The Brand Positioning Workshop

Derrick DayeDecember 18, 20074 min

Brands need three things to lead today.

1. An Emotional Advantage: How your customers feel about your brand that they don’t feel about other brands.
2. A Distinctive Advantage: How you do things that are uniquely compelling to those most important to your future.
3. A Connective Advantage: How you create meaningful connections that is different from what others do.

The Brand Positioning Workshop is a highly facilitated, day long, workshop designed to help brands in all stages of growth gain a competitive advantage founded on the requirements of market leadership today. Together, we arrive at complete consensus among your organization’s management team and marketing leadership on the brand’s target customers, brand essence, brand promise, brand personality and brand archetype.

A compliment to our strategic engagements and our two-day, B2B brand positioning, brand strategy co-creation and brand strategy for startups workshops this workshop integrates insights about the elements that most often differentiate business to consumer companies from each other.

In The Brand Positioning Workshop, experts from The Blake Project 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 to gain an advantage in the mind of your customer, the primary brand benefit must 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 ONLINE 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 an executive summary of every decision made and incorporates the following essential elements: target customer, brand essence, brand promise, brand personality and brand archetype. This is delivered one week after the workshop and is intended to be used to inform and rally employees, guide external communications, inform customer touchpoint design, influence corporate strategy and serve as a foundation for brand identity work. The outcomes from this workshop are always valued by advertising agencies as an important component of the creative brief.

A Compass For Building And Communicating Brand Value

Brand owners know, the stakes are high in brand positioning. This work will greatly impact the success of the brand for years to come. The Brand Positioning Workshop has been validated by over 250 corporate, product, service, B2B, B2C, non profit, celebrity and place brands across numerous business categories. It has been very well received around the world by CEOs, senior marketers, brand managers, executive directors, celebrities, heads of government and other organizational leaders for its ability to align and energize the organization and its management team with the brand’s positioning as well as build a competitive advantage for the brand.

The outcomes of The Blake Project’s brand positioning workshops have proven vital for startup, emerging, regional, national, non-profit and global B2C, B2B brands in:

-Gaining clarity and confidence in the strategic direction of your brand
-Responding to competitive threats and market disruption
-Shaping perceptions that the value of products and services are high and unique
-Gaining stakeholder consensus on what the brand stands for
-Anchoring the brand culture with one ‘ownable’ point of difference
-Educating stakeholders on the best practices in brand strategy and brand differentiation
-Guiding internal and external communications in staying on brand
-Building emotional connection

The Blake Project is a leading brand consultancy with a history of helping brands overcome high-stakes marketing challenges. We are widely known for helping brands discover what they can own in the minds of their target audiences.

We believe that the ultimate goal of brand equity building is to move the consumer from brand awareness to brand insistence. Our brand insistence model, our guide for The Brand Positioning Workshop,  incorporates five elements that drive a consumer to insist upon a particular brand to meet his or her needs – brand awareness, accessibility, value, relevant differentiation, and emotional connection. We believe that these five areas of emphasis and activity are the primary drivers of consumer brand insistence, critical in becoming a category-of-one-brand where there are No Substitutes.

The Brand Positioning Workshop has been very well received by government leaders, CEOs, CMO’s, executive directors and other organizational leaders for its ability to align key stakeholders with the brand’s positioning.

Our brand and growth consulting workshops are in-person or online and are led by renowned brand strategists.

Please email me, Derrick Daye for more about how this workshop can help you gain an emotional advantage, distinctive advantage and connective advantage.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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