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Four Ways To Creatively Position Your Brand
by: Gordon Hochhalter, Partner
Creativitystrategyconnectivity
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| Leaders creatively package their brand messages in ways that position them as leaders. They only say things that are important to their customers. And they say them importantly...with impact and with dominance. |
Brand strategy, brand schmadegy. Truth be told, it is creative work that ultimately positions brands in customers’ and prospects’ minds. It is the expert integration of words, pictures and ideas with strategy that makes brand positions real and tangible.
That’s why you might want to consider developing your brand strategy and creative together. Because in the marketplace, where buying decisions are being made, they are inseparable. They cannot be disconnected. They act as one. And they should be developed as one.
Here are four simple ways to anchor your position through creative execution:
1. Stand for something: Dominate the key points of brand contact
In this new world of customer- and prospect-controlled business communications, you can’t afford to be perceived as just one of the herd offering the same stuff that everyone else is offering.
To succeed in this new paradigm, you’ll have to become top-of-mind (number one) in something in your prospects’ heads.
But if you look at most companies’ communications it appears they want to stand for everything. That’s why they end up standing for nothing.
That’s because positioning is not something you can pack into your product or into an ad that looks like a catalog. Positioning is what you do with the prospect’s mind.
Positions are about unique ideas. And the first company that plants its idea into the minds of people has a tremendous advantage over its competitors. It becomes awfully hard to dislodge. And, in fact, blocks out communication about other companies within that category.
To get there first, you have to speak with such impact that you simply take the position in the category.
For example, leaders package their communications in specific ways that identify them as leaders. First, they only say important things. (Things that are important to their prospects.) Second, they say them importantly.
In direct marketing, for example, that means searching for ways to make mailings physically involving. In fact, if you can get people’s hands into your message, their minds will follow.
In print advertising, it means concentrating high-impact ads in the dominant magazine in your market, rather than scattering them over a number of publications with low space rates.
It means running a few big ads, rather than a lot of small ones. It means dominating the magazine with design.
2. Embrace the white space: Focus on a single idea in each communication
Present only one idea in each ad or each page of a brochure. A single visual element should dominate a layout.
And don’t be afraid of white space. It has the power to focus your reader on your message.
Illustrations and photographs should be created for the one idea they are trying to support, rather than lifted from a file. Effective visuals grow out of a strong, focused benefit message. Not the other way around.
So if you want to position your brand as a leader, your communications should dominate the medium you’re in with relevant concepts and powerful design. So that in the context of its environment, your message looks more interesting, more useful, more memorable or more intriguing than everything that surrounds it. Including the editorial.
3. Strategize your creative: Give each medium a specific function that the creative is responsible for delivering
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| A brand position delivered by an integrated, consistent creative point-of-view, voice and visual style overcomes market clutter and fragmentation. It's like seeing a familiar face in the crowd. |
When you do that you can double recognition of your buying message. Because when audiences become familiar with your communications, they do a lot of the work for you. It’s like seeing a familiar face in a crowd.
The fact is, people simply pay more attention to communications that they know.
Unfortunately, many business marketers don’t take advantage of this little quirk in human behavior.
What they should be doing is developing integrated programs that use different media to reach prospects at different stages of the purchase process with consistent, highly recognizable, familiar communications.
Instead they’re off sending a “thingbe” here and another unrelated “thingbe” there, and a third inconsistent message over there and one that doesn’t look or sound like the others over here.
You might as well set fire to your budget.
What keeps those “thingbes” from hitting is a widening and deepening quagmire of communications clutter. And unless you develop a strong, consistent, easily recognized, consistent, unique, consistent, relevant, and, of course, consistent creative communications presence, it’s going to be glug...glug...glug time.
Developing a truly integrated program or campaign is not about the consistent use of your logo, a type treatment or a color palette. It’s the consistent use of a single, overriding, compelling, creative idea. Every part of the program should reek of it. It should be based on how your customers and prospects view their business—not how you view yours. And it should be unique, so you can own it.
4. Creativate your strategy: Use a consistent tone of voice and visual style to galvanize your position through a well-aligned brand image
What many business marketers don’t want to admit is that positioning is as much a creative issue as it is a strategic one. And it will be even more of a creative issue in the future.The reason is the tremendous, ever-expanding diversity of media and communications options that are fragmenting audiences and messages all over the place.
So in order to capture and maintain a presence in your audience’s mind, you’re going to have to present not only a compelling but a consistent personality, voice and point of view. Each one of these components is a creative issue.
Every creative strategy should establish or reinforce a position for your company. And every piece of communications must match that position.
Positioning is a highly creative process. It involves the expert integration of words, pictures and ideas to build a unique brand position and personality for your company. And that personality becomes the central part of your company’s position.
Just as you cannot separate words from visuals, you can’t separate image from position.
Need more information?
Gordon Hochhalter, Partner
Creativitystrategyconnectivity
Mobium
360 North Michigan Avenue, 12th Floor
Chicago, IL 60601
312-422-5922 • 866-2MOBIUM
Fax: 312-422-6922
ghochhalter@mobiumllc.com
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