The Brand Positioning Workshop

Certainly we spend a fair amount of time on Branding Strategy Insider (and at The Blake Project) focusing on brand positioning. It's one of our favorite topics. A question about our process inspired today's post on how we position brands. Simply put, we call this exercise The Brand Positioning Workshop. This highly facilitated, day long, workshop is designed to gain complete consensus among your organization’s management team and marketing leadership on the brand’s target customers, essence, promise and personality.

We work with you to develop your brand’s position in its current marketplaces, while designing flexibility for its future growth. This includes identifying, analyzing and selecting the brand’s target audiences, competitive frame of reference and key customer benefits (functional, emotional, experiential and self-expressive). The workshop focuses on developing the brand’s essence, promise and personality. We also ensure that your brand has chosen the most powerful benefits to own and that it has developed the proof points and “reasons to believe” for those benefits.

We believe that the primary brand benefit should deliver against these objectives:

•    The benefit is extremely important to your target audience(s).
•    Your organization has unique, sustainable competencies (and strategic intent) in delivering against the benefit.
•    Your competitors are not delivering against the benefit (nor would it be easy for them to do so in the future).
•    Any benefit chosen must be unique, compelling, motivating, understandable and believable.

We generally plan for attendance by 6 to 10 key organization stakeholders, including the organization’s leadership.

Previous research steps provide critical input to this workshop. With or without a formal research component, the workshop is preceded by a questionnaire designed to accomplish the following:

•    Provoke thinking about the brand’s positioning elements by workshop participants just prior to the workshop
•    Invite other stakeholders not able to attend the workshop to provide their input
•    Help us understand the thinking of the key stakeholders prior to facilitating the workshop

We include educational components throughout the day so that all participants are speaking a common language.  For instance, we make sure people understand the five drivers of customer brand insistence: awareness, relevant differentiation, value, accessibility and emotional connection. We also make sure that people know the difference between brand terms such as unique value proposition, essence, mantra, promise, personality, associations and position.

The deliverable is a one-page brand positioning statement that incorporates the following essential elements: target customer, brand essence, brand promise and brand personality. This is delivered at the end of the workshop and can be a direct input into tagline development. This can also be used to inform and rally employees and staff, guide external communications, inform customer touchpoint design and serve as a foundation for other brand identity work. This statement is always valued by advertising agencies as an important component of the creative brief.

This workshop has been very well received by CEOs, executive directors and other organizational leaders for its ability to align and energize the organization and its management team with the brand’s positioning. Our workshops are lead by renowned brand strategist Brad VanAuken.

Please email me for more about how this workshop can benefit your brand.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid & The Blake Project