Enterprise Archives

Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on December 1, 2022October 14, 2024 by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. But many high-growth companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining a clear positioning allows you to control how the market perceives you and better positions your product and/or service to be more convincing and attractive in that market.

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

Markets, in their very nature, are dynamic—always shifting and progressing. Many businesses spend a lot of time, focus, and energy properly positioning their brand in the current market. And that alone is hard to get right. But what many businesses fail to do is reassess their brand positioning down the road as needed.

Markets change. New competitors enter. And companies develop and deploy new products, features, and benefits constantly. Note that maintaining your positioning doesn’t necessarily ensure your brand will be relevant in the future. Your positioning needs to last in a dynamic environment.

Examining your positioning can ensure you situate your business as the first and best choice in your market. So when you are evaluating your current positioning, ask the following questions about your brand:

Is your brand positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition?

Help people value your brand? Once people understand your brand, your positioning should make your brand more meaningful to them. To create meaning, you need to have a deep understanding of your target markets. Have their behaviors, mindsets, values, needs, interests, fears, frustrations, joys, and dreams shifted? Does your positioning still feel right to the people who matter to your business? So work on creating simple and significant positioning that you tailor to your brand’s target markets. Positioning that doesn’t adjust to and predict your customer’s needs will struggle to stay relevant today.

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic northstar. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth.

Stand apart? Your brand positioning should provide an understandable, identifiable, and meaningful picture of your brand. This picture is what makes you different from your competitors. What are your points of difference? Have they changed with the market? What do your target markets and internal teams recognize as your key difference today? Is it a sustainable differentiating factor? Make sure you work to own the space that could set you apart.

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

Positioning is a powerful tool for setting your business up to thrive. It will help drive growth and build a business resilient enough to endure shifts in the market. So work to ensure it’s designed to maximize the relevance of how and why your company matters to the people important to sustain its growth and profitability.

Differentiation in today’s overcrowded marketplace is critical for growth and for businesses to cut through the clutter to survive. As a result, you must take the time to get it right. Focusing on it is the best way to ensure your business is positioned for sustained growth. And for your brand, focusing on positioning is the best way to find a meaningful space in the hearts and minds of the people vital to your success.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work?

The Value of a Sales-Led Brand Strategy For High-Growth Companies

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Paige Lansing Valle

A Sales Perspective

Tracy Lloyd, founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Emotive Brand, shares how her sales background informs her work today, and offers insights on the true value of bringing sales to the strategy table.

Tell us about your sales background.

I have an interesting background that has led me to the agency world, and on to brand strategy. Initially, I got my start in non-profit fundraising and development. A start-up CEO bought an expensive table from me to attend a gala event I was hosting. Throughout the sales process of getting that deal done, he said to me that I was in the wrong job, and thought I should be in sales … at his company. And so I did. And from there, I sold technology for many years—some emerging technologies, other enterprise solutions—in the states and living as an expat overseas.

How does your background shape your approach?

Everyone brings their past experiences and jobs with them. My background happens to be in sales. And I bring that knowledge into our approach at Emotive Brand.

Because I know how to sell and understand what it takes to be successful in sales, I focus a lot of my time there. It helps me back into brand strategy. With a sales mindset, I can reach a full understanding of how to position and sell technology to the enterprise. In fact, I’ve realized I can’t really brand something until I know how to sell it. I need to grasp what’s working and what’s not from the perspective of the sales team.

Since the sales team is closest to customers, they have a strong understanding of what customers need to buy. They are naturally driven to be successful. And they want everything at their disposal to be successful. They are the people I want to spend time with so I can witness first-hand what is going on. Understanding what will help them helps fuel our own team and our work. It is also a good reality check for me to balance what I hear from other parts of the organization directly for myself, and to witness the realities of what it is like for the sales team who is out on the front line.

Other people might come from different angles, but I think that this particular angle is something that is distinct to the way we work at Emotive Brand. I think it differentiates the way we approach strategy.

So sales teams are involved in your brand strategy process?

Yes. I like to involve them in a few, key places in our process. Early on, I like to go on sales calls and listen in whenever possible. It helps me get grounded in what’s going on. I listen to their pitch – how they address objections and how they position the technology. I pay attention to tone of voice. I look for signs that indicate that the customer understands. I want to know the exact point at which a no transforms to a yes, and then pinpoint why.

Later on, I like to involve sales when we begin work on prioritizing target audiences and then again when we are developing the value proposition(s) and messaging. At the end of the day, so many aspects of brand strategy have value by being vetted by sales – positioning, messaging, defining categories, and go-to-market strategies. I gather huge insights from the sales team – insights, I might not be able to get anywhere else. It’s my job to ladder back these findings and connect all the dots, and from there build the most impactful strategy possible.

It is obvious to work with the marketing team when developing a brand strategy. It’s not as obvious to work with the sales organization. But, for us, it works. Bringing sales to the table creates alignment, and breeds a better, stronger, smarter end product.

What kind of clients are your skills in sales of particular value to?

We work with a lot of high-growth startups that are going to market with products and services that are new, and often times inconceivable to most people today. They’ve built and engineered products that are ahead of the marketplace. This requires hard work from the brand in order to cut through the clutter. Our clients need help clearly articulating their true value to customers. Often times the market needs help understanding the brand’s value proposition and our clients need these tools to help their marketing and sales teams execute successfully. They need to quickly penetrate the market and sometimes even create a new market when one doesn’t exist. We have done our very best work for companies who have complex B2B technology, are beginning to sell into the enterprise, and who need to create new value for old thinking.

Where does brand strategy come in to play?

Brand strategy is about solving business problems. It’s as simple as that. All of our clients come to us with a business problem and we create a strategy to solve it. Most often the problems we are solving are about growth, differentiation, and creating a strong value proposition. Our clients almost always have a solid understanding of the features and benefits their product offers, but leading with that is not working. They may not know it at the time, but this is where the brand needs to step in and help them better tell their story.

For us, it always starts with defining why a brand matters at the highest level. We make it easier for a target audience to understand a technology and its role. From there, it’s all about creating the corporate narrative. Nailing the category, the positioning, and creating a strong value proposition and messaging to appeal to your top buying personas.

Brand strategy answers integral questions like: Why does your product matter? Why does it matter now? How is it different and better than what competitors are doing now? Sales teams need to understand the answers to these questions in order to be successful.

Knowing how to sell makes it easier for me to think about the end user buying our clients technology and how to best support a sales team with the tools they need to go to battle and more easily articulate this new way of doing business. We arm them with the tools that more easily helps them do what they do well — close deals.

Are there any challenges involved in bringing sales to the table?

Taking sales people out of the field is hard. So it’s important that we use them strategically and not waste their time. We don’t need everyone in sales involved in the process, but we make sure to include enough people so the strategy can benefit from their front-line experiences. They are very good at helping us gauge reality.

What’s the bottom-line payoff of bringing sales thinking to brand strategy?

There is so much exciting stuff going on in technology right now. For our clients’ customers, it’s hard to keep up to date and understand who’s going to bring the right value to their business. Brand strategy can help position a business to thrive – creating the right tools to go to market, and helping customers more clearly understand why a business matters and how it’s different. Using my sales background is a way for us to get to the heart of why the brand truly matters so we can create the right brand strategy.

This understanding helps create a value framework, situate the brand and its people for success, and ready a business to scale. Our work is about creating a brand that truly connects with people rationally and emotionally. A strategy doesn’t have real value unless it actually helps a brand reach the people who matter most to its business in meaningful ways.Bringing a sales mindset to the strategic table makes for a more impactful strategy. That’s the bottom line.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.

How Global Enterprise Tech Companies Can Re-brand

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Tracy Lloyd

In the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s impossible to escape the blinding pace of technology. Ideas, innovations, and companies emerge like skyrockets, lighting up the sky and sometimes the world. We’re used to the speed because we live here, and because many of our clients are start-ups. We build meaningful brands to guide their stratospheric growth.

Then there are companies that have been around for a while. Venerable tech brands that have stood the test of time. Some dating back to the days when Silicon Valley was populated not by software geeks on corporate campuses, but by apricot and prune orchards.

Rethinking and recalibrating brand strategy can be scary for an established brand. But adapting to shifting trends, while remaining true to the heritage that got you there in the first place, is essential for any brand that needs to maintain a connection to all the people that matter to the brand.

Here’s how brand strategy can help an established tech company refresh or re-brand.

Change is not a sign of weakness

When a brand has been successful over a long period of time, it’s a sign that it’s been doing something right. And it’s a sign of strength, not weakness, when the leadership team realizes it’s time to change with the times and alter long-standing behavior to address the reality of today. An authentic brand that knows its strengths is a in a great position to stay up to date and compete with current rivals, while gaining the most from its heritage.

Brand behavior drives brand health

Some companies are held back from greatness by the “this is how we’ve always done things” syndrome. Leadership teams who recognize these indicators often turn to brand strategy to figure out how to reconnect with customers in meaningful ways and how to reenergize company behavior to deliver on the promise. Great leaders live the brand promise personally and lead by example. But it’s not always easy. It takes guts for a CEO to change direction and adopt a new way of thinking and acting. It takes even more guts to enlist the entire workforce to follow.

Employees are involved. So involve them early.

Most people are resistant to change. So when a brand needs to change with the times, it’s a good idea to pave the way by including people from all levels of your team. When they’re invested in creating the strategy, they’re prepped to handle the changes needed to roll it out. This is doubly true for companies with employees who’ve been around for a while. They might have very good ideas to help the company evolve. So ask them for input and meaningfully socialize with them once the work is done.

An old-fashioned practice turns out to be very modern

Giving customers what they want is what successful businesses have always done. Sometimes venerable brands need to freshly rediscover what people want. When your team knows what your customers want, need, think, and feel, your brand can make a more emotionally meaningful, stronger connection to people in a way that meets their expectations. It’s called empathy. A new-sounding name for a very old fashioned fundamental of people businesses.

Venerable brands often have a huge advantage over newer brands because they’ve already forged strong connections and already mean something to people. Like all brands, a venerable brand needs to speak in a consistent voice and behave in a consistent way to deliver on both the rational and that emotional connection. Brands like this, that evoke emotions, don’t just feel better, they perform better. No matter how old they are.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy company in the San Francisco Bay Area that’s only eight years old. But our experience spans decades with fresh strategic thinking for brands that want to stay meaningful, and stick around.

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Tag: Enterprise