How to ensure your brand delivers growth for your business

Positioning for success. How to ensure your brand delivers growth for your business 01 November 2012 Joe Hale & Rosa Wilkinson

How do you know if your brand positioning needs attention?

1.  Colleagues struggle to summarise your positioning on a Post-it note

2.  Your current positioning isn’t understood by the majority of the business

3.  Your current positioning is ignored by the majority of the business

4.  The last positioning project you worked on was a nightmare you don’t want to revisit

5.  Your positioning explains what your business currently does, rather than what it aims to achieve

6.  Your current positioning is seen as a straightjacket rather than a springboard

7.  Your business lacks a clear personality

8.  You rely on a brand onion / wheel / key / pyramid to share your positioning with the rest of the business

9.  Your positioning doesn’t challenge people (internally and externally) to think differently about your business

10.  Nobody would care (or notice) if you changed your positioning tomorrow

Why do positionings fail to reach their potential?

1. Positioning is approached as a purely intellectual exercise without demonstrating the value it will deliver to the business.

4

Why?

Brand positioning is a practical exercise, not an intellectual pursuit. To be taken seriously, it needs to align with business strategy.

A new positioning should be an investment in the business – so you should know what returns you expect to see.

Positioning should create value for the whole business, not just the marketing department.

2. Brand models are treated as the end, not the start of the process.

5

Why?

Positioning needs to inspire action. Onions, wheels, bridges and PowerPoint can’t achieve this. You have to show people how the world is going to be different as a result of your hard work.

If you have to constantly explain your positioning to colleagues and police its use, it means there’s still work to be done.

Filling in the brand template is just the start of the positioning process…

3. Positioning aims for the lowest common denominator. So it can be safely ignored by the rest of the business.

6

Why?

Too often positioning seeks to capture what a business is like now, finding something vague enough that it’s not going to offend anyone.

Really great brand positioning should scare people. They should see that it’s going to mean doing things differently from now on.

Brand positioning should fuel change. It’s a challenge to your business to be great.

From good to great positioning

Hallmarks of great positioning at work in businesses

#1 Prosperity

#2 Integrity

#3 Elegance

#4 Craft

8

#5 Curiosity

9

Five hallmarks of great positioning

Prosperity Setting out the value you want to deliver, the contribution your business makes to the world. #1 You can’t be clear on positioning until you know what kind of value you want to create.

10

#1 Prosperity: Telling the story of your contribution to the wider world

To be the global sector leader in the mining and metals industry… To attract another 10,000 new colleagues globally in the next 5 years… > …takes a different approach to storytelling.

Communicating the role Rio Tinto plays in making modern life work is essential to pride, positioning and productivity.

11


Integrity Committing to a clear belief or conviction, that sets out what you can do – and what you can never do. #2 Great brands inspire belief in others because they are built on belief themselves.

12

#2 Integrity: Committing to what really matters for your customers

13


Elegance Articulating your positioning in a simple and well-designed way that enables others to see how they would use it. #3 Great brand positioning creates the maximum impact with the minimum input.

14

#3 Elegance: Finding the big idea that your business can get behind

98% of employees understood and were inspired by the new brand story and visual expression. 92% were aware of actions and changes at corporate level, which helped them deliver the brand story better and more consistently. 96% had identified actions on a personal level, which will help strengthen the brand.

15


Craft Working positioning through the business to create practical change in the way things are done. #4 Great positioning should humanise your business.

16

#4 Craft: Living up to global leadership in your sales and marketing

Allen & Overy seeks to be the preferred counsel to the world’s most advanced companies. Advanced becomes a way to measure and stimulate progress in every aspect of the firm’s business. > Business Development initiatives

bring insight and expertise to life.

>  Campaign management developed from a central organising idea.

> Partners articulate confidently the

value the firm can offer.

17


Curiosity The restlessness and inventiveness that drives your business forward, being prepared to try new things (and to fail). #5 Great positioning challenges a business, allowing it to learn and adapt to a changing world.

18

#5 Curiosity: Setting your own agenda for category innovation

Marshalls strives to improve landscapes for everyone > Harnessing insight and trend analysis to set

out future trends in garden design > Fairstone – A Fairtrade model for sandstone

supply chain and ethical trading > Opening the right conversations with

customers to plan their product innovation

Hallmarks of great positioning at work in businesses

#1 Prosperity

#2 Integrity

#3 Elegance

#4 Craft

19

#5 Curiosity

1.  Ask 5 colleagues how they would describe the company’s purpose and see if they can manage it in a sentence or two

2.  Review 3 proposals from your sales team to see if there’s any mention of something bigger than product and service

3.  Check through the criteria you use for interviews and recruitment to see if you’re recruiting people who share your brand values

4.  Read the latest entries on your Twitter feed or your blog – can you see a point of view on your industry or the wider world?

5.  Print off the ‘About Us’ page for your company and competitors – if you cover the name, can you spot the difference?

20

5 practical steps to assess the strength of your current positioning

Is your positioning visible and consistently portrayed wherever and however people find you?

21

Taking it further…

Business is Beautiful:

The hard art of standing apart The immeasurable aspects of business that create real value Featuring interviews with innovative companies such as 3M, Arup & BMW Released February 2013 > Leave your card to win a copy

How does this sound?

22

So…

Any questions?

Is there anything that particularly resonates?

Anything to add?

[email protected] [email protected]

23

Or call us on +44 (0)20 7262 4488

We hope you enjoyed our perspective on great B2B brand positioning.

If you’d like to find out more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thank you.

Documents

How to ensure your brand delivers growth for your business