making a statement

If you want your marketing efforts to fire, you need to give them direction and focus by zeroing in on a positioning statement. A positioning statement tells the market exactly what you promise to deliver. Having a good one is vital as it differentiates you from your competitors and means more impact and less waste from your marketing budget.

A positioning statement is one of the key elements in any brand as it can generate an emotional feeling in the target market. It works for small business:

Marketing Angels - Delivering marketing that works

Sustainable (building, design, landscaping) - Bringing the built environment to life

Pure Heaven (all natural body products) - Creating a peace of heaven for everyone

Opic (executive coaching and development) - Empowering people through knowledge

Vandenberg Reid (solicitors) - Understanding matters

And it works for big business:

BMW - sheer driving pleasure

VB - for a hard earned thirst

Jeans West - fits best

Aussie Home Loans - we'll save you

Hungry Jacks - the burgers are better at Hungry Jacks

Avis - we try harder

So, why should you spend time developing a clear positioning statement?

1.It saves time and money in developing and executing your marketing tactics.

2.It provides more effective communications through consistent, cohesive and differentiated messages.

3.It builds market awareness and higher brand recognition

4.It enables advocacy and referral from your customers, as it is easy for people to quote the positioning statement to explain what you 'promise'

5.And hence, it helps achieve the company's desired sustainable leadership position.

The aim of your positioning statement is to reflect today's reality yet help move your company toward it's sought after, achievable, differentiated and sustainable leadership position.

There are some essential questions that need to be answered before an effective positioning statement can be developed

·What business are you actually in

·Who you are as a business, what are the key values of the business

·Who is your target market

·What are the 'hot buttons' of those target clientele - what are they looking for?

·Who are your competitors and how are they positioning themselves

·What's different about your business

·Is there a unique benefit to be derived from your product or services?

Don't go for the easy option of claiming to be a 'leader' or 'the best', as it's a big promise to deliver on. Speaking it, does not make it so. Actions speak louder than words, so follow through with the promises of the brand. Trust is such an important element of building a brand. Trust is slow to evolve but quick to evaporate.

Work hard to reveal the unique offering of your business and keep in mind that a positioning statement can be very different to the current market position of your business.That's why it's important to find out how you are perceived in the market now, in order to develop 'how you would like to be perceived' in the future. Don't assume you know how the market perceives you either, go out and talk to them.

You'll need to interview a cross section of

·Current clients

·Long terms clients

·Recently acquired clients

·Disgruntled clients

·Target clients

·Key influencers of your market, such as media or government bodies.

And the sorts of questions you need to ask are not derived from a 'client satisfaction' questionnaire. You need to ask questions like:

1.If you were to describe our company to a colleague what words would you use

2.What services do we provide

3.How are we different from our competitors

When you know where you are at, you can then start to discuss where you want to be!

Where do you want to be?

Once you have developed your positioning statement, communicating it to the market won't be your only focus, as everyone in the business needs to agree on it or at least be informed of it. That's an internal branding exercise, but I'll leave that discussion for another column!

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