How do you ‘cut through’ as a brand in 2024?

5 minutes to read by Liz van Zyl

Marketing effectiveness is in long-term decline. Brands exist in a challenging environment of customer distrust, shrinking attention spans, endless choice and disrupted marketing channels. And AI is upending how we search, communicate and decide.

So how do you ‘cut through’ as a brand in 2024 to reach and engage your target customers?

We invited four pioneers in the world of marketing effectiveness to share their insights with us at a recent client event. Hailing from different specialisms within marketing, customer insight & innovation, Dan Krigstein, Director at The Growth Distillery & The Growth Intelligence Centre, Tegan Knight, Senior Business Director for Hopeful Monsters, Rikki Pearce, Managing Director for Verve Australia, and Josh Butt, Chief Audio Officer and Founder of Ampel, joined us for an insightful discussion with lots of takeaways for brand-side leaders looking to more effectively reach and influence their customers.

Below are our favourite 8 actionable takeaways from the discussion:

Understand your customers’ context

We already know that marketing effectiveness is falling, the secret to nipping this in the bud for your brand lies in understanding why this is the case. One of the major trends contributing to this is the information overload that every decision maker now contends with. Other contributing factors involve the dissolving of traditional culture codes, the erosion of institutional trust and the sheer overwhelm associated with seemingly endless choice. And, on top of that, audiences are really fragmenting.

At the moment, we’ve got a very messy information architecture. People are overwhelmed and exhausted. - Rikki

To achieve cut through, it’s vital that brands start with a deep understanding of the current environment from their customers’ perspective.

Articulate what getting cut through means to you

Once brands have a deep understanding of the environment they are in, it helps to also articulate what “cut through” looks like for them specifically. While each of our panelists bring a different expert lens to this topic, they agreed on what cut through means to them:

Cut through is about distinctiveness - both in terms of creative concepts and also in terms of how your brand brings these concepts to life, harnessing distinctive messaging, channels etc.

Dan built on that by saying that “when we talk cut through, in my mind it’s about how you create a message or a value proposition that sticks. It’s about tapping into the human behind the consumer and if you can do that, your brand/messaging/product automatically resonates.”

“To me, that Ginsu knife ad that ran on late night TV for 20 years is a great example of cut through - excuse the pun. It’s a distinctive advert with distinctive messaging - “you cut through a shoe with Ginsu.” Ultimately, every brand and every message needs to have that “sharpness,”” added Josh. “To me, that Ginsu knife ad that ran on late night TV for 20 years is a great example of cut through - excuse the pun. It’s a distinctive advert with distinctive messaging - “you cut through a shoe with Ginsu.” Ultimately, every brand and every message needs to have that “sharpness,” added Josh.

Invest in Creativity

Useless absurdidity will define you more than useful practicality - Dan

Everybody’s got useful practicality. It’s not unique or distinctive. Brands need to step away from the ‘sea of sameness’ and stop relying on the traditional marketing frameworks and brand codes that have been adopted industry-wide, which also results in every brand in the industry seeming the same.

“Brands need to remember that there is a cost to being boring,” explained Tegan. “Don’t assume it’s low risk to not be creative or stand out.” Times, and customers, have simply changed too much for brands to continue relying on archaic approaches to modern audiences. Audiences require more exposure to brand messages to even notice them, costing brands more money.

BrewDog is a great example of a brand that invests in creativity: A Scottish beer company that launched ‘beer hotels’ with craft brew on tap in every room and even built-in shower beer fridges. Instead of approaching the category like every other beer business would (and promoting the value of their product based on the calories it includes, the ingredients it’s made from or its price), they opted to invest in creativity and, in doing so delivered enough “creative disruption” to not only position themselves as a challenger brand, but also to capture the hearts and minds of their target market.

Tap into a community of supporters & build affinity

Be close to your customers and use that as a springboard to create something really different.- Rikki

One of the key drivers of influence is advocacy. Another is brand affinity. And this is another area in which BrewDog excelled. They tapped into a community of supporters when they opened their funding round up to their customers.

Tegan from Hopeful Monsters shared a fascinating example of a project their agency launched with Converse, called the Converse All Stars Program. This is a program for emerging global creatives who are independent enough not to follow, but rather shape, what’s next and, in so doing, are creative on their own terms.  Those who make it into the Converse All Stars community gain access to global events and networking, exclusive resources, and opportunities for commissioned work and funding.

Think twice before jumping on the ‘values’ marketing bandwagon

It’s a balancing act, not every brand has to stand for something… Being authentic and genuine is much more important than greenwashing or pretending to care about causes you don’t, purely for the sake of virtue-signaling. - Dan

One of the most effective and powerful approaches a brand can take is to try to connect with the values that their buyers are aspiring to connect with, rather than the values they already hold.

Considering non-traditional channels is a cut through no-brainer

Audio is widely seen as the fastest growing channel today and a channel where customers pay attention longer and more deeply. It’s a great example of a channel brands can tap into to gain almost instant cut through (as it will likely not be relied on as heavily by competitors). Sonic branding, as Josh Butt from audio agency, Ampel, pointed out, is an experiential tool that brands can use to immediately create brand association and connection with their audiences in ways other channels simply can’t.

Stop thinking about AI as just a tool, start thinking about AI as a shift in the way consumers do EVERYTHING

Yes, AI can help marketing and innovation leaders do our jobs faster. But it can do much more than that. AI is already in our homes, in the way we ask Alexa to pull up a specific video on Youtube or the way we ask ChatGPT to create our travel itinerary…

It’s less about GenAI being a tool to get cut through and more about what AI in general represents in terms of bringing about a fundamental shift in buyer behaviours.

This also means that marketers have the opportunity to start looking at their target audiences’ technographics (the types of technologies they use) and not just demographics - designing buyer journeys and experiences based on their tech preferences (as this becomes increasingly integral to the way people access information, browse, make buying decisions and, ultimately, buy).

Find the friction!

Traditional marketers and customer-centric leaders often seek to remove the points of friction, but cutting through may actually involve playing to the friction… Find the moments of friction where your buyers are most frustrated and serve your brand, message or product to them then. This is, after all, when they need your solution the most.

In conclusion, achieving cut through in 2024 requires a multifaceted approach that blends deep environmental understanding, creative investment, customer affinity building, and strategic use of emerging technologies like AI. Bringing a cross-functional marketing, insight and innovation lens to this topic, our expert panelists emphasised the importance of standing out through distinctiveness, authenticity, and leveraging non-traditional channels (like audio). By embracing these principles and adapting to the evolving landscape, brands can effectively reach and engage their target customers, ensuring long-term marketing success.

More about our experts:

Dan Krigstein

Dan is a consumer strategy & intelligence leader with global experience across retail, consumer goods, digital & media industries. Dan leads News Corp’s Growth Intelligence Centre and also The Growth Distillery - supporting publishers, brands, and industries to develop growth strategies through customer-led thinking and product innovation. Dan has also been leading some fascinating work around Influence, which is really relevant to the notion of getting cut through.

Tegan Knight

Tegan is Senior Business Director at Hopeful Monsters, an independent, creative communications agency for brands on a mission. Their expertise lies in helping brands lead and shape culture. Their clients include Adobe, Converse, Resmed and Red Bull. Tegan is an expert in the entertainment field, with a global perspective, having worked in the UK, Australia and Asia.

Rikki Pearce

Rikki is the Managing Director of Verve Australia, where she consults to a wide range of clients on how to impactfully reach customers in a fragmented and rapidly changing market. Rikki is an experienced consumer psychologist and customer strategist, and previously held roles with Qantas and News Corp Australia among others.

Josh Butt

Josh is founder and Chief Audio Officer at Ampel - an audio creative agency that creates audio for brands seeking to be heard amongst all the noise. He’s an award-winning content creator of podcasts, audio ads, TVCs, short films and TV. Josh’s work makes audiences laugh, think and act. He’s worked with clients including Sydney Opera House, Awin, hipages, Primo, HSBC and BMW.

Useful resources shared by our panellists:

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