Posts tagged "Positioning"

In their 1981 marketing strategy classic (it must be a classic, there’s even a 20th Anniversary Edition!), Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout noted that if a brand occupies the category leadership position on the “ladder of consideration” of a customer, that position was essentially unassailable. The “high ground”, if you will. Their caveat, of course, was that the positioned leader could conceivably make a mistake significant enough to cause their displacement from atop that ladder…or that a competitor could “bring in a new ladder” with new discriminating variables favoring the competitor and more important to the consumer. Otherwise the category leader could remain on top indefinitely. With no variance in B2C vs. B2B. (more…)

We who’ve been in the marketing communications business for years have certainly been exposed to a myriad of brand repositionings in our professional careers…and most likely participated in more than a few as well.  Some simple and easy, some incredibly complex, but all with the intention of moving the perception of the brand closer to what the prospective customer wants to buy (even if requiring change in what the marketer has to “sell”).
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By now, I’m sure you’ve all heard about Getty Image’s PicScout bot that’s crawling the internet searching for unauthorized use of their images. It looks like it’s been around for at least a couple years. If you haven’t, well, Getty Images is a client of PicScout [www.picscout.com], an Israeli-based company employing technology that essentially trolls the internet searching for images and comparing algorithms to libraries of companies they represent. Getty Images is one of several stock image sources PicScout lists as clients. With a glance on their customers webpage, you’ll see they also list Corbis, Image Source, Super Stock, and others. (more…)

Everyone has likely heard a few jokes starting with “A duck walks into a bar…”, and immediately become interested because of the unexpected imagery. Today, however, I walked into the office bathroom and was confronted with real imagery that also piqued interest. On top of the commode was a role of toilet paper fully packaged in white tissue with the word “green” depicted and underlined in green all over the package, and “office depot” in red, also underlined, but smaller and more subdued. Had it been Christmas time I might not have noticed. Everything is green and red then. But just after the 4th of July such packaging was unexpected. And inspired more contemplation than your average roll of toilet paper, which is rarely high on anyone’s “Wow! Look at that!” list. If ever. (more…)

A recent post by my colleague, Dick Hatch (about the slogan “Our people make the difference“) got me thinking. There are a number of common ad themes whose trite familiarity makes them invisible at best, laughable at worst. I’d like to nominate another candidate.

I’ve seen dozens, maybe hundreds, of banks, CPAs, furniture stores, builders, car dealers, and many other businesses claim in one way or another that they are:

“Big enough to serve you, small enough to care.” (more…)

For kicks, I tried Googling this tagline. On this particular day, the results produced several construction companies, a few carpet cleaners, realtors and brokers, hospitals, therapeutic clinics, a TV station, a web page from Deloitte Touche, a security firm, machine and metal fabricators, a change management consultant, staffing firms, a used car dealer, various banks, a plastic mold die maker, a dentist, an old WalMart uniform patch (with the slogan) for sale on e-Bay, a chemical company, a full-service boatyard, and a boatload of other indistinguishable, undifferentiated manufacturers, services, and firms in untold other industries. Unbelievable! (Granted, not in all cases were they necessarily using the line as a corporate positioning or tagline per say, although more did than not.) Doesn’t matter. They were using it as a point of differentiation in some form, and differentiating it is not. (more…)

Positioning starts at home. If you can’t get positioning right inside the organization, there’s little chance it will be successful in the marketplace.

Typically, B2C marketing and sales have little personal interaction. If the purchase is fairly substantial, e.g., say for a $500 piece of consumer electronics, we may do some purchase research and talk to friends. However, the only personal interaction with the selling party during the buying cycle may well be the cashier.

That’s not the way it is in B2B marketing and sales. (more…)

Today I ran across a great blog posting at Brandeo regarding positioning strategy. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiments expressed in it. While the blog post mentions two consumer-marketing examples, the issues are equally relevant and critical to B2B marketing.

Concurring with the author, I believe that there is often too little time paid to developing the proper positioning, and that too often positioning strategy is confused by ambiguous talk about the amorphous “brand.” Discussions about the brand usually get people thinking about things they can see, like visual identities and taglines. While brand strategy should be nearly synonymous with positioning strategy, in today’s world it generally isn’t. (more…)

The B2B world is wrestling with how to effectively harness “word of blog” marketing—let alone the glittery new world of social media marketing. How can we use social media sites to create that viral buzz that sends awareness and sales soaring? We see what occasionally happens in the consumer market, and we want some of that.

Let’s be real, though. While that’s a great objective, the B2B world is still struggling with basic blogging, let alone creating something that goes viral on some social media site. Last year, Forrester Research found that only 29 of the Fortune 500 firms sponsored business-oriented blogs.

B2B blogging brings up a bunch of questions. Who’s going to write for the blog? Do we have enough content to support it? Will we continue to support the blog after a couple months? How do we control the brand in that environment? Will we publish negative blog comments? Who’s responsible for the blog? Public relations? Marketing? (more…)