Salience Over Storytelling

I'm a sucker for a literal brand.

Take self-storage in the UK. Large warehouses with rooms inside. You hire a spot, bring almost anything, and leave it there.

This industry exploded around 20 years ago when UK house prices started climbing. Renovating became more popular than moving. People needed somewhere to put their stuff while the builders were in. Self-storage was the perfect solution.

The category remains healthy today because space remains expensive. But self-storage is low involvement - you only think about it when you absolutely need it. The consumer entry point is that moment of need. To win, you need brand salience. Literal branding is probably the best shot at being memorable and first to mind.

The Visibility Principle in Practice

Big Yellow Self Storage is the largest self-storage company in the UK. They weren't first, but their brand approach was novel: paint a warehouse yellow, call it Big Yellow, spin up 100+ sites across the country.

They now generate over $200m in revenue, hold around 18% market share, and have 4x the brand recognition of any competitor. They essentially kickstarted the category brand strategy now prevalent across the UK.

The model is simple: pick a colour, name it after the colour, put it on a building you can see from the motorway. The entire strategy is legibility. The visibility principle in action.

Does Big Yellow Have a Narrative?

Very little to none.

But do you even need a narrative when all you need is salience at the consumer entry point? Probably not. If you're literally branded and the category winner, all you need to do is maintain first-to-mind. That's relatively easy when you own the category from a brand strategy perspective.

The Parallel to Web3

Brands in crypto have, in my experience, built for high involvement: storytelling decks, strategic narrative frameworks, tiered community strategies, token marketing, Spaces and livestreams, dev activations, grant programs, quests and points campaigns.

But I've taken a stronger view recently that low involvement strategies are overlooked in web3. This is compounded by the ever-increasing abundance of slop-shipping. When everything looks the same and sounds the same, nothing cuts through to the audience you're trying to reach.

It's almost like shipping one thing a week is becoming as powerful as shipping five things a day.

Differentiation Over Volume

In branding, one question sits at the front of your mind: how can my brand stand out from competitors?

Differentiation has to lead your strategy. Position too similarly, and you become just another thing in a sea of existing things. The strategy for growth then defaults to trying to be first or trying to be louder.

You never want to be a thing. You want to be the thing. When you're it, you set the pace and the standard.

Colour positioning is a simple way to achieve instant salience. In UK self-storage, you can stack the brands together and make a rainbow.

The Takeaway for Web3

This isn't to say a successful brand in web3 just needs a unique colour and a literal name - you'd be hard pressed to find a colour that isn't already taken.

But somewhere along the way, with the hype and attention, brands try to do a million things. They say many things while doing those million things, often overlooking the most important part of brand strategy: telling your audience who you are, how you're different, and how you help them do what they want.

Usually this just means saying one thing. Over and over. Through words, visuals, or real estate. Saying it very often.

Salience-led strategies are perfectly capable of being single-track brand strategies effective at winning a category and maintaining dominance.

Any brand in any industry can achieve this. It just requires deep thought about execution.