"Do People Know What It Is?"

The case for prioritizing recognition over attention in offer development and marketing

Photo by Timur Garifov on Unsplash

The fastest path to business success is to make a product people want to buy.

Not a product people can be easily convinced to buy. But a product people can immediately recognize as the thing they've been looking for (even if they didn't know they'd been looking for it). There are many ways to do this: solve a readily apparent problem, tap into a deeply felt desire, or jump on an emerging trend, to name a few.

In other words, recognition is a critical and often overlooked factor in a business's success and sustainability.

Over the last decade and a half, I've met many people selling an enormous variety of products and services. Some of those offers have been blockbusters. Others have completely flopped. But most often, I've seen people struggle for each sale—if not one by one, then with the time and energy they sink into social media, email marketing, and content creation in the name of building an audience who might want what they're selling.

The common thread among the products and services that struggle to gain traction? A lack of recognizability.

The blockbusters are all highly recognizable. They feel familiar. Or they easily connect to some preexisting desire, fear, motivation, or frustration. They seem like the answer to a very important question.

Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, small business owners (and large corporations) create products and services with a low recognition factor all the time. What's more, our media environment, with its low barrier to entry and (relatively) low-priced ads, makes it quite easy to ignore recognition as an area of concern. Betting on high-volume attention—that is, building an audience—seems to be a safer course of action.

Today, I want to make the case for spending less time trying to attract attention and more time making marketing and offers that people recognize.

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The Most Unlikely Stuffed Animal

When I first decorated my daughter's nursery in 2008, owls were all the rage—at least in the corners of the indie maker internet that I haunted. I figured I couldn't go wrong with a nursery full of a symbol of wisdom, so like many other babies born in 2008, my daughter got an owl-themed room.

In the years since, other animals have risen in popularity thanks to weird corners of the internet: the narwhal, slow loris, and three-toed sloth, to name a few. In the last few years, Gen Z set its sights on a new animal obsession: the axolotl.

For the uninitiated (like me), the axolotl is an endangered species of salamander native to a single lake in Mexico. And it looks like an adorable cartoon alien.

So it's little wonder that stuffed axolotls have become a hot commodity. Slate's Willa Paskin recently investigated this trend for Decoder Ring, a podcast about cultural mysteries. Paskin spoke to Elaine Kollias, marketing director and designer at Folkmanis, a company that produces high-quality stuffed animals and puppets. The axolotl is now Folkmanis's biggest seller by volume.

Folkmanis’s stuffed axolotl

Judy Folkmanis, the company's founder, set a simple policy for deciding which animals to turn into products. "The bottom line was always, do people know what it is?" Kollias explained to Paskin. For a small company, focusing on recognizable animals—turtles, raccoons, beavers, and skunks—was a smart play. It reduced the chance of a "flop," as well as limiting the potential marketing, design, and sales considerations they'd need to think through.

In the '80s and '90s, Folkmanis branched out a bit with a stuffed cockroach and a stuffed mosquito—certainly not traditional, but very recognizable. Then came the internet and the revolving door of trendy animals.

Spotting one internet trend, a young designer at Folkmanis proposed a slow loris puppet. It took some coaxing (and plenty of data) to prove that, in fact, people did know what this animal was. Eventually, Judy Folkmanis approved the design, and the company produced a slow loris in 2016. And then, a narwhal. And then, an axolotl.

Folkmanis isn't the kind of company that makes trends. It responds to them. It pays attention to up-and-coming animals and creates instantly recognizable products for the people who see these animals in their feeds multiple times a day.

"Do people know what it is?"

"Do people know what it is?" turns out to be an excellent product development question. Recognizable products don't need as much marketing, financial investment, or pushy sales campaigns to work. Companies that try to make trends or introduce truly novel products have to spend more time and money generating consumer awareness. A customer has to recognize a product as filling a need or desire before they can purchase it.

Not every product or service will be instantly recognizable. But every product or service needs to identify how and why its customers will recognize it, unless its creator plans to flood the zone with advertising.

Often, a low-recognition offer requires more than just high-volume marketing to sell. Low-recognition offers are frequently solutions in search of a problem or wish fulfillment in search of wishes. That means that marketing a low-recognition offer typically requires convincing (or, manipulating) people they have the problem that it solves or the wish that it fulfills.

What does it mean to be "recognizable?"

Generally speaking, to be recognizable means that the thing (or person, or idea, etc.) being recognized can be identified from previous experience or knowledge. It feels familiar either because it is familiar or because it reminds us of something we're already familiar with.

Recognizable needs and desires are ones we can easily notice and identify based on existing knowledge or previous experience. I recognize that I'm hungry because I notice that I feel a bit light-headed and cranky. I recognize my desire to go paddleboarding because I know from previous experience how good I feel on the lake.

If I've been trying to solve a problem, that problem is familiar to me. Marketing for a product or service that solves that problem only needs to mention it for me to recognize that I might be interested in finding out more. Depending on just how recognizable that product or service is, I might be ready to open my wallet on the spot!

Something can become recognizable when we're introduced to it and given time to become familiar with it. The more marketing we encounter about an idea, product, or person, the more familiar we become with it.

This often occurs with coaching services. For as ubiquitous as coaching is in the circles I run in, plenty of people would never think to hire a productivity coach, divorce coach, or book coach, even if they know they want to improve their productivity, navigate a divorce, or write a book. Coaching, as a solution, takes time to become recognizable if you're new to the idea. It generally requires more marketing to connect a particular problem to the solution of hiring a coach.

When a product or service is instantly recognizable, the sales cycle is often very short, even for high-priced offers. When a need or desire is instantly recognizable but the product or service takes some additional exposure to become recognizable, the sales cycle is likely a little longer. When neither the need nor the offer is recognizable, sales cycles are long, resource-intensive, and often plagued by less-than-ethical practices.

Platforms benefit from and profit off of creators and small business owners who offer low-recognition products and services because it takes so much labor (i.e., content and data creation) to make a living.

Recognition vs. Attention

Prioritizing or even creating recognition for a product or service is different from generating attention for a brand. Both can be considered marketing, but only one leads directly to sales.

Most marketers use social media to attract attention and build a brand (personal or otherwise). The idea is that if enough people pay attention, then a marketer can translate that into an appropriate number of sales. The more people who are paying attention, the more people will buy the product or service on offer. This is a misconception.

There are all sorts of things marketers can do to generate more views on their social media posts: jump on trending audio, remix popular memes, perform hashtag vulnerability, etc. Those tactics may very well improve a post's "reach" or generate new followers. But those tactics don't necessarily lead to a product or service becoming recognizable.

What's more, attention-driving tactics often require casting a wide net.

One way to get more attention is to try to capture the attention of a bigger group of people, which makes the task of creating recognition even harder. Because recognition is in the eye of the beholder. What's recognizable to one person isn't recognizable to another—that is, the wider someone casts the net for attention, the more likely it is to pick up lots of folks who don't need or want what they have to offer.

Marketing based on recognition is laser-focused on what is familiar to the people who are most likely to want to buy the product or service being marketed. It speaks to that relatively small group's frustrations, problems, and desires. It doesn't try to convince others that they, too, have those frustrations, problems, and desires. It doesn't manufacture need where there was none before.

When attention rather than recognition is the goal, marketers often have to resort to manipulative tactics to produce recognition among the people who are (ostensibly) paying attention. Strong-arming recognition is a form of control. It relies on psychological triggers rooted in fears of missing out, insecurity, not belonging, being unloved, and even illness and death. Instead of gradually building honest recognition, it leverages data, micro-commitments, and carefully designed persuasion pathways (i.e., the funnel) to create a false sense of recognition.¹

Attention-oriented marketing can result in an attention bubble in which the marketer's perspective becomes a new reality for their followers. Everything within the bubble is then recognizable—and everything outside the bubble is unrecognizable. It's the same epistemic structure that conspiracy theorists and cult leaders employ. That's not to equate these practices or the harms they cause, simply to point out the similarities in set-up.

Final Thoughts

When Folkmanis decided to produce the slow loris toy, they didn't need to create a reality in which everyone wanted a slow loris. That reality already existed for a segment of their market. Folkmanis didn't need to create a reality wherein every kid wanted a stuffed axolotl. Lots of kids already recognized that desire.

Folkmanis doesn't have to rely on attracting attention and convincing people to buy their products. People recognize what Folkmanis offers as soon as they see it in a gift shop or children's boutique.

My sincere hope is that we can learn to put less emphasis on attracting attention for what we do, who we are, or what we have to offer and put more emphasis on producing what people actually need or want. It's a tall order—consumer capitalism is based on the manufacture of demand and the proliferation of desires. Economic growth has become a measure of how brands command our attention to sell us things we don't want until convinced they're the solution to existential needs (or merely a way to stave off the dread of life in the 21st century).

When we focus on recognizing existing needs and desire, solving those needs and desires with recognizable offers, and sharing how we can help with people who recognize the value of what we offer, we can more easily resist the worst of late-stage capitalism while providing for ourself in more sustainable ways.

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1. For more on this, check out “Creating Worlds that Create Audiences: Theorising Personal Data Markets in the Age of Communicative Capitalism” by Charitsis, Zwick, and Bradshaw in the open access journal, TripleC.