November 2023

Hiding in Plain Sight

Why fitting in will be the best way to stand out in 2024.

Let’s start here:

Our Study Guides throughout 2023 have spoken at length about how brands are doing a poor job of listening to their consumers when making marketing decisions and the damage this can cause when it comes to loyalty, perception, and just plain dollars wasted. Today, to wrap up our year of practical marketing, let’s talk about how to show your audience you are listening in a way that creates relevance without making the whole story about you.

The most obvious way to show a consumer that you’re listening is also a fairly overt one: you tell them. “We hear you” style campaigns are not new to marketing and have been shown to work in certain circumstances as a first push at shifting perception. This type of relevance is loud and acts as a disruptor. The challenge with “we hear you” style campaigns, however, is that they can’t be an always-on participant in the conversation. If you don’t eventually stop making the story about yourself, your brand will always be stuck in “WE HAVE A BIG ANNOUNCEMENT” mode. These types of campaigns don’t create ongoing relevance but instead rely on a quick burst to re-establish a foothold in the conversation before moving on to something else.

As part of one of the biggest “we hear you” style campaigns ever, Domino’s launched the blog pizzaturnaround.com in late 2009 to document all of the positive press related to its new pizza. 

Another way to show you are listening is to mimic the actions and activities of consumers. Participating in trends on social media is a more subtle way of showing up than saying “We hear you,” but again the relevance in this situation is stunted. Latching onto viral trends is only as reliable as long as the trend is relevant, and brands have developed a habit of showing up two weeks too late with a watered-down response. This approach is also becoming increasingly ineffective because it relies on a framework for virality that’s showing diminishing returns (if a brand jumps on a TikTok trend late and gets barely any views does it make a sound?).

The most natural approach to relevance, and frankly the approach I hope to see more from brands in 2024, is to hide in plain sight for the subcultures that matter to you most. This isn’t me telling brands to be deceitful or furtive, but instead, think of hiding in plain sight as what happens when you use your learnings about your audience to create a type of relevance that is fluid and natural to their lives. It’s about your brand becoming so synonymous with an action, a moment, or a thought that it doesn’t feel like an intrusion to be there. Hiding in plain sight allows you to pick your spots wisely without needing to flood the zone and trying to be for everyone.

Think about your relationship with consumers as more of an ongoing cycle than a trip down a funnel. For this relationship to be healthy, you need to know the right things to do to make your consumer’s lives easier and do those things unprompted, showing that you are listening and then responding with understanding and action, not just a quick “we hear you” followed by the same old issues. Hiding in plain sight is an acknowledgment that your brand is providing the right kind of support when it’s needed.

Hiding in plain sight doesn’t have to be purely transactional. Your hiding spot can be an emotional one that relates to people feeling a certain way or craving a certain thing. It’s the nature of your placement that becomes practical, rational, and relevant, removing stress from your team to invent relevance (“we hear you”) or piggyback on the relevance of others (social trends).

You may feel that the short-term impacts of hiding in plain sight are minimal, or that the thought itself makes your brand feel passive. But in reality, this is the type of relevance that builds trust for the long-term and encourages the loyal instead of the spontaneous. It aligns closely with our recommendation that brands think more like transit hubs than communities, focusing more deeply on the triggers that make you relevant at the right times for the right people instead of trying to be a constant in the lives of everyone.

So what might hiding in plain sight look like for brands in 2024? Here’s what brands can be doing more of:

  • Making a complicated aspect of your consumer’s life easier, whether it’s related to your product’s use directly or indirectly.

  • Respecting consumer’s time by broadcasting messages through channels they’ve opted into that truly provide value

  • Supporting creators and influencers that have real, natural affinities for your brand in ways mega-influencers cannot and do not.

  • Choosing not to speak on every trend or internet topic just because it might get a few likes.

Basically, if it feels like you’re forcing it, you probably aren’t hiding in plain sight. And if those ideas all seem a bit feel-good, that’s because they should. People want positive relationships in their lives, and “delighted” isn’t the worst word for someone to use when they describe the outcome of an interaction with your brand. A healthy cyclical relationship with consumers pushes everyone forward in a way that feels symbiotic. If it’s true that we are headed toward the end of being extremely online, these types of actions will only become more important to cement the way brands and people connect. No amount of virality can offset a fluid, continuous relationship. In 2024, I hope brands see that sometimes hiding in plain sight is the loudest action they can take.

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