By Anita Whitehead, Managing Director, and Tim Stiles, Partner, KPMG LLP Restrictions on civil society and foundations have become increasingly widespread. In the last year alone, civil society organizations (CSOs) in over 100 countries experienced serious threats to one or more civic freedoms. A variety of complex factors have driven this trend, impacting how CSOs […]

This Insight Brief discusses the challenge of recruiting top-tier talent into the advertising industry; includes interviews with marketers, professors, and students; and explores new research from the ANA and AEF.

My blog series on “How to Scale-Up Your Brand” continues today with instructions on how to plot your brand positioning.  A clear competitive brand positioning is essential to brand-building because it defines who you are selling to, what your business scope is, and how you create unique value for your customers.  In this post, you’ll learn how to identify the optimal position for your brand.

What Is Brand Positioning?

Your brand positioning is one part of the strategic platform of your brand.  It describes how you compare and compete with other brands.  The other part of your strategic brand platform is your brand identity, which articulates what you stand for and believe in.  In a previous post in this series, I introduced some brand tools to help you identify and clarify the key elements of your brand identity.  And you can learn more about the integration of brand identity and brand positioning in this post on strategic brand platforms..

A brand positioning statement uses this framework:

For [core customer], we are the [competitive frame of reference] who does [unique value], because [reasons to believe].

This post explains this brand positioning framework and I outline a brand tool, customer collage, for identifying your core customer here.

Today I address how to define your competitive frame of reference, or category of choice, and how to identify your unique value, or unique customer benefit.

• Your competitive frame of reference is the mental file folder you want your customers to put you in. Usually this is your industry category, but keep in mind that people don’t necessarily think of products in terms of specific categories and in some cases you might be creating a new category so there is no obvious frame of reference.  Plus, many purchase decisions involve “indirect competition” in which consumers ask themselves: Juice or soda?  Dinner or movie?  Vacation or new car?   So your competitive frame of reference requires careful consideration.
• The unique value of your brand is what you do for people that either no one in your competitive frame of reference does as well as you, or no one does at all. You should think about and articulate this in terms of a customer benefit, what’s in it for them.  Look at what you do from your customers’ — not your own — point of view.  Your unique value will differ depending on your competitive frame of reference so here’s how you develop these two elements simultaneously.

Five Steps to Plot Your Brand Positioning

Follow these steps to define your competitive frame of reference and identify your unique value:

1. Start by thinking differently about what business you’re really in. Consider what you do for people instead of the product/service you produce.  You may be a mobile carrier, but are you really in the productivity business?  You might be selling running shoes, but are you really in the inspiration business?  You might be an insurance provider, but are you really in the freedom business?  Create a list of the possible businesses you might be in and identify the leading brands in each.  The one that most directly reflects how your core customers think about what you do is probably your most effective competitive frame of reference.

2. Consider what lifestage your brand or product is in. If you are just starting out, you should define your competitive frame of reference more narrowly since your primary challenge is simply getting people to choose you over other existing options.  Later in the lifestage of your product or brand, you should define your frame more broadly since you’ll probably want to consider avenues for new growth through adjacent markets, categories, capabilities.

Your answers to #1 and #2 should lead you to an understanding of the best definition and scope for your competitive frame of reference.

3. The next step is to list key competitors in your competitive frame of reference and the unique benefit each delivers. Use industry research, analyst reports, audits of competitors’ experiences and communications, and social media listening to help you understand each brand’s points of strength and differentiation.  Synthesize your findings into a succinct description of each competitor’s unique benefit.

4. Use competitive landscape maps to identify the competitive white space for your brand. Begin by drawing several charts, each with an x and y axis.  For the first chart, start with axes that are standard for your category — for a snack food, for example, your axes might be low price vs. premium, sweet vs. salty, or for kids vs. for adults.  Plot on the chart the relative positions of brands in your competitive frame of reference.

Move onto the next chart, using different axes and placing the competitors on each.  Consider axes that represent different attributes for your category (for snack foods, you might think about single serve vs. multiple servings or indulgent vs. healthy).  Continue to create new charts, experimenting with different axes, especially those that speak to customer emotions (energizing vs. relaxing) or different usage occasions (meal replacement vs. treat).  Also use axes that reflect the drivers in your answers to #1 above.

5. Finally identify the unique value of your brand by evaluating the opportunities in the landscapes. In each chart, pinpoint where the competitive white space is and place your brand in that white space.  Then for each chart examine the positions and unique benefits of competitive brands and identify the unique value of your brand relative to theirs in the context of that white space.  Once you’ve examined several charts, the one that reveals the most compelling value for your brand should become clear.  It’s the one with the most significant white space and the most differentiating benefit.

This process involves both art and science — and it takes some practice to do it well.  Try it out with your brand and then let me know if you’d like help or feedback.  Leave your comments below or contact me here.

Up Next:  Brand Differentiators

My next post in this “How to Scale-Up Your Brand” series covers the last element of your brand positioning, the reasons to believe, your key brand differentiators.  I will show you how to identify and prioritize the ones that give your brand the most power and competitive advantage.  Look for it here in a couple of weeks.

previous posts in the “How to Scale-Up Your Brand” series:

• How to Conduct a Brand Diagnostic
• Assess Your Brand Power
• Set Your Brand Purpose, Values, and Attributes
• Identify Your Core Customer Target

The post scale-up your brand — plot your brand positioning appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

By Vanessa DiMauro, CEO, Leader Networks and Advisory Board Member, Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board Digital Marketing is causing big changes in business today—online and offline. And, as usual with big changes, there’s no shortage of confusion in the market about exactly what’s happening, what’s working and what’s not. Pundits and […]

Tommy John on Tuesday released an integrated campaign and 60-second film, “Undershirt Undoing”. The new campaign illustrates the issues men face every day with ill-fitting undershirts, which has been the brand’s focus since it launched in 2008.

“For too long men have been resigned to living in discomfort with their undershirts and allowing it to negatively impact them everyday.” Says Josh Dean, CMO at Tommy John. “No other brand was speaking to this uncomfortable truth, nor offering an answer. We saw an opportunity to take ownership of the problem and to showcase our patented undershirt as the ultimate solution. In typical Tommy John fashion, we took to raising awareness about a frustrating issue in a humorous yet relatable way.”

How’d they do it? Ferrets, what else!

The Credits:
Ad Agency: Preacher
Director: Neil Harris via Smuggler

Past work: Tommy John’s Big Adjustment

–-ADVERTISEMENT-– (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

This webinar gave a summary of the K2 Intelligence report on media rebates and incentives and reviewed the top ten questions advertisers need to consider in reviewing contracts with media buying agencies.

This week, PR expert Becs Miller shares her 6 simple public relations steps you may follow to boost your visibility and position you as an expert in your field. Take it away, Becs! *** Picture this: You have a continuous stream of new followers landing on your website who already know…

TED curators Kelly Stoetzel and Helen Walters host the very first TEDNYC event in New York, NY, on September 7, 2016. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

The conversation around the upcoming US presidential election is full of frenzy, headache and noise. But elections are about more than divisiveness and disagreement — they’re civic events worthy of celebration, and, while it may seem unbelievable at the moment, they hold the promise of transforming governments for the better.

At TEDNYC: The Election Edition, six speakers who think about elections differently — whether as a design challenge, a translation project or the stimulus for creative work — spoke about why the future of our shared political sphere may be brighter than it seems, and why it’s absolutely and completely necessary for Americans to vote in November.

It was our very first salon in the new theater at TED HQ, a custom-made cavern of seats, screens, cameras and all of the technical wizardry necessary to film sessions of expertly curated, intellectually stimulating TED Talks. The theater has been the working focus of many talented and dedicated TED staffers for countless months, and tonight’s inaugural session was a landmark moment for the organization and the first step in a new adventure that we can’t wait to share with you.

First up was the author of the best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance.

America’s forgotten working class. J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor, predominantly white town in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to the social ills plaguing so many working-class towns like his: a heroin epidemic, families torn apart by divorce and sometimes violence. In these forgotten parts of America, structural barriers like a lack of jobs, failing schools and brain drain often prevent poor families from joining America’s fabled upward mobility. But, Vance noted, something much more difficult to quantify was infecting the minds of kids he grew up with — a sense of hopelessness and despair, a feeling that they’d never get ahead no matter how hard they worked. With the help of a perceptive grandmother who told him not to believe the deck was stacked against him, a four-year crash course in character-building in the form of the Marine Corps and a lot of luck, Vance closed the social-capital gap and went on to law school and a career in finance. But a lot of kids from his town won’t have that good luck, and that, he says, raises important questions that everyone from community leaders to policy makers needs to ask: How do we help more kids from towns like his?

The author of Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance, spoke about growing up poor in southern Ohio, where his classmates shared “a sense of hopelessness that leads to conspiratorial places, the sense that ‘No matter how hard I work, they’re not going to let me in.’” He spoke at TEDNYC in New York, NY. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

“Historical eras do come and go.” Journalist Michael Tomasky gives a historical crash course on how American politics has turned into such a polarized battlefield — and shares three rays of hope for the future that may break through the current ideological maelstrom. (A few key changes are on the near horizon, he says — including, believe it or not, reform of the dreaded filibuster.) Most of all, he encourages us to take the long view. “Historical eras do change,” says Tomasky. “All is not lost.”

Why ballot design matters. You’ve almost definitely made mistakes when you’ve voted, and you probably didn’t know it, says civic designer and ballot design researcher Dana Chisnell. She explains how ballot designs have confused voters and, in turn, influenced election outcomes, breaking down the story of an electoral disaster in Sarasota County, Florida — where, in 2006, 18,000 Floridians left the polls without recording a single vote in the congressional race, the hottest race on the ballot — as well as the infamous hanging chads of the US presidential election of 2000. Chisnell shares ten simple design principles, like using mixed-case lettering and avoiding centered type, which she and her team have developed to improve election ballots and to help people vote the way they intend. Learn more about the design principles and the quest to design the perfect ballot here.

Songs of protest. “When they say we want our America back, what the f*** do they mean,” asks Jill Sobule in “America Back,” a song she played often at Bernie Sanders rallies that became an anthem of his campaign. With an upbeat tune and a hefty dose of humor, Sobule reflects on the long history of immigration in America — and the anti-immigration sentiment that has always accompanied it. She also shared with the audience her wish to reinvigorate the tradition of protest art through her initiative My Song Is My Weapon, an online hub where artists and musicians can share, create and collaborate on protest songs and protest art.

A shared language of democracy. As a consultant for the United Nations, Philippa Neave works with emerging democracies to organize their very first elections, helping with the details those of us in established democracies take for granted: how to register, how to vote, why you should vote. And so often, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is language. In many countries, the appropriate language to describe the electoral process simply does not exist — or when it does, the concepts the words represent are not well understood. To right the problem, Neave worked with colleagues to establish the Arabic Lexicon of Electoral Terminology, a reference tool in Arabic, English and French that covers eight Arab countries. Even with this technical reference tool, Neave still sees an important missing piece of the puzzle, “a work of reference for the average person,” because it is only by creating a shared language and shared understanding of democracy that we can hear the voice of the voiceless: “The silent majority is silent because they don’t have the words. Let’s give them the words.”

Elections consultant Philippa Neave holds up a ballot from the 2005 election in Afghanistan, whose citizens were so eager to run for office for the first time that the ballot ended up being the size of a newspaper.  She spoke at TEDNYC in New York, NY. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

It’s our country, too. Sayu Bhojwani, president and founder of The New American Leaders Project, tells the essential American immigration story through her own 16-year journey to becoming an American citizen — and urges her fellow immigrants to find their own power in the political process, by voting, by running for office, and simply by speaking up about what they care about. “Immigrants’ votes, voices and vantage points can help make our democracy strong,” she says. “We have fought to be here.” 

The joy of voting. There was a time in America when voting was fun. That time, says civics educator Eric Liu, is called most of America’s history. Tracing the robustly, raucously participatory history of voting in America, from the Revolution through to the Civil Rights era, Liu recalls American traditions of parades, street theater, open-air debates, festivals and bonfires on election day. “Decades of television and the Internet have killed much of that joyful culture of voting,” he says. “The couch has replaced the commons, and the screen has made most citizens spectators.” How can we get people excited about voting again? In partnership with the Knight Foundation, Liu has launched The Joy of Voting project, inviting artists, activists, designers, and educators across the country to come up with creative projects — from DJ sets to plays to punk rock satire — to encourage the far-too-many Americans who don’t vote to express themselves at the ballot box. “Why bother voting? Because there is no such thing as not voting,” Liu says. “In a democracy, not voting is voting — for all that you may detest and oppose.”

“Not voting can be dressed up as an act of passive resistance,” says Eric Liu, “but it’s actively handing power over to people who will gladly take advantage of your absence.” He spoke at TEDNYC in New York, NY. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

What evidence is there that Purpose-driven brands do any better than others?

There are numerous data sets, publications and studies you can discover on the topic of Purpose-driven brands. We’ll cover a few here to establish the point:

•  87 percent – informed people who believe business should place ‘equal weight’ on society’s interests and their own business goals. (Edelman Good Purpose Survey, 2012)
•  94 percent – CEOs who say that their company is ‘increasingly held responsible not only for our own actions, but also for the actions of others in our value chain’. (Corporate Philanthropy CEO Conference 2010)
•  61 percent – of recent graduates that are likely to factor a company’s commitment to sustainability into their decision if choosing between two jobs with the same location, responsibilities, pay and benefits (2011 Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT Survey)
•  62 percent – of the public across 20 countries ‘say they trust corporations less now than they did a year ago’. (2009 Edelman Trust Barometer)
•  42 – the number of academic studies showing positive correlations between social enterprise and financial performance. (Harvard Business Review).

Havas Media Group published a global analytical framework that looked at more than 700 brands in 23 countries and found some remarkable insights:

• Meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 120 percent. Since 2004 the share prices of the top 25 companies on its Meaningful Brands Index (BMI) have increased faster than companies who are not seen as being meaningful by consumers.
•  The Top 10 brands all scored above 50 percent when asked if people would miss the brand if it disappeared tomorrow. The average across all brands was just 38 percent.
•  70 percent of people think that companies and brands should play a role in improving our quality of life and well-being.
•  However, just 24 percent of people agree that companies and brands are working hard at improving this.
•  This is mirrored in Western Europe (29 percent) and Eastern/Central Europe (31 percent), Europe and the United States (28 percent), but less so in Japan (46 percent) and developing markets such as Latin America (48 percent) and Asia (51 percent).
•  Just 32 percent of people trust companies and brands.
•  54 percent trust those that are socially and environmentally 
responsible.

Forbes magazine published figures that support this as well:

•  87 percent of global consumers believe that business needs to place at least equal weight on society’s interests as on business’ interests.
•  20 percent of brands worldwide are seen to meaningfully and positively impact people’s lives.
•  Only 6 percent of people believe the singular purpose of business is to make money for shareholders.

Brand Valuation consultants Millward Brown and former P&G global marketing officer Jim Stengel developed the list of 50 brands, which they say built the deepest relationships with customers while achieving the greatest financial growth from 2001 to 2011. To arrive at the Stengel 50, they valued thousands of brands across 30+ countries. The list included both B2B and B2C businesses in 28 categories, ranging in size from $100 million in revenues to well over $100 billion. 
Investment in these companies – the ‘Stengel 50’ – over the past decade would have been 400 per cent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Havas Global CEO (and co-founder of One Young World) David Jones provides three simple rules for Purpose-driven brands:

1. Forget ‘Image Is Everything’ And Embrace ‘Reality Is Everything.’ Brands need to create a reality around what they do – it does not need to be perfect, but it does need to be honest.

2. Do Good To Do Well. Old-world Corporate Social Responsibility saw companies ‘give back’ to society without a lot of concern about what they ‘took out’ (and how they took it out) in the first place. In the new world of Purpose-driven brands, how the business impacts its stakeholders internally and externally is baked into the operating model. Success generates profits that allow the organization to continue operating so long as its purpose remains relevant. Doing well is a by-product of doing ‘good’.

3. Out Behave The Competition. Eighty per cent of brand building is through behavior, not marketing. People want to know what a company stands for, and they want to see evidence that the company is delivering on that promise.

What Purpose-Driven Brands Do

Creating a strong, clear, compelling and credible Purpose for an organization that defines why it exists is critical for any organization that wants to enjoy longevity and relevance, not to mention resilience that leads to sustained performance. While an organization may or may not choose to explicitly use its purpose as its external positioning, it is worth considering. In any event, this Purpose should provide a clear compass that should guide the organization in:

•  how it operates;
•  what products and services it provides (and doesn’t provide);
•  what sectors and geographies it will (and will not) operate in;
•  who it hires;
•  who it fires;
•  who it develops and how it develops and promotes them;
•  what businesses it acquires;
•  what assets it disposes of;
•  how it manages its corporate responsibility efforts;
•  how it markets and sells;
•  how it engages with what stakeholders, when, why and how often;
•  how it manages its supply chain;
•  how it selects, manages and operates its facilities;
•  who it lends to;
•  who it borrows from;
•  … and so on.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Kevin Keohane, excerpted from his book Brand and Talent, in partnership with Kogan Page publishing.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

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

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers