component of your Brand Plan. Claims are a proven business builder across categories and markets. Our research database for winning Claims has an average increase in Brand Choice of +41%. In market results are, when executed well, show an increase in +10-200%. We can lead your team to qualified winning Claims in as little as 4 weeks.  Shopper1st – Where Winning Brands Start.