Brands need three things to grow and lead today.
1. An Emotional Advantage: A feeling about your brand that customers don’t feel with other brands.
2. A Distinctive Advantage: A way of doing things that customers interpret as different and meaningful from the industry standard.
3. A Connective Advantage: A way of engagement that reinforces why customers choose to keep your brand in their lives.
Founded on the requirements of market leadership, The Brand Positioning Workshop is a highly facilitated, day long, workshop designed to help brands in all stages of growth gain a competitive advantage. Together, we arrive at complete consensus among your organization’s management and marketing leadership teams on the brand’s target customers, brand essence, brand promise, brand personality and brand archetype. Further we define how the brand will compete, what it stands for and what it stands against.
A compliment to our strategic engagements and our B2B brand positioning 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.
Requirements For Positioning Success
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 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 that the power of brands lies in focus and 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
-Accelerating brand growth
-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
-Introducing new brands into the marketplace or serving a new customer segment
-Extending brands into new product categories
-Bringing new life to under-performing brands
-Shifting brand messaging and communication strategies
The Blake Project is a leading brand consultancy with a long history of helping brands overcome high-stakes marketing challenges. We are widely known for helping brands discover the unique value 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, Startup CEO’s, 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 online and in person and are led by renowned brand strategists.
The Blake Project also delivers this workshop via advertising, digital and marketing agencies as an extension of their team.
Please email The Blake Project for more about how this workshop can help you gain an emotional advantage, distinctive advantage and connective advantage. We can also be reached directly at 813-842-2260.
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
