The Power of Positioning.

The marketing department has received many nicknames over the years. Some I’ve heard include the arts and crafts department, the pretty pictures department or the colouring in department. I’ve walked into many organisations in the past, especially during my consulting days and needed to fight for the value that marketing adds to an organisation. I don’t think it’s malice that leads to these demeaning labels that people in organisations put on marketing, but simply a misunderstanding of it’s role, it’s impact and it’s purpose. 

In this misunderstanding, marketing becomes a very busy department serving as a ‘catch all’ for the tasks that other departments don’t want to take on. Marketeers get handed with the colouring in assignments simply because the added value we can bring hasn’t been effectively communicated. What this results in is a department focused on tick box exercises, aiming to get as many tasks as possible ticked off the list in any given week. 

It’s a common phenomenon I’ve seen across many businesses through the now 15 years I’ve been in marketing and I believe it’s super important for a marketing department to be seen as a productive contributor to the organisation. The question this raises for me, is whether the goal posts for what ‘a productive contribution’ is, are in the right place for an organisation to extract the most value from it’s marketing operations. 

During my time as a consultant when I saw the goal was ‘just get it done’, the quality of the work was being compromised, or not even considered. I began to notice a missed opportunity. When communicating externally purely from an operational and functional standpoint, you’re missing a trick. One that if you master, and you’re in an industry that doesn’t consider communications from beyond a functional and operational standpoint, you’re in a very good position to gain a competitive advantage. 

So, in any future roles I took on, I vowed that I would stand up for strategic marketing, even if it means putting a little more thought into each piece of external communications to consider these very important questions: how do we want this piece of content to position us? What do we want our target audience to take away from this about who we are, why pick us and what we stand for? It values the quality of what is being produced as much as the quantity. 

This means at times, two to three revisions, getting the marketing team to think about what we want every piece of content to say about who we are as a business and how we want to be positioned in the market. This is tough to do when the temptation in a busy marketing department is to slip into just the functional operational element of marketing that doesn’t require strategic thought. 

Sure, you can get by from churning through the items on your checklist, and non marketeers in your company aren’t even likely to notice what’s missing. Sure, it’s going to look articulate and the visuals are (hopefully!) going to be on brand and your target audience is going to see regular activity, which in itself is important. But, are you changing anything in the way that target audience perceives you in that message? Are you increasing the likelihood that they’ll consider you when the need arises for the product or service that you’re offering? And then, are you quantifying that?

Are you building on your brand’s share of voice? Are you creating cut through in a busy market? Are you moving the needle on metrics that matter? Or, are you succumbing to a busy marketing department’s biggest problem, time pressure. 

If that is the case, we’re then into the some of the psychological temptations that all of humanity faces, preference for ‘good enough’ over continuous never ending improvement and a confirmation bias. So, it’s normal that in the absence of striving for greatness, good enough becomes just that. But, you’ll never sustainably grow market share, especially in a time of exponentially increasing change, with doing just enough to get by. And yes, it’s hard to put that much thought into every piece of communication that you put out into the market, but it’s a skill that can be trained. 

To make things simpler, and to put a visual framework to the thought that goes into building and evolving a formalised position in the market. This simple framework can be used to support the considerations you make in your marketing messages. 

The Brand Positioning Framework

CULTURE 

Culture is traditionally seen as a HR Function. However, when culture informs your positioning statement in the market, it’s becoming increasingly important to collaborate internally with your HR Department. You must ensure that the cultural element of what you’re communicating externally aligns authentically with the way things actually are internal to the organisation. 

This is becoming increasingly important in the time of digital real time personalised communications. Because your audience’s bulls**t radar is highly trained to spot a fake. If you in any way say something is one way, and internally it’s another way, you are setting yourself up to damage your corporate reputation. A very costly mistake when it occurs. 

So, your company’s actual internal culture must be accurately reflected in your external messaging for the power of your positioning to be effective. 

CLIENTS OR CUSTOMERS 

Are you communicating from a deep understanding of who your target audience is, what they value and what they need, or just what you think they value and need? When was the last time you interviewed your target audience? Used market research to validate your messaging? Or just relied on internal perspectives of what you think your audience wants? 

This is the difference from a message that is ok, to a message that resonates and creates cut through. When one important objective of marketing is to influence your target audiences consideration set (i.e. when a need arises for a product or service you offer, are you in the top three companies that your target audience thinks of to solve that problem?). Being in the consideration set, especially the top spot significantly increases the chances that you’ll win the business. 

So, your positioning statement must accurately reflect who your target audience is, what they value and need for it to be effective. 

YOUR COMPETITION 

This is the context in which you compete.

There is absolutely no point, in saying the exact same thing as your competition unless you’re a challenger brand and your goal is to capture market share from that company. However, this approach is often not as effective as actually highlighting a need that your competition doesn’t deliver and using that to make your company a viable and at times, better alternative. So, you must use environmental scanning to regularly stay abreast of the moves in the market that your competition are making. Therefore, evolve your positioning in real time to continue to create a blue ocean space between your company and the competition. 

IN SUMMARY 

To move beyond communicating from just an operational and functional standpoint, you must think through your culture, what your clients or customers want and how your competition are currently positioning themselves to carve out a unique position for your company to occupy. And why? Why is it so important to do this? Three words, market share growth. 

Strategic marketing is both the voice of the client or customer and also takes the long term view of where you want to be 3 to 5 years from now. When truly effective, strategic marketing efforts will influence market share, revenue growth and position in the market 18 months or more in the future. So, this is super difficult for an organisation focused on sales this quarter to value. But, here’s the challenge, the longer you wait to adopt a strategic approach to marketing, the longer the benefits of doing so will continue stay 18 months plus in your company’s future. 

So, the dance that many marketing departments face is the balance between benefits that can be rendered now, against the long term pay off that effective strategic marketing promises. It’s like planting like seeds or a term deposit that accrues interest for years into the future. So, I hope using the power of positioning framework allows you to add the benefit of strategic marketing thought to the messages you’re communicating now and therefore, start to bring those future state benefits into the daily practice of your marketing department today. 

By Melanie O’Connor 

If you have questions about anything in this article you’re welcome to reach out to me via enquiries@melanieoconnor.co to discuss further.