What’s your position? Seriously. Where do you fit in? What’s the pain-point you solve? Would the market even notice if you disappeared?
A positioning statement solves these, but before you go off and throw together a good ‘sentence’, you’ll have to do your homework. That’s where I come in. I help companies dig deep to find out what their core values are, how that results in a brand personality (the internal reflection of who they are) and how that manifests itself in their brand image (the external reflection of who they are).
Once you’ve got all of this sorted, NOW it’s time to start thinking about what position your brand should focus on in the marketplace. Even if you truly have the capability to do ‘all things’, that’s almost a 100% positive indicator that you don’t do most of them better than all of your competitors. So, focus on your features and benefits to get the benefits that give you the biggest edge. Now onward to building that positioning statement.
I harp on positioning all the time because once you’ve got it, it’s like having your brands true north. It makes the ‘what’s in scope and out of scope’ question very easy to answer. A project either fits with the position or it doesn’t.
While I spend a lot of my time actually building marketing campaigns, I don’t do it without having a great sense of what the positioning statement for the brand is, and formulating a story for the brand that brings it to life. These two tools are absolutely essential to getting everything that follows right.
This is a required discipline if you’re serious about your brand. Don’t cheat on this stuff. If you don’t know how to do this correctly, get help from a professional.
If you’d like to assess your current positioning or need help formulating one, I can help. Contact ginger [at] zumgi [dot] com.
