Brands Frame of Reference

One of the most powerful ways of getting people to think about your product is to build a frame of reference into your branding efforts. A frame of reference is the way people use your product, the times and circumstances therein when they do use it. Snickers uses this consistently in their advertising; showing eating Snickers as a way to stave of hunger quickly and pass time while positioning itself with funny ads showing people in need of a quick pick-me-up. Effective frame-of-reference marketing is what has allowed Snickers to position itself as the second, best-selling candy bar.

Godiva, another candy, has positioned itself very differently by creating promotional campaigns, price points, and packaging which makes it the candy for special occasions. This in turn allows it to charge a lot more than most candies do for its product while avoiding direct competition with giants like Snickers and M & M’s. The danger of using frame of reference is that your product will become limited in its functionality, reducing the number of times that people will buy it. After all, if people only purchase a product during specific times, then you have a shorter selling window to get them to make a purchase.

Sometimes you don’t have a choice however, after all, if your brand isn’t what you want it to be. It’s what your customers think of it. Oreo found itself trapped in a frame of reference that limited its sales to either special, indulgent moments or picnic-type settings. In order to combat this and increase its sales, it created snack packs in order to encourage people to buy it for their kids’ lunches or on the go in much the same way they might purchase any candy bar. When developing a frame of reference, you need to carefully consider your target audience to determine what it is that they are doing when they use your product or a product similar to it. After all, if Oreo was stuck on what people normally did with cookies, they might not have created snack packs. Instead, you must also consider what it is your target wants to achieve so that you can find possible ways of expanding the ways in which they will use your product.