Branding Strategy Insider

The B2B Brand Positioning Workshop

The Blake Project offers a highly facilitated, day long, workshop that is designed to gain complete consensus among your organization’s management team and marketing leadership on the brand’s target customers, essence, promise, personality and archetype. A compliment to our one-day and two-day brand positioning workshops for B2C brands, this workshop integrates insights about the elements that most often differentiate business to business companies from each other.

We work with you to develop your B2B 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, personality and archetype. 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 Two-Day Brand Positioning Workshop

The Blake Project, the brand consultancy behind Branding Strategy Insider now offers a highly facilitated two-day workshop designed to help brand owners gain clarity and consensus on key strategic and creative decisions that impact business success when introducing new products, inventing new brands and transforming under-performing brands.

With a process designed for issue resolution, marketing and brand management teams come together in a creative environment that aligns stakeholders around the brand’s target customer segment, desired brand positioning, brand promise, essence and delivery in the markets the brand will compete.

Over the course of two days we work with you to build a strategic roadmap for brand growth and success through focus in four key areas:

To whom you market
You can only create successful products or solutions when you know who the most fervent buyers will be. It is critical to understand as much as you can about the core target customer segment to whom the brand is intended to appeal.

Why they buy
Grabbing the largest share requires a complete understanding on what drives the target customer to products/brands in your space. Defining the context that will give the brand unquestioned relevance to the target customer against their illuminating needs, motivations, attitudes, and preferences is essential for brand building success.

Developing Organization Mission, Vision & Values

An increasing number of organizations for whom we are facilitating brand positioning workshops are asking us to facilitate organization mission, vision and values workshops as well. It makes sense, especially for organizations for which the brand exists at the organizational level.  For those organizations, crafting brand strategy is closely aligned with crafting organizational strategy.

It makes sense to craft organization mission, vision and values and brand essence, promise, personality and archetype in concert with one another. Here is an overview of each:

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 brand consulting 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, personality and archetype. A compliment to our two-day and B2B brand positioning workshops, this workshop integrates insights about the elements that most often differentiate business to consumer companies from each other.

We work with you to develop your B2C 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.

Exploring Customer Touchpoint Design

From time to time we are asked to help make the brand promise real at each point of customer contact. To achieve this we begin with a highly facilitated full-day ideation session, which is designed to generate a large number of ideas to reinforce the brand essence, promise and personality at the specified customer touchpoint(s). A wide variety of ideation techniques are used in this session. This is followed by a two to four hour meeting with a smaller group of people to sift through and evaluate the ideas generated in the ideation session and to identify and build upon the most promising ones. It is important to develop criteria for selecting the ideas with the highest potential for the least cost and effort. Specifically, customer touchpoint design includes the following:

•Identifying each major point of customer contact
•Choosing the first point of contact on which to focus
•Ideating new brand ‘proof points’ or experiences for that point of customer contact
•Developing and applying appropriate criteria to this selection process
•Identifying the most promising (ROI) set of customer touchpoint experiences generated in the ideation session
•Selecting 2 to 4 of the most promising ideas
•More fully developing those ideas
•Developing plans to implement the top ideas

This process can also include:
•Ideating potential new points of customer contact
•Identifying customer problem areas at each point of contact and ideating solutions to those problems

Customer touchpoint design can be augmented with two other customer touchpoint reengineering processes: