Brand messaging for consumer brands

I don’t have a thing for B2C or D2C businesses. I have rarely had the opportunity since my foray into tech started with consulting and that meant I started dealing with decision makers from the get go. C-level and execs who owned businesses and were the head of the department in their organization.

Even my first VC-funded startup was a B2B business for impact analytics. That’s how deep it is, I also have a fear for B2C because when it scales too quickly and is probably a fin-tech, your problems multiply with it. it scares me. As a matter of fact the one B2C app I’ve built that I didn’t deal with pain is ChatKJV.

But I built and designed chatkjv in 2023 and wrote the whole app over a weekend while load shedding the first 10k users who tested out the app in less than 5 days.

No one complained and the value proposition was simple “describe how you are feeling and I will respond to you based on the scriptures”

So maybe I’ve gotten some experience under my belt, because the last B2C that made me give up on the idea was in the fintech category, when I was still an early coder [quora link] and we got hacked, not my best moments. So I swore that If I built consumer apps, I will only play with data and never with numbers that represent financial value outside the app.

But then this post isn’t about B2C or B2B apps, I wonder how I rambled up to this point, without getting to the point. but if you’ve read up to this point let me cut to the chase.

I was in a supermarket in lagos recently and I was in particular looking for ginger powder and honey.

It was during the christmas holiday and I think I caught a flu, so I wanted to make some organic syrup to handle it. however to my surprise when I went to the tea and organic sections of the mall. I couldn’t help but notice some weird labeling.

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The image above is a tea with ginger, lemon and some roots. however notice how the messaging it “stop typhoid” tea.

To me, it was really strange, and I spent a lot of time in the mall looking for just ginger, lemons and honey but could only find, “sleep well” tea

The highlights here was how the products were sold with their benefits instead of their features.

I might be from the enlightened bracket, where I completely understand what I am looking for, however for individuals in the mass market, if the supermarket had all of it’s organics and tea products named as “fight menstrual cramps” They’re only there on the shelves because it sells and it goes really deep into driving their understading of the customers in their regions / target group.

I however didn’t have the opportunity to checkout the same mall chain in another city to find out if this was a recurring pattern. However it was a pivotal moment for me to learn about brand messaging particularly in the mass market region.

What do you think, how would you name your product, brand or rephrase your value proposition based on premise that your users are not so smart, dumb it down for them.

Of course I don’t expect this to apply to every industry, but it would be interesting to see how this plays out with tech products. I might explore this with apply better, our most recent B2C product within the HR niche.

But then how about using this for Investors cold email and outreach. I’m thinking writing email headings like

“exit 10x in new hr tech startup – early stage 60% MoM growth” or

“join seed round and exit 10x in 3 years or 100x in 5 years – hr tech”

Sorry, but I think my cold email / DM and sales strategy is going to get some spice.