Branding Strategy Insider

Discovering Brand Personality

I have helped organizations position their brands through consensus building brand positioning workshops since the mid-1990s.  As a part of that process, I have the workshop participants (mostly organizational leaders) select the brand personality attributes for which they want their brands to stand.

The organizations with which I have worked span a wide range of sizes and industries. They include manufacturing companies, consumer products companies, aging services firms, wealth management firms, medical supply companies, real estate investment trusts, municipalities, high schools, environmental conservation organizations, public service organizations, professional associations and many others.

I thought it would be interesting to identify the most popular personality attributes across all of these organizations.

Following are the most popular personality attributes (in decreasing order of popularity):

•    Innovative (45%)
•    Professional (41%)
•    Responsive (36%)
•    Caring (32%)
•    Reliable (27%)
•    Customer focused (27%)
•    Trustworthy (23%)
•    Service oriented (18%)

Others with frequent mentions:

Employee Alignment: A Brand Positioning Mandate

It will hardly be big news for readers of Branding Strategy Insider, but we now live in the era of the brand. Most marketers are fully aware that the ultimate factor that will determine their personal career progression and the general health of their organisations will be their ability to build and protect their brands.

But despite a plethora of debate within the industry on the topic, most organisations are still struggling to get to grips with their own specific brands. The problem for most managers comes when they attempt brand positioning.

Look across any strategic activity - marketing communications or packaging, for instance, and it's clear that all of these and many more activities depend on having a clear and concise brand position. What is our brand?

How does it behave? What does it stand for? These are all questions that must be answered if a brand is to succeed.

The problem with most companies is that they miss the central tenet of brand positioning: less is more. Most marketers are driven by their large capital expenditures on brand positioning and the enormous amount of personal time they devote to the project to produce an elaborate and complicated multiple slide presentation.

Consensus: Heart of Brand Positioning

Frequently, the brand design is not embraced by the organization because the leadership team was not actively involved in the process at every step along the way. Typically, outside experts will design the brand based upon separate interviews with key stakeholders. This input does not allow for disagreement, debate, discussion or consensus building among the stakeholders. For this reason, The Blake Project offers what have proven to be highly successful and intensive brand positioning workshops for organizations.

These are highly facilitated, very well prepared sessions in which all the key stakeholders (typically organization leaders and marketing executives) are “locked in a room” until they reach a consensus on all of the key elements of brand design: the target customer and the brand essence, promise and personality.

As part of the process and in tandem with brand research we ask key stakeholders (and ad agency personnel, front-line employees, salespeople, customer service reps and marketing researchers with first hand knowledge of you customer’s perceptions) in-depth questions about the brand and its market to serve as stimuli for the brand-positioning workshop. In addition to stimuli this questionnaire ensures that key personnel with a stake in your brand and those you wish to have input from (that may not be invited into the workshop) are involved in and rallied around the positioning process.

The power of consensus in brand positioning cannot be over-emphasized. Consensus serves as the 'glue' in the coming weeks, months and years after the exercise is conducted. Without it brand focus can be lost.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Successful Brand Repositioning

You follow the same steps and address the same brand design components when repositioning a brand as you do when first designing the brand. But, brand repositioning is more difficult than initially positioning a brand because you must first help the customer “unlearn” the current brand positioning (easier said than done). 

Three actions can aid your success in this process: (1) carefully crafted communication, (2) new products, packaging, etc. that emphasize the new positioning and (3) associations with other brands (co-branding, co-marketing, ingredient branding, strategic alliances, etc.) that reinforce the new brand positioning.

You should not rely upon an advertising agency, a brand consulting company, or your marketing department to craft your corporate or organizational brand’s design. This exercise is so critical to your organization’s success that your organization’s leadership team and its marketing/brand management leaders should develop it, preferably with the help and facilitation of an outside brand-positioning expert.

We have more to share on Repositioning here and Brand Positioning here.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Of Success, Strategy and Positioning

Success is not about having the right people, the right tools, the right attitude, the right role models, or the right organization, although all these things help. Having the right strategy is what puts an organization over the top. Strategy sets the competitive direction, dictates product planning, tells you how to communicate internally and externally, and tells you on what to focus.

A great business strategy without proper marketing will often fail in a highly competitive world.

Killer Competition
Strategy is what makes you unique and it is the best way to put that difference into the minds of your customers and prospects. In a world of ‘killer competition’, using good strategy is the best way to survive what I call the ‘tyranny of choice’. Whether the consumer is choosing between 260 choices of car models, 38 choices of tire makers, or even 50 brands of bottled water, there are so many good alternatives for customers that companies pay dearly for their mistakes. Competitors get your business and you don't get it back very easily. Companies that do not understand this will not survive.

Strategy, as defined in Webster's New World Dictionary, is all about "maneuvering into the most advantageous position prior to actual engagement with the enemy." To do this, an organization must first study, understand and maneuver around the battleground - a battleground that is in the minds of consumers and prospects.

Positioning is how you differentiate yourself in the mind of your prospect.

The Positioning Process
A business strategy's success or failure depends on how well a company understands these five elements of the positioning process:

   1. Minds Are Limited. The mind rejects new information that does not compute. It accepts only new information that matches its current state of mind. The mind has no room for what is new and different unless it is related to the old. One way to overcome the mind's limitations is to present a message as important news.

Complexity: Enemy of Brand Positioning

Over the past five years I have observed some outrageously successful brand executions. But for the most part, I have watched large organisations wasting millions of euros/dollars on attempts to position their brands in ways that can never succeed. In this post, I will share one of the great brand positioning lessons I have learned; simplicity - or rather, the lack thereof.

Ultimately, if we are successful, positioning will drive the company's behaviour to such a degree that it will appear in customer research as the things customers notice about that company. Unfortunately, most companies have such complicated positioning at the heart of their brands that there is no chance that this simple process will occur. Instead of a simple, tight definition of what the brand stands for, we find brand keyholes, triangles, wheels and dictionaries - layer after layer of complexity that will only serve to kill the brand's execution.

It's like the game of Chinese whispers. Whisper a complicated word into the ear of the first person in the group and by the time it reaches the end of the chain it has warped into something different. Whisper a simple word and it stays the same along the line. In most companies the positioning is so complex that even the originating brand manager, on closing the laptop holding the presentation, can't remember what it was. What hope, then, for the consumer at the end of a chain that spans strategy, marketing, sales and retail before reaching them?

Why so much complexity? The main reason is that brand managers believe the positioning is so important, and has taken up so much time and resources, that complexity equals greater impact. In reality, less is more. Finding one word for the brand is much harder than finding eight. Positioning is not like throwing shit against a wall - the more you throw at it, the greater the chance of something sticking.

Worthless Brand Values

Visit any FTSE 500 company and ask the first 10 employees you meet about their brand. Not one, barring the brand manager (if you are lucky), will have a clue what values or positioning they should be delivering to customers. Their attention and potential support was lost long ago when a sea of circles, triangles and keyholes containing brand personalities, traits, values and attributes washed over the heads of an unsuspecting workforce.

A correlation exists between the brevity of a brand's positioning and its potential to succeed. That success hinges on ensuring that the positioning is not only tight, but right. It is hard to know whether your positioning statement is right, but it is far easier to determine whether it is wrong.

Most companies use the same tired values to position their brand. Three brand values repeatedly emerge. This unholy trinity is generic, worthless and sadly symptomatic of indolent marketers who apply a branding-by-numbers approach to this most vital and unique of challenges. Irrespective of format or length, if your brand positioning contains any (or all) of the values described below, I steadfastly predict imminent failure to build the brand.

The first is quality. Quality is a multidimensional concept. It can mean hundreds of different concepts: luxury, reliability, rarity, performance, taste, durability, speed and slowness, to name a few. If the point of positioning is to focus the brand, why do it on something that means different things to different people at different times? If you cannot be specific about your brand in its positioning statement, everything that follows will be equally vague and mundane.

Brand Positioning: Remember This

What seven concepts are critical to positioning?

   1. Perception (their’s, not your’s)
   2. Differentiation
   3. Competition
   4. Specialization
   5. Simplicity
   6. Leadership
   7. Reality

To sell concepts, products and services, you have to understand how the mind works:

   1. The mind is a limited container.
   2. The mind creates "product ladders" for each category (cars, toothpaste, accounting services, hamburgers, etc.) There is always a top rung and a bottom rung in each category.
   3. The mind can only remember seven items in a high interest category. Most people remember only two or three items in a category.
   4. On the product ladder, Positions One and Position Two typically account for more than 60 per cent of the sales in that category. In other words, Positions Three, Four and Subsequent are not profitable.
   5. The mind hates complexity. To the mind, complexity equals confusion. People don’t have time to figure out confusion.
   6. The best way to enter the mind is to OVER-SIMPLIFY the message.
   7. The most powerful positioning is to reduce your message to one simple and easily understood word.
   8. Minds are insecure. Most people buy what others buy: this is the "herd mentality."
   9. Minds don’t change—easily.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Brand Positioning: Key Questions

To apply positioning thinking to your own company's situation, here are six key questions to ask yourself:

1. What position, if any do we already own in the prospect's mind?

Get the answer to this question from the marketplace, not the marketing manager. If this requires a few dollars for research, so be it. Spend the money. It's better to know exactly what you're up against now than to discover it later when nothing can be done about it.

2. What position do we want to own?

Here is where you bring out your crystal ball and try to figure out the best position to own from a long-term point of view.

3. What companies must be outgunned if we are to establish that position?

If your proposed position calls for a head-to-head approach against a marketing leader, forget it. It's better to go around an obstacle rather than over it. Back up. Try to select a position that no one else has a firm grip on.

4. Do we have enough marketing money to occupy and hold the position?

A big obstacle to successful positioning is attempting to achieve the impossible. It takes money to build a share of mind. It takes money to establish a position. It takes money to hold a position once you've established it.

The noise level today is fierce. There are just too many "me-too" products and too many "me-too" companies vying for the mind of the prospect. Getting noticed is getting tougher.

The State of Branding

Dave Goetz from Brand & Strategy interviewed me in May of 2006 on the state of branding. This is the conversation that transpired...

What, if anything, has changed over the past thirty years in marketing strategy?
Essentially, the only thing that has changed is the level of competition. Competition today is intense. It’s what I call the “tyranny of choice.”  There is now so much choice that if you make a mistake, your competitors quickly get your business, and you don’t get it back. It’s the General Motors problem. They made a lot of mistakes and market share continues to drop.

Has your thinking about positioning changed since you coined the phrase?
No, not at all. My stance on positioning has become more important in the scheme of things because of the level of competition.  My first article in 1969 about positioning pointed essentially to the “me-too-marketplace.”  The concept of positioning was necessary because of the arrival of more and more competitors saying, “Me too.”  My premise was based on the rise of competition. But did I realize in 1969 what it would be like in 2006? Not at all. At that point, there wasn’t global competition.

Are there a limited number of positions?
Remember, we’re talking about positioning as a science.  It’s the science of the mind—psychology. One of the things we talk about in positioning is the Rule of Seven.  In other words, in any category there are no more than seven brand names that anybody can remember, and those are only high interest categories. Harvard psychologists figured out that generally the finite number of brands that stick in people’s heads is seven. But there’s also the law of duality. If you look at every category, only two brands eventually rise to the top.  It’s Coke and Pepsi, Kodak and Fuji. The remaining brands—3, 4, 5, 6, and 7—are working in a fairly small market share.