• Have you ever read a random trivial fact about a brand and thought that it was odd, but still had that fact glued to your mind later on?
• Trivial facts are worth sharing, especially when those are connected to your brand and make it stand out among the competition with their uniqueness.
• If you are wondering why trivialising your brand is important or how you can do it, find out more through our examples.

If you’re in a conversation with someone and they throw out the line “That’s trivial, really,” the inference is that the piece of information you’ve just shared is not worth anything in the conversation you’re having.

Chances are in this circumstance you stop, you think and then you attack the conversation in a different way trying to cover for what you didn’t realise was a faux pas.

But that’s just messed up. After all, to you, that triviality was something you thought worth sharing. Something about that fact resonated with you in such a way as to make you think it was necessary to share it with someone else.

So, perhaps it was not the fact that it was inadequate, perhaps it was the way you used it. 

Good bar trivia can get people talking

That’s the irony of trivial facts though. Well delivered they can deliver eye-opening moments and can be things people remember for life. Try these few on for size:

• Scotland’s National Animal is the Unicorn
• Facetious is a word that uses all English letter vowels in alphabetical order
• Appending /4 at the end of Facebook’s URL will redirect you to Mark Zuckerberg’s profile
• Google’s original name was “BackRub”
• Human DNA is binary in format and can be used as a memory store. In fact, it has been computed that each male sperm can hold 35MB of data and the average ejaculate of a man, some 1.5 Petabytes.
• In all official Apple photos, the time on their devices will show 9:41 or 9:42. This is because they do their big reveal around this time.

Chances are you won’t remember all those, but one of them may just tickle your fancy enough for you to remember it (recall), google it to check my facts (act), or to better still share with others (influence). The point is, whilst they may not compel you now necessarily, they help form part of a story which does shape your behaviour.

You do not own your brand story

Take that concept one step further and ponder this for a moment.

The market’s perception of brands is increasingly being shaped by user-generated content and thus, more than ever, the perception of your brand is not what you say it is, let alone what you may believe it to be. It is what consumers say it is. So why do you think you can shape what they think with pre-packaged slogans?

Pitching brand slogans at them or espousing a specifically curated story is not necessarily going to sway them. More and more evidence shows they will form their own opinion (from social influences, entire brand experiences – not just the product, reviews and so forth) and use this when deciding if your brand journey is worthwhile.

So, what can you do?

I postulate the trick lies in providing them with information they were unaware of before. Something trivial – which when delivered contextually – may not influence decisions for them right then, in that moment, but well delivered, context-rich information may stick well enough that into the future it is repeated to others and/or be something that drives the action you desire. I call this Bar Trivia. It should be something digestible, something meaningful, something people want to remember. If it is, it helps shape the perception they have of your brand, and helps evolve their brand journey with you just that little bit more.

Furthermore, trivial things are those items which often become part of the commonplace; things people take for granted and see as a given. Isn’t that what you want for your brand - to be seen as a given, the commonplace that isn't questioned? 

Shareable information has the power to create a moment of connection between two or more people. Think about Fantale wrappers or "Liddle facts" inside drink lids. These 10-second pieces of information get people talking and have become tools which that brand is synonymous for.

But don’t get caught on sharing trivia focused on converting people only. Make it trivial, make it unique and make it fun and let the audience decide on how they want to use the information. And most of all, remember to stand by your fact. Don’t get put off just because it does not resonate with everyone. At the end of the day, I believe that any single question has more than one solution; it's all a matter of perspective. Ask me why!