R.E.D.
In 2006, Taco Bell launched its “Fourth Meal” campaign—an effort to drive late-night business—while other quick-service restaurants we’re focusing on breakfast and healthier menu items, like salads.
Why?
“Taco Bell is the voice of rebellion,” according to Greg Creed, the former CEO of Yum! Brands.
Since then, Taco Bell’s late-night business has become larger than McDonald’s (with roughly half the locations).
This story is relayed in “R.E.D. Marketing,” a book that’s currently making the rounds of Repeat’s Marketing team, as it offers an simple framework—relevance, ease, distinctiveness—for brand growth.
What we like about this story, though, and the reason to relay it here is that this distinctive campaign is also an example of relevance and building mental availability.
As we wrote in Available:
Mental availability—by Sharp’s definition—is not the same as brand awareness. (Sharp defines mental availability as the probability that a consumer will “notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations.”) Sharp has also defined those buying situations—at least at the point of acquisition—as “category entry points.”
There are five of them, and—to bring this back to the conversation with the founder above—they are not available in the data traditionally associated with the advantages of DTC.
In fact, they are data points available to any brand, provided they prioritize talking to their customer:
Why are you buying from the category?
When are you buying from the category?
Where are you buying from the category?
With whom are you buying from the category?
With what are you buying from the category?
According to Sharp, the more of these entry points a brand can cover, the greater the likelihood of a brand’s mental availability.
Piggybacking off last week’s issue, where we discussed whether a heavy reliance on direct response marketing is impacting the ability to grow past a certain point, these two frameworks (the relevance and ease part of R.E.D., really, is Sharp’s five questions) and Taco Bell’s Fourth Meal example seems to hit on an aspect of what’s needed when that becomes the case.
Perhaps most interesting, though, is the brands many of us talk about the most—brands like Who Gives A Crap, Liquid Death, Mid-Day Squares—have baked a lot of this in from the beginning. The direct response stuff is just extra fuel on the fire.