The B2B Brand Positioning Workshop

Derrick DayeOctober 11, 20114 min

The B2B Brand Positioning Workshop is a highly facilitated, day long experience 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 The Blake Project’s 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 take into account that the decision to choose a B2B brand is often strongly influenced by track record, responsiveness, knowledge and of course reputation.

We see the emotional drivers of B2B brands as a critical factor in our process. The temptation is to believe that B2B brands lack emotion because they are subject to highly logical decisions. That’s not the case – B2B is purchased emotionally as well as logically – but the emotions for buying B2B are very different from those of consumer brands. For the most part, B2B brands need to focus on risk alleviation. That means that in contrast to the excitement that consumer brands are looking to generate, B2B brands need to focus on generating emotions centered on reassurance – professionally, technically, financially, legally and of course personally (for those championing use of the brand itself).

With this in mind 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 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. (NOW ONLINE)

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 on B2B brand management 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, brand personality and brand archetype. 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, influence corporate strategy 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.

A Compass For Building And Communicating B2B 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 more than 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, heads of government, celebrities 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 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.

Our brand and growth consulting workshops are NOW ONLINE and are led by renowned brand strategists.

Please email me for more about how this workshop can benefit your brand. I can also be reached at 813-842-2260 in Los Angeles, California.

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

Related Posts

Connect With Us