• by Doug Parks , 8 hours ago

Here’s a conundrum for you:

As marketers, when we sell something that’s a Want, we can easily lean into aspects of desirability and amplify it until it starts to seem like a Need.

I don’t need that 2pm afternoon coffee but pull on the right emotional strings by showing me a cozy mug with steam curling up and I’ll start to feel downright desperate for it.

So, if you’re selling a Need—a true Need—shouldn’t that be even easier? Haven’t we skipped ahead of all the marketing legwork to that same end state where the customer simply must have it?

Well, there’s the headache. Unfortunately, often the things we need are, by their necessity, things we don’t want to think about.

Take fire safety, for example. Smoke alarms, extinguishers, carbon monoxide detectors. Those are important. Vitally important, in fact. And the consequences of not having them in place, frankly, most people would rather not think about that.

For Kidde, the brand that basically created the fire safety category, this is the marketing hurdle to jump.

How do you build brand awareness around a product that customers are not eager to dwell on? A product they might purchase once every decade and, when they go to purchase, they’re met with daunting barriers around the regulations, the specifications, and the cost.

This week, we sat down with Matt Heizman, Senior Vice President of Global Residential Fire Marketing & Product Management at Kidde, to talk about the role of education in driving category awareness and how emerging technologies across AR and smart homes are improving access fire safety across the world.

You can listen to the entire podcast at this link.