The Sponge Sydney -

Brand Positioning is a term coined by Al Reis and Jack Trout some 30 years ago in their book titled  Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 20th Anniversary Edition Some things have certainly changed, but the principles still remain true. And while they may be speaking directly to businesses competing in an oligopoly with the directive to own a single word in the mind of your market, where it is simpler to do so, owning a distinct value position is just as important in a market of any other size.

What is Brand Positioning?

It is the distinct meaning, feeling or promise that is immediately associated in the mind of your market when they hear or see your brand.

Brand Positioning starts with understanding who the key potential clients are that you can provide greatest value for. Then knowing where to find them, what the optimal price point is, and the single most distinct and untapped story, or key attributes, that when used correctly will get them to buy from you over your competition, whether or not they are in the market to buy right now.

Armed with these insights, you then build a remarkable brand identity (logo, packaging, marketing material, etc), culture and value proposition that distinctly addresses each of the key discoveries to position your business as the only reasonable choice for these prospects.

So, how do you do position your brand?

Research

Study your clients, prospective clients and your competitors.

Define your main key buyer profiles or personas. It is common to have a hand full of different key buyers. Create a written profile – a buyer persona – for each of these buyers by asking questions like: Who they are? What are their responsibilities and challenges? How do your solutions fit for their particular challenges? What are their buying influences? And anything else that helps you understand how to sell to this buyer. It is helpful to give each buyer persona a name and describe their physical characteristics. Use these buyer personas as the target for your business communications. For more great information and insights into creating buyer personas I recommend you visit: webinknow.com and buyerpersona.com

Understand the true value of what you provide. Poll your current clients to learn where they believe you have provided them the most value and how they would explain it to a friend or colleague in their own words. At the same time you may also want to check the relevancy of your offerings for them at this time.

Talk with your prospective clients to see what value they are looking for from your business. Your prospective clients can tell you what they need or want which you are not currently offering. The answers may uncover a real void in the market just waiting for you to fill it. In some cases this could open up a completely new niche category for you to create and own.

Study your competition to know what the stories and value propositions they are using so you can understand the landscape and be able to be unique or distinct when creating yours.

Learn what other leading brands servicing comparative price points in different industries look like to your client. Consider their style, aesthetics and level of quality of design.

Create

Find the single most distinct and untapped value statement and build your brand around it.

These next processes can be very challenging. It is helpful to remember that while you are very important to your business, you are in most cases not the buyer of your offerings, so you need to step outside of your perspective during this stage and take the perspective of your primary buyer persona. It is also quite valuable to put together an advisory board of some of your clients and prospects to use for regular feedback during the development of these elements.

All the research you have done has given you a wealth of information to use to create your value proposition. More on value propositions here. A value proposition is your core brand story. It is the collection of reasons your clients buy from you. In it you differentiate your business from your competition and articulate the distinct value you provide, substantiated with examples of how you have helped similar businesses to those you are targeting. With a strong value proposition you are most of the way there and you lay the foundation for all your marketing efforts.

Next create a distinct, compelling and a sticky tagline (See Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die) or core message (sticky: short, succinct, easily visualised, interesting and immediately memorable). This should be an ultra-condensed version of your value proposition, ideally around three words long. This becomes the essence of your brand position.

Then build your brand identity and collateral material to look like you belong in the price bracket you are aiming at. The quality level communicated by your brand, in each and every client contact point, will impact on the price point you can demand.

Deliver

Make every aspect of your business clearly and authentically communicate your core message.

This means every single point of contact that your clients can encounter with your business needs to be consistent. From your signs, brochures, website, through to your on hold audio, it all needs to be about delivering your core message. This especially includes the way your staff interacts with your clients. Engraining your core message (by way of core values) into your company culture and then hiring specifically to fit it, can in some cases be more important than any other single touch point.

Evolve

Frequently check the pulse of your brand and evolve to fit the changes that naturally occur.

This is about staying current and relevant with your brand position and your offerings. A simple way to do this is continue to talk with your current and prospective clients regularly to see what they believe the value you provide is and that it is still relevant to them with the changing time. They can tell you what you are not currently offering that could help them which may turn into a completely new niche category for you to own. It is about listening for the new possibilities and evolving your brand position to suit.

I look forward to the questions that arise. Feel free to ask them below, or email me directly.

A guest post by Sponge intern Zenith Phillips

Can you remember that initial thing that drove you to make the decision to work towards a career in the creative industry? Was it flipping through magazine advertisements thinking to yourself how cool it would be to make them? Or seeing a massively Photoshopped advertisement and wanting to learn how to do it? You have an interest so now you just go to school then get a job, right? Unfortunately, everything in the creative industry is competitive and that includes the glorious step between student and professional ‘the internship’.

My professors told me as a graphic designer I will learn 60% on the job, through my experience I would say 65%-70%. The purpose of an internship is to get your knowledge at 100% to assist you in becoming a professional. Landing a good internship is difficult and competitive. Difficult because you want to find placement where you will get attention, first hand assistance from successful people in the industry. Competitive because everyone wants attention from the best.

My main focus when searching for an internship was ‘who is willing to get me to 100%?’ that’s when I discovered the work experience program at The Sponge. During my time at The Sponge I have learned… I have learned a lot and it would take me hours and hours to write everything out so you should really just come in and learn for yourself. This internship is not easy, your work needs to meet The Sponge standards. Your entire process gets creative direction from both the director of creativity and senior director so you defiantly get good portfolio pieces! You will learn to love the words ‘looks good, give me 5 more!’and understand how much of a process design is. Aside from mentoring you to create amazing design that works, The Sponge will teach you anything you want to know whether it be technical or how a graphic design business works.

If you want a rewarding internship with amazing creative direction from people who are design and marketing masters, awesome BBQ’s every Friday and work you will be proud to put in your portfolio, I suggest you apply for The Sponge work experience program.

To me brainstorming new online business models is a great deal of fun. My team and I really enjoy the challenge of developing innovative ideas and understand the technical freedoms and limitations of the internet. Recently we have had the opportunity to work on some exciting and boundary pushing online strategies. In this post I will share with you some of the key questions we work through to develop an effective online strategy.

In most cases an online strategy is not an off the shelf solution. The internet gives us the freedom to market any combination of products and services and with the technological advancements that are constantly being developed it creates the opportunity to be innovative in the way that they are delivered. These innovations can create a superior user experience and generate a real consumer buzz.

To develop an effective online strategy my team and I like to spend a couple of hours with a client working through (and often brainstorming) what we believe to be some of the key questions. I have grouped them into bite size pieces below. Keep in mind that a lot of these questions are broad stroke and are intended to spark meaningful (and often lengthy) conversations and have natural follow up clarification questions. To keep it relatively simple they are not included here.

Knowing that there is an worthwhile opportunity

1. Who is your potential market or markets?
2. Are they on the internet?
3. Is there a proven demand for your offering?
4. Is demand rising or in decline?
5. Is there an undersupply, or an oversupply of what you are offering?

Branding your offering

1. Is this a new brand, a sub brand or a standalone offering?
2. Have you named it to position it correctly for your market?
3. Does your brand identity and design style appeal to your market? Does it convey the value of what you have priced it at?
4. Does your value proposition communicate the value of your offering clearly and concretely to your market?
5. Is your domain name easy to say, memorable and matches your brand name?

Selling your offering

1. Do you know what motivates your market to buy?
2. What is truly unique about your offering?
3. Why will your market buy from you?
4. Does your offering require short or long term education to be accepted by your market?
5. Does your offering require an introductory offer, or free trial period to make a sale?

Delivering on the sale

1. How do you intend to handle online payments?
2. Are you delivering locally, interstate, or globally?
3. Does your offering require warehousing and shipping? How do you intend to manage this?
4. Is your offering a onetime sale, or is there an opportunity for repeat sales, or a subscription sale?
5. Does your offering have natural complimentary offerings that you can also provide?
6. How do you intend to deliver your customer service?
7. How can you add value for your customers over and above your offering? (This question fits in next category too!)

Marketing & Usability – Getting more sales

1. Does your offering have an inherent referability? Is there one you can create?
2. Is it more important to constantly add new customers, or increase the number of transactions with your existing ones?
3. How scalable is your offering?
4. Do you know what else can be done on the internet with current technologies that may complement of advance your offering?
5. Do you intend to create a community for your clients?
6. Have you considered the useability and functionality of your website for your customers, both immediate and for the future evolutions?

Financing, Longevity & Exit

1. Is your offering immediately monetizable?
2. How many sales do you need to break even and then become profitable?
3. What does success look like for you?
4. Is your offering a short term or a long term business model?
5. What is short term and long term to you?
6. Do you have an exit strategy?
7. How do you intend to fund your venture (short and long term)?

I hope these questions help you with your online strategy. If you would like to dive deeper into any of these categories or questions, or get some professional help developing your online strategy, simply drop us an email now.

One last question.What other good strategy defining questions do you know of?

Your answers to our survey have given us the top 10 services we offer that you want to know more about. They are:

1. Online Marketing Strategy
2. Brand Positioning
3. Website design and maintenance
4. Search Engine Optimisation
5. Social Media for Business (facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc)
6. Web Video
7. Business & Brand Naming
8. Google Adwords
9. Email Newsletter Marketing
10. Logo Design and Stationery (inc digital templates)

Over the next 10 weeks I intend to post an article each week working through this list, starting with Online Marketing Strategy. If you can’t wait for information about any of these subjects you are welcome to contact our team to arrange your own personal consultation.