Repositioning Positioning – thought starters from The Value Engineers
Posted by Liana Gregorians on March 16, 2012
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As many of you will know, here at The Value Engineers we pride ourselves on out-thinking – asking the right questions, challenging the status quo, and coming up with inspiring solutions.
So, we were delighted to be able to share a bit of our out-thinking on Wednesday 14th March as Giles Lury, our Chairman, presented a webinar on the topic of Repositioning Positioning – a challenge to the incumbent brand frameworks, and a fresh perspective on what the future of positioning might be.
If you weren’t able to join us, or if you’d like to listen again, then just click below - and let us know what you think!
The proposition that you have put forward, which seems to suggest a more self-focused idea of positioning, does that not risk isolating the customer, who obviously is the most important factor in the success of a brand. Surely any decision about the development of a brand should be focused on the needs/desires of the customer- and without a philosophy that take’s into account the needs of the consumer you will be shooting yourself in the foot even if you then intend to position yourself for a wider market space. If one’s business is not reflective of society then it would become potentially damaging to that businesses success. Take Apple for instance, Steve Jobs may have had a clear brand identity which was based upon their own values, but this was surely largely informed by his understanding of his customer base- and he didn’t necessarily aim at a wide consumer base, it was just that the ethos and product was desirable enough by a large enough amount of the public. (Jobs is perhaps an extreme case as he understood the customers better than they perhaps understood themselves.) In comparison, Kodak, formerly the leader in their market, have struggled in recent years to remain relevant. They stubbornly stuck to their ethos of ‘capturing moments of our lives’ which they seemed to consider to be reliant upon ‘film’, refusing to move to the ever increasing digital market. Had they been better informed, and less stubborn they may have still been the market leader.
The problem is that the ‘Reasons to Believe’ and the propositions, which are reliant upon the philosophy, have to be convincing- therefore if the philosophy isn’t itself highly reflective of wider social trends, potentially having perhaps a broader philosophy rather than a broader range of propositions, then it will be difficult to become/remain a growing business.
Totally agree with the careful separation of propositions and brand proposition, but we need to keep in mind how closely they must relate (one should not lead the other, they should work together).
3 quotes I really liked:
1. “If we let the consumer define our brands [too much?] we end up with bland, undifferentiated brands” – the classic Apple lesson regarding customer research.
2. “Preserve the core whilst stimulating change” – sets just the right tone to avoid the awful ‘let’s just stick to the knitting’ anti-innovation road to decline.
3. “A principle isn’t a principle unless it costs you money”.
But I would challenge a few things. Having worked in service industries all my career (retail then mobile) I still feel like a lot of marketing thinking is somewhat too rooted in the ‘classic’ FMCG thinking, whilst we live in a largely service-based economy. Does that matter? Yes.
Products, in the FMCG sense can be incredibly tightly controlled for consistency (I know from my retail days how good this can be). But services rely on people. And I worry that too much brand marketing thinking is top down and done ‘to’ employees, not ‘with’ them.
Similarly in services, the idea of separating brand and marketing I disagree with. A brand cannot be separated from the product/experience and treated as a philosophical idea. They are the same thing. Separating ‘brand advertising’ and ‘product’ has led to a lot of consumer apathy, and huge amounts of time wasted on internal battles within organisations. Someone says their team ‘owns the brand’. What old-fashioned rot. Particularly in service industries, no-one owns the brand. You deliver an experience collectively, and a consumer decides how they perceive it.
So what? Well, the brands you use as examples are excellent. And they all have a fundamental belief that they started with – to do something differently, to bring a little magical entertainment, to launch an exciting new technology that could change lives.
So a lot of modern brands would do well to spend more time with all their people. What is it the they think they do differently to other places? What do customers tell them they like about their product or service and why?
We need more bottom-up “this is who we really are” brand thinking to balance a little too much “this is who we want to be” defining from the top. This is important because too much top down separation of the brand tends to lend itself to too much tinkering, which confuses poeple in an organisation and wastes time. More focus on the core of what the company is about.
What were the founding reasons for the company, the brand and how do its people deliver it today, not just what the marketing department (including me) would like it to be. When the two meet, it’s a winner.
Rich