Why you need a concise brand positioning when markets get hyper competitive.
Your brand is your business, to all your stakeholders and especially your people. It tells the story of who you are, why you exist and what difference you make in an ever changing world. It defines and expresses what makes you meaningfully different from your competitors.
But like many B2B brands, you may be myopically focused on sales, and struggle to cut through the complexity of your offer and get clear on your intent at the brand level.
You may have found that most of your successes have been achieved through one to one (narrowcast) referrals. This is typical of F2F relationship selling, and referrals are great. But it’s a very inefficient way to build scale.
To build scale and to shorten sales cycles you need a brand. A brand that has qualified your economic buyer prior to that initial conversation. A brand that explains your offer in a clear, concise and compelling way.
Not convinced? Still believe its all down to the quality of your sales people? No problem, because one of the primary advantages of a strong brand with a clear positioning is it brings you a sales advantage, regardless of the quality of your sales people. So, a sales advantage is simply that you win more often than not, and when you come up for an opportunity that’s within your sweet spot, your area of focus or your area of specialisation, then you usually win.
The second point is that with a strong brand positioning you win whilst charging more. So, you win by not cutting price. You’re able to command this premium price and still win. That infers you’re seen as meaningfully different because a price premium signifies a few varied things, but ultimately it’s a big indicator of how differentiated you are seen to be in comparison with your competitors. And your brand positioning defines and delivers that.
An additional point to make is aligned to something very important across services industries. In this context your product is your people. Having run these types of projects for two decades I never cease to be amazed at the heightened internal commitment, confidence and drive that emerges at the conclusion of brand positioning projects, not to mention the external client and market benefits you realise too.
Do any of these challenges sound familiar?
Do you have a lack of clarity and singlemindedness of what your brand actually stands for? Without clear brand positioning your external messaging becomes confused and your internal messaging and external messaging can become unaligned.
Confusion amongst staff as to what your brand stands for, is also an issue. That’s because it makes the task of building aligned values and an aligned culture even more challenging. It also makes it difficult to attract and retain the best recruits. The best people in the industry always want to work for the strongest and clearest brand.
A weakened market and competitive position gives your competitors an advantage. They are enjoying stronger client and customer loyalty and (it’s expected) a lower cost of customer/client acquisition as well.
Higher business expenses and higher costs: it frequently results in re-working and work arounds and duplication of costs and effort. It also makes marketing and web presence highly inefficient.
It can also make you look smaller, which in times of uncertainity creates the heightened need for size, strength and stability. Ultimately a clearer positioning brings clarity to your entire brand identity making the task of explaining your intent so much easier.
Does your organisation need a brand strategy refresh?
The above considerations may have you contemplating the need for a brand refresh. Beyond what’s already been outlined here’s some more specific reasons and questions for you to consider.
• Has your business merged with another organisation or been acquired by another organisation?
• Has your business acquired a significant new asset?
• Has your business introduced a new product or service that changes or expands your product repertoire?
• Is your business developing a new strategy that will change the direction of the organisation?
• Is there a need to introduce the product/service to an important new audience?
• Has your business been involved in a damaging situation that will impact the brand?
• Has it been more than three years since the brand has been reviewed?
• Is a new competitor threatening your market position?
• Has your organisation struggled to recruit the industry’s top talent in recent years?
How BrandMatters can help
Our goal across all projects is to deliver a brand that explains your offer, your strengths and your key points of differentiation. This is summarised in a clear and concise brand narrative.
It is designed to build a presence for your brand and have you doing less chasing and following up prospects and have more business coming to you. That’s because when clients and stakeholders know who you are and what you stand for, they seek you out.
You will also have a meaningful, unifying theme for your website, social media, and new business messaging program and a more aligned and committed culture. And this all makes recruitment far easier.
The timing is good to launch this sort of project at the beginning of a calendar year and then use these outputs to create results for the remainder of the financial year.
The primary unspoken question on the minds of most recruits looking to change companies is “Where is this business headed? What are you trying to become?” This means not just defining who you are, but why… Our projects deliver this level of clarity for our clients and much more.
To chat about your brand positioning, contact us here.
