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Your resume is more than a list of job titles; it’s your opportunity to showcase your ability to drive brand growth and deliver measurable results. Our AI-enhanced resume rewrites are strategically crafted to reflect your marketing expertise. By highlighting your unique value and results, you’ll catch the attention of hiring managers looking for candidates who know how to grow brands and businesses.

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Networking is crucial in today’s job market, especially for roles in branding and marketing, where relationships are paramount. Branding Strategy Insider + Jennie Johnson’s advanced tools go beyond standard job searches, offering key insights into your target companies. With access to contact information for decision-makers in marketing departments and at advertising agencies, you’ll have a direct path to the people who influence and make hiring decisions. This focus on targeted networking sets you apart from the crowd, making your application stand out.

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Our AI career coaching isn’t just about finding a job; it’s about fostering a career. With personalized advice for long-term growth in the marketing profession, we help you make strategic career moves that support your professional aspirations. Whether you’re looking for leadership roles or a transition within the industry, our data-driven insights equip you with the tools you need to make confident decisions that align with your career path.

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With a deep understanding of the branding and marketing landscape, Branding Strategy Insider + Jennie Johnson specializes in helping professionals land impactful roles. Below are just a few of the marketing roles filled:

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO): The strategic head of marketing, responsible for overseeing the entire marketing strategy, brand positioning, and alignment with business goals.

Growth Marketing Manager: Focuses on customer acquisition, retention, and revenue growth using data-driven tactics and cross-functional collaboration to drive business growth.

Brand Manager: Manages the perception and positioning of a brand, ensuring alignment with target audiences, and maintaining brand consistency across all channels.

Digital Marketing Manager: Leads digital marketing strategies, including SEO, SEM, content marketing, social media, and online advertising to maximize reach and engagement.

Content Marketing Strategist: Develops and manages content strategies to engage audiences, build brand loyalty, and drive conversions through storytelling and value-driven content.

Product Marketing Manager: Oversees the positioning, launch, and promotion of products, working closely with sales and product teams to align on messaging and market strategy.

Social Media Manager: Manages a brand’s social media presence, content, and engagement strategy to foster community and brand loyalty across platforms.

Customer Experience (CX) Strategist: Focuses on enhancing customer journeys and interactions across touchpoints, ensuring a seamless and positive experience to boost satisfaction and retention.

Performance Marketing Manager: Drives paid advertising campaigns with a focus on measurable results and ROI across channels like Google Ads, social media, and display networks.

Marketing Data Analyst: Analyzes marketing data to inform strategies, optimize campaigns, and drive better ROI through insights into customer behavior and marketing performance.

Influencer Marketing Specialist: Manages partnerships with influencers to enhance brand visibility, credibility, and reach, leveraging influencer platforms and direct relationships.

SEO/SEM Specialist: Focuses on optimizing search engine rankings and driving traffic through organic (SEO) and paid (SEM) strategies, with a strong focus on keywords and analytics.

Marketing Operations Manager: Ensures that marketing technology and processes run smoothly, supporting the entire marketing team in areas such as campaign management, reporting, and data integration.

Creative Director: Leads creative direction for marketing campaigns, ensuring visual and content assets align with the brand’s identity and goals.

Public Relations (PR) Specialist: Manages the brand’s public image and media relations, crafting narratives that promote brand reputation and manage external communication.

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“We keep trying to articulate our difference, but it feels vague compared to our competitors.”

“Our positioning sounds just like everyone else in the market right now.”

“My aim is to find a competitive advantage that no competitor can replicate.”

Finding The Emotional Hook

Business leaders and B2B marketers operating under a single brand — but selling multiple products and services — all struggle to differentiate in markets where it can be incredibly challenging to show how they are genuinely unique in a distinctive, ownable, instantly recognizable way.

Articulating differentiation is hard. Yet, as marketing-oriented leaders, we still aspire to craft positioning that resonates emotionally with buyers and makes our brand and product/service both memorable and compelling.

And it’s easy to adopt strategies that are indistinguishable from competitors.

To stand out, we need to connect with our audience at a fundamental human level. We need to tap into the underlying emotions, pains, needs and desires that drive their behavior. When we understand what truly matters to our customers, we can identify powerful connection points that inspire action.

Today, let’s explore how The Blake Project develops an authentic emotional positioning that can help your brand form meaningful relationships with its audience.

Know Your Audience Deeply

The starting point is getting crystal clear on who you’re talking to. Moving beyond basic demographics and psychographics means understanding what your audience cares about at a core level.

– What motivates them? What gets them excited and invested?

– What frustrates them? What obstacles and pain points keep them up at night?

– What aspirations do they have? What outcomes are they striving for?

– What fears or doubts hold them back? What risks make them uncertain?

Uncover this qualitative, emotional intel through surveys, interviews, social listening, and customer advisory boards. Empathize fully with your audience’s inner world. Once you grasp their deeper emotional essence, you can craft messaging that truly resonates.

Determine Desired Outcomes

With a rich picture of your audience, analyze what goals and outcomes your offering enables them to achieve. Look past surface features to identify the higher purpose or end benefit you provide.

The great news here is that this is also a chance to get inside the heads of your service delivery subject matter experts and leaders. They have so much to bring and to offer, and including them develops a greater sense of connection and ownership to the very assets the business will be using to sell what they do.

For example, a collaboration software company realized its tool wasn’t just about efficiencies — it helped leaders foster innovation and build thriving cultures. The desired outcome was unleashing human potential.

Get specific on the meaningful impacts you uniquely deliver, like:

• Helping people accomplish important life and business goals
• Making complex tasks simpler and less frustrating
• Providing peace of mind in uncertain situations
• Enabling self-expression, passion and purpose
• Overcoming fears and fulfilling meaningful aspirations

Find Powerful Connection Points

Now, match these outcomes to the core emotional drivers within your audience. Where is there strong alignment between what matters most to them and what your brand provides?

Look for connection points like:

• Fulfilling a longing for mastery, achievement, or status
• Providing the freedom people crave
• Helping overcome a major anxiety or source of stress
• Enabling someone to become their best self
• Aligning with a deeper sense of purpose

These intersections represent the most compelling value you offer. This forms the basis for emotional differentiation.

Develop A Core Theme

Distill your key connections down into a simple, coherent emotional positioning theme. This core theme should capture the special way you elevate customers’ lives.

Strong themes often involve:

• Helping people progress on a journey
• Overcoming a frustration or limitation
• Achieving a state of being (belonging, confidence, calm)
• Accomplishing an important goal
• Contributing to a greater good

Emotional themes like these help you stand out from rational, feature-focused B2B positioning. They form the heart of your unique value.

Build Collateral That Brings Your Theme to Life

With a core theme established, infuse it throughout your content and campaigns. Develop messaging, stories and visuals that vividly convey how you impact people’s inner worlds.

• Website copy – lead with emotional headlines and value propositions
• Email sequences – incorporate themed narratives
• Case studies – highlight human stories, transformations and outcomes
• Videos – dramatize how you fulfill yearnings and alleviate pain points
• Sales enablement – train sales people and subject matter experts to consistently connect with what matters most

By consistently tying back to your emotive B2B positioning theme, you’ll form deeper bonds with your audience. You’ll move beyond rational reasons to choose you to inspire genuine affection for your brand.

Articulating Your Differentiator Is Only The Start

People are fundamentally emotional creatures. To craft differentiation that resonates, take the time to truly understand your audience at the human level. Uncover their inner drivers and connect your value to what they aspire to be, achieve, and feel. Distill this into an authentic emotional positioning theme that runs through all your content. This empathetic approach to messaging lets you build relationships beyond transactions and form lasting bonds with the people you serve.

And yet… Crafting differentiation that resonates emotionally and articulating your positioning is only the first step. Next, you need a reliable system to translate these ideas into tangible results.

This is where a Go-To-Market Operating System comes in. A GtmOS acts as a detailed creative brief and campaign playbook that aligns positioning, messaging, and marketing across your organization. It provides a blueprint for executing campaigns that drive real awareness, leads and sales.

With a GtmOS, you can train stakeholders company-wide on conveying your brand story consistently. You can rapidly create campaigns and content that brings your emotional positioning to life across every channel and audience. And you can analyze performance and optimize execution to steadily improve results.

So once you’ve developed a compelling emotive positioning, implement it across the customer journey with a go-to-market system. This combination provides the strategy and execution foundation to truly maximize your marketing. With these tools in place, you can build lasting connections and create a brand that delivers a meaningful difference in your marketplace.

At The Blake Project we are helping clients from around the world, in all stages of development, redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change with our Go To Market Operating System. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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Ingredient brands are well-known brands with well-known qualities that are included as a component or feature of another brand or product to enhance perceptions and the marketability of that brand or product. The ingredient brand calls out unique features or performance and is often used to increase the acceptance of a product or brand that is using a new technology identified by the ingredient brand.

Ingredient branding differs from brand licensing strategy in the following ways:

• Ingredient branding increases awareness and communicates to a wide audience the benefits that products and services can provide.
• Ingredient branding occurs when another company uses a product as an element of its own product.
• The product being included is called the “ingredient.” The product that incorporates the ingredient is called the “host.” For example, DuPont is the host of Teflon.
• Ingredient branding is largely successful because of the questions it forces on the competition. “Does this computer have an Intel Chip inside?”

The list of successful ingredient brands continues to grow; some of the most successful include; Android, Bluetooth, Bosch, Cinnabon, Dolby Digital, Downy, Heavenly Bed, Geek Squad, Gor-Tex, Hemi, Intel Inside, Kevlar, NutraSweet, OnStar, Splenda, Stainmaster, Scotchgard, Swarovski, Techron, Tetra Pak, Velcro and Vibram.

To be successful, ingredient brands must possess the following key attributes:

• The ingredient must be highly differentiated in order to add value to the overall brand
  • This means the ingredient should have a separate name and logo and overall purpose because the added value comes from the extra identity
• The host brand should be well-established in the market before employing an ingredient branding strategy
  • The consumer needs to first understand the host brand and then find additional value in the ingredient
• The ingredient needs to be subservient to the host brand, otherwise the message can be lost

If you are considering this strategy for your brand be sure to consider the pros and cons to ingredient branding.

The Blake Project Can Help You Build A New Revenue Stream Through Licensing Beginning With A Brand Licensing Audit

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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We think you will find that each offers a great deal of actionable insights and is well worth your time.

1. Chief Marketing Officers At Work
   Josh Steimle offers 29 exclusive, in-depth interviews with chief marketing officers like Jeff Jones of Target, Linda Boff of GE, Brian Kenny of the Harvard Business School, Trish Mueller of The Home Depot, and Seth Farbman of Spotify. This book helps C-level executives and others who interface and collaborate with marketing departments to understand how marketing drives growth at both startup and enterprise levels and how marketing has moved from art to science.
2. Invisible Selling Machine
   This book explores the concept of creating automated marketing systems that work seamlessly in the background. Ryan Deiss guides CMOs on building effective marketing funnels and leveraging automation for sustainable growth.
3. Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
   Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown delve into the principles of growth hacking, providing actionable strategies for achieving rapid and sustainable growth. CMOs can learn how to experiment, iterate, and optimize marketing strategies for maximum impact.
4. Contagious: How To Build Word Of Mouth In The Digital Age
   Jonah Berger explores the science behind why certain ideas and products go viral. CMOs can gain insights into creating contagious content and campaigns that capture the attention of their target audience.
5. Building A StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
   Donald Miller introduces a framework for crafting clear and compelling brand messages. CMOs can learn how to create a narrative that resonates with customers, making their brand more memorable and persuasive.
6. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation To Create Radically Successful Businesses
   While not exclusively focused on marketing, Eric Ries’ book introduces the concept of lean thinking and rapid experimentation. CMOs can apply these principles to marketing strategies, ensuring agility and responsiveness in a rapidly changing landscape.
7. The CMO Manifesto
   The CMO Manifesto – A 100-Day Action Plan for Marketing Change Agents by John Ellett is the essential guidebook for marketing executives who have been chartered to disrupt the status quo and become leaders of positive change at their companies.
8. The Next CMO: A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence
   The world is changing, and so is the marketing profession. CMOs and the next generation of marketing leaders need to read this book by Peter Mahoney to develop a strategy for ensuring operational excellence to achieve their goals.
   
9. CMO To CRO: The Revenue Takeover By The Next Generation Executive
   Mike Geller, Brandi Starr, and Rolly Keenan shows CMOs how to reach their potential and stand out as more than a marketing professional. In CMO to CRO, the focus is how to bring revenue to the forefront and make every team’s number one objective a seamless customer experience.
10. Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make Competition Irrelevant
    W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne introduce the concept of “Blue Ocean Strategy,” encouraging CMOs to explore untapped market spaces. The book provides a framework for creating innovative marketing approaches that set a company apart from the competition.

At The Blake Project, we are helping CMOs from around the world, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. We help accelerate growth through strategy workshops and extended engagements. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Join 20,000 Marketers Who Have Taken A Transformative Journey To A Bigger Future In Mark Ritson’s Mini MBAs In Marketing And Brand Management Courses.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The duo emphasized the importance of creating a unique and compelling position in the mind as that is where the battle to stand out is won or lost. Even though the world of marketing has evolved significantly, the core principles of brand positioning put forth by Trout and Ries continue to shape successful marketing strategies in every business category and sector around the globe.

In the early 2000s, Jack Trout was a mentor of mine, often sharing his wisdom with me about the world of brands. He was quick to point out that what had changed since originating the concept was the enormous rise in competition, and this one aspect made positioning more valuable. He backed up his thinking in Differentiate or Die. Practitioners of brand management will not dispute that the competitive landscape has changed; however, most agree that positioning has evolved from a fixed position to a direction.

John Gerzma does an excellent job of framing positioning’s evolution in the context of maintaining relevance.

“We live in an age of ‘compressed change.’ Brand building is completely different from the way it used to be. Positioning used to be planting a flag and stepping back. Now the terrain is moving at such speed and ferocity that it’s difficult to think in a static way about positioning. Erosion is critical to track. You have to be able to figure out why consumers are falling out of love with brands. Consumers don’t just want brands to be different and relevant but to keep being different and relevant. …. Successful brands recognize this and know it’s not a place, it’s a direction. They must constantly evolve, not stand still.”

Put another way; brands are never finished. You must think of them as a river, not a pond, and move with the currents accordingly. It is the paradox of brands; you have to change to stay consistent.

The Core Of Brand Positioning

At its core, brand positioning revolves around identifying unique value that your brand can own. This involves finding an unmet need or underserved niche and then presenting the brand as the solution to that problem. Trout and Ries argued that being the first in a category is crucial for achieving a strong brand position. They famously stated, “It’s better to be first in the mind than first in the marketplace.”

The key elements of successful brand positioning, according to Trout and Ries, include simplicity, consistency, and authenticity. A brand must convey a clear, easy-to-understand message consistently across all touchpoints, staying true to its core values and promises.

The core of their thinking can be summarized as follows:

1. Focus On The Consumer’s Mind: Successful brand positioning begins with understanding the target audience and their needs. It’s about finding a distinct position that resonates with the consumers’ aspirations, desires, and pain points.
2. Own A Word In The Consumer’s Mind: Brands should strive to associate themselves with a single word or concept in the consumer’s mind. This mental association should be unique and hard to replicate by competitors.
3. The Power Of Simplicity: Trout and Ries emphasized the need for simplicity in brand positioning and how it is articulated. A clear and straightforward message is more likely to stick in the consumer’s mind and create a lasting impact. Sometimes that straightforward message is obvious, which is an advantage. If the message is obvious to you, it will be obvious to your customers. (Papa Johns: Better Ingredients, Better Pizza)
4. Emphasize Differences, Not Similarities: It’s crucial for brands to differentiate themselves from their competitors rather than trying to emulate them. Highlighting relevant and meaningful differences creates a stronger position in the market. There are times when similarities are important. For example, you would expect to see a security guard at a bank and perhaps a vault. These industry-standard elements help brands associate with the wider idea of banking and reinforce trust with consumers.
5. Consistency Is Key: Brand positioning is not a one-time effort. Consistency in messaging, branding, and customer experience is essential to reinforce the brand’s position over time. Relentless consistency is the trust-builder of brands.

Positioning Requires More

As with all strategies, Positioning by itself is not enough; you must have the discipline to keep your focus and relentlessly execute to stay ‘on brand.’ In working with more than 200 brands and businesses, we have found that the unsung hero of brand positioning is the consensus built with internal stakeholders on who represents the most value, what the brand stands for and stands against, and how the brand will compete. Consensus ensures the strategy is understood and adopted.

In The Blake Project’s brand strategy workshops, we help leadership teams set a course for a bigger future using various tools and techniques to arrive at the most advantageous brand positioning and, in the process, ensure that all voices are heard, and participants are clear on what to do in bringing the strategy to life. We call this the most important day in a decade, and it is not work for your agency or a consultant to do for you; you need to be intimately involved in its creation.

Back to Jack, his wisdom was spread out over 13 books that include classics such as Marketing Warfare, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Differentiate or Die, Repositioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change, and Crisis, Big Brands. Big Trouble, A Genie’s Wisdom, In Search Of The Obvious, and Trout on Strategy. His thinking (and that of Al Ries) has largely been proven timeless for the simple fact that the human condition has not changed, as value still has to be encoded in the mind. Marketers begin that work with customer research informed brand positioning.

The Blake Project Can Help Differentiate Your Brand: Simply email us, for more about how we can help you define the unique value your brand can own in the marketplace.

Join 20,000 Marketers Who Have Taken A Transformative Journey To A Bigger Future In Mark Ritson’s Mini MBAs In Marketing And Brand Management Courses.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers