Branding Strategies - Positioning Statements

Heads down in branding and sales at the same time. Oh… right… plus running the sales and marketing strategy for a new company. :)

Lessons learned:
1. Evaluation: what I have to work with
2. Aligning our efforts
3. Who we are and what we want the world to think of us?
4. Sales. Sales. Sales.

It’s interesting that we need sales and revenues to grow but we can’t grow if we don’t understand who we are and what we stand for. If I can’t explain it then how can my sales team communicate it to customers?

I started with a classic branding dilemma that most companies have;
"What do people think of us and what do we want the world to think about us. Position versus Positioning Statements."

In other words; A positioning statement is what we want the world to think. A statement of position, by contrast, admits the truth. Now lets narrow the gap.

With any company we need to get revenues thru the door so I am a firm believer to test test and test some more and practise along the way to re-fine it. So we set out to test our positioning statements and it’s interesting to see that people think we sell advertising. Ok - -we do but that’s not all that we do. We actually help people get more customers by improving not only their advertising channels – we improve their entire strategy of HOW to actually get more business. And it’s free advice.

Next lesson was the word FREE. (I have to admit I kinda suspected this was the case)

We sell advertising but as soon as we started to offer free advice to clients our value proposition decreased and our clients wanted more for free. More and more and more but would not buy advertising space. So we started to charge for our advice. Guess what? We got more clients instead.

This is a classic example of Positioning versus Position Statements. We were perceived as an ad sales company but we thought we are perceived as advertising experts helping companies get more business.
The hard part is to shift this perception so that not only can we sell more advertising spots but also sell our strategic services at a premium rate. That is my challenge over the next few months as we launch across Australia because our product is the only product in Australia.

Next post will be about how we will align ourselves in the Social Media Space to get more business. This is going to be a tricky exercise because I can't be "social" if I don't know what my clients are looking for. Hmmmm :)