Most of the brand messaging they see will be analytical and based on assertions of “better-ness” in the form of ingredient comparisons, quality assertions, or claims of formulation and taste superiority. What’s missing is the type of beneficial distinctiveness that sets a brand far enough apart that such comparisons become moot.

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Moreover, we know that consumer actions and decisions to buy are governed by the brain’s Limbic System, a part of our physiology that is influenced through emotion and not rational messages. Humans are not hard-wired to function as fact-based decision-making machines. It’s always heart-over-head. Surprising to be sure because we all like to think of ourselves as rationally informed beings. In reality, preferences are influenced by how people feel in the presence of your brand.

• The battle for market share, sales velocity, and sustainable business results resides in the six inches of grey matter between both ears of your brand’s core and prospective customer base. Your real marketplace challenge is how to secure and maintain mental real estate.

However, many brands are preoccupied with trumpeting their product features and benefits. Ultimately, your business success will be proportional to how greatly (or not) your brand matters to its intended audience. Mattering is an outcome of occupying a unique and positive frame inside your consumers’ minds. When your brand is distinctively positioned with users in a relevant way, you can secure a place in the brain that continuously emerges to reinforce brand preference and purchase.

Take the best-positioned brand in the beer industry. Much to the chagrin of all other large beer manufacturers, Corona is in a class by itself, having honed and invested in its association with beach, surf, sun, and vacation-in-a-bottle vibes. Even the lime ritual helps fortify the mental associations of wanting to relax in that sunny beach locale while enjoying a cold bottle of Corona. Notice the brand never talks about its liquid, brewing credentials, or quality of ingredients. It’s an emotional proposition and distinctively owned by Corona as a desirable lifestyle image association. This is positioning at its finest in a business where brands routinely fly over this important work by running a clever ad campaign featuring a catchy slogan.

Nike doesn’t sell running shoes. It’s an emotional and aspirational brand. One that inspires passion and commitment to athletic endeavor and achievement. ‘Just Do It’ is a more than memorable call to action. It’s a state of mind and purpose. It works to plant a positive association in the consumer’s mind by surfacing their quest for self-improvement. The predominant voice of Nike’s brand is decidedly not about running shoe design and engineering, advanced materials, or other product feature details. Nike owns the emotional context around a powerful desire for personal achievement.

• Do you see where this is going when you rise above self-promoting product features and focus on the consumer and their lives and how you can operate as an enabler of their hopes and dreams. Suddenly, you find yourself in rarified territory, exploring a path to uniquely position your brand in a more powerful way – creating a meaningful correlation that can take root in the consumer’s brain.

Far too many brands don’t labor at this. Instead, they focus squarely on themselves — through a circular story about product bona fides and feature advantages. It’s important to consider that consumers no longer buy products. A purchase is now a flag and symbol of what they believe in, their values, and who they are. Want to have a deeper relationship with your core users? Then, imbue your brand with deeper meaning. Give them something larger than themselves to embrace and advocate for.

• By doing so, you open an incredibly important strategic examination of how to create a memorable, sticky brand position. Consumers are naturally drawn to a brand with a higher purpose and belief system that aligns with their own.

Just be careful not to conflate a strong brand position with an advertising campaign. Creating emotional context around your brand and its “why” is a more demanding exercise. We refer to it as curating your Brand Stand — a decisive view about why your brand exists and its human-relevant purpose. It will serve as an anchor for every business decision coming after it, the value you create and how you do what you do.

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We won’t devote space here to examining all the prescriptive details around brand positioning discovery. Perhaps the most important guidance we can offer is embracing uniqueness and differentiation—especially important in business categories where sameness (most of them) is a systemic problem.

A Good Place To Start…

• “We are the only brand that delivers _____________.” What does the consumer get from you that they can’t get anywhere else? This is one of the toughest questions your brand will face. Remember, it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing on a trivial distinction that won’t deliver a genuine path to differentiation.
• What are your core customers’ beliefs and lifestyle aspirations? How can you further support and enable their hopes and dreams as your brand’s superpower? Suddenly, you are marketing something more vital to them than the table stakes expectation of a well-designed and produced product.

Positioning Is Most Effective When Trust Breaks Out

Trust is essential to unlocking the business value of a unique brand positioning. Trusted brands retain loyalty, motivate repeat purchases, and deliver a receptive audience for the trial of innovations. That said, trust can only be earned. Here’s a six-point checklist to help you think about trust:

1. Values and beliefs – a higher purpose brand that has a belief system beyond transactional considerations is immediately trustworthy
2. Consistency – when the experience with your brand across all points of contact is reinforced through repeat performances, you earn trust
3. Keeping promises (walking the walk) – when earning trust, efforts to demonstrate dependability through actions and behaviors are more powerful than words
4. Social proof – validation and verification of your competence through the testimonials of real people is powerful affirmation of trustworthiness
5. Transparency – another form of validation is taking consumers behind the corporate curtain for an unfiltered look at what you do and how you do it. Showing extraordinary openness is  characteristic of a trusted brand
6. Help rather than hype – If you truly care about your customer’s well-being and success, you will operate unselfishly as an enabler of their lifestyle goals and wishes, earning their trust along the way

A uniquely positioned and trusted brand is your organization’s most powerful business-building asset. Your devotion and energy to creating emotional connectivity and trustworthiness are the formula for rising above the competition and driving sustainable, profitable growth. Positioning creates a memorable place in the brain, while trust seals the deal. Together, they deliver a formidable and powerful business-building platform.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

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Good positioning, which is only partially under the control of the brand marketer, carries a variety of benefits for the brand: (1) greater recognition and memorability by consumers, (2) a reason to buy, that is, the value provided by the product, and (3) a clear basis for choice over competitive offerings. Such consumer centric benefits are often associated with greater frequency of consideration of the brand by consumers, greater market share in the relevant market, greater consumer loyalty as measured by repeat purchase, greater willingness among consumers to pay a price premium, and greater financial return for the firm. If you have ever seen an ad and asked what exactly they are advertising, you have seen an example of poor positioning. Hence, the critiques of Jaguar advertising: no car is shown or implied; it looks like rather common ads for fashion or cosmetic products; no reason to buy or even identification of what to buy; different from what?

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The world changes and such changes often include changes in consumer needs, lifestyles, and values, changes in technology, and changes in competitors’ offerings. What was once of value, or a point of differentiation may become less so. Thus, changes in a positioning statement of a brand, repositioning, is often required in response to such changes. There are a number of signals that repositioning might be necessary: a downward trend in sales, eroding margins and/or market share, failure to capture new customers, especially those just entering the market, technology that creates new or better benefits, and loss of differentiation as a result of changes in competitors or competitive offerings, among others.

It is important to differentiate repositioning from rebranding and brand extension. Repositioning involves changing a brand’s message, image, or associations in ways that retain the core identity of the brand. Thus, Crest successfully repositioned itself by differentiating itself as the toothpaste for fighting cavities, a value proposition supported by endorsement of the American Dental Association. More recently, Old Spice changed its image by appealing to younger consumers with its “be like a man” message, while still retaining its associations with an attractive scent, ships, and other elements of its brand. The new positioning did not alienate older users, but did provide reasons for new customers to try the product.

In contrast, rebranding involves changes to the whole identity of a product. It may involve changing the brand’s look and feel, name, logo, associations, or even use. Listerine began life as a surgical antiseptic and was even advertised as a dandruff rinse before establishing its contemporary identity as a mouthwash. Rebranding often involves abandoning the original brand name and any who may still find the brand attractive. It is often done in response to negative associations with the brand. One the other hand, Apple has been a master at evolving its brand identity overtime, starting out as a computer hardware company but evolving into an umbrella for a wide range of digital products and content. Updates of existing elements of the brand, such as logos and fonts, are typically referred to as a brand refresh because they do not change the core identity of the brand. Finally, brand extensions represent efforts to extend product or service offerings into new, different categories. Thus, Crest has expanded from the name of a toothpaste to an umbrella brand for a host of dental hygiene products. Brand extensions almost always involve some repositioning of the original brand because they change how consumers think about the brand, the value or benefit(s) offered, and the points of differentiation.

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It is important for brand managers to understand and clearly articulate what they are trying to accomplish and how they hope to influence consumers regardless of whether the issue is repositioning, rebranding, refreshing, or extending a brand. An especially important consideration is the degree to which any change in current positioning influences current customers even if the intention is to attract new customers. Relevant changes in customer behavior are not just whether existing customers and new customers will buy, but also how often they buy, and what price premium they will pay, if any.

Any change in strategy and positioning needs to include an analysis of the target customers, new and existing, the effect of the change on some relevant behavior, such as purchase or price paid, and the financial implications of the change and resulting market response. Whatever the strategy there needs to be a clear and strong value proposition and a differentiating message. Effects of any change are measurable in advance and the costs of such measurement are modest relative to what is at risk. Change is inevitable; response to change is a choice. In the words of Steve Jobs: “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity, not a threat.”

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Dr. David Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Marketing and Business Law, Loyola Marymount University, Author, Financial Dimensions Of Marketing Decisions.

At The Blake Project, we help clients from around the world, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable at critical moments of change. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

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Kevin Clancy was a pioneering giant. One of only two ‘three-fers’ ever, as I term it: Market Research Council’s Hall of Fame, 2008. ARF’s Great Mind Award, 2012. AMA’s Charles Coolidge Parlin Award, 2015. Of the few people who have meant a lot to my career over the years, Kevin’s influence was the greatest and most meaningful. I joined Yankelovich specifically to work with and learn from Kevin. I continue to think in the ways that Kevin taught me about positioning, pricing, segmentation, and forecasting. Kevin was a brilliant communicator, especially of complicated ideas, and I still borrow from the things I watched him do in front of a room. Especially his tongue-in-cheek humor. He mentored many of us, and as word of his passing has gotten out, the accolades and grateful memories have been pouring in on social media and text threads. His professional legacy is enormous.

So, today, I want to share three important lessons—overarching ones—that I learned from Kevin, with a bit of Kevin’s story tied to each.

Marketing Intelligence. This was the tagline for Yankelovich Clancy Shulman when I joined in 1991. The firm was a few years out from the merger of Yankelovich, Skelly & White and Clancy Shulman Associates. Many YSW people had left, so Kevin and his partner Robert Shulman were rebuilding the business with new people and new methodologies, a shift to what Kevin liked to say was “state-of-the-science modeling.”

Kevin began his professional career at BBDO in 1966 as one of a power trio of associate research directors. Kevin himself. Larry Light, who went on to run marketing and media services at BBDO, then Chairman of the international division of Bates, then global CMO for McDonald’s. And Lew Pringle, who went on to found and run marketing sciences for BBDO, then Chairman of BBDO Europe. The mid-sixties were abuzz with flux and transition for marketing research, a period when the field became much more deeply grounded in the newly emerging discipline of marketing science. Kevin, Larry and Lew were part of the close-knit community of researchers who were inventing and expanding the application of sophisticated modeling techniques, largely borrowed from operations research (OR), to the analysis of increasingly rich and detailed purchasing and media data using computing power newly accessible via time-sharing systems (and later, micro-computers).

Kevin believed unequivocally in the power of quantitative analysis. In his 1991 manifesto, The Marketing Revolution (HarperBusiness), Kevin had this to say about qualitative research: “The most popular form of preposterous research is the ubiquitous focus group.” Kevin minced no words. He added, “Yet companies love a good group, particularly if it’s done in an interesting place.” For Kevin, research should be optimization—you can hear OR echoing in his thinking. Companies are spending money, the goal of which is to maximize returns, period, end of story. This, then, is the job of research—optimizing marketing, which inherently makes research a quantitative discipline. Anything else from research, in Kevin’s view, is ‘preposterous.’ And actually perilous.

To get this message out to a bigger audience, Yankelovich ran a 1990 ad campaign that was a fancy version of a slide Kevin used to present (with a grin). It pictured a tombstone beneath the headline, “Every 7 minutes another marketing plan dies,” with the epitaph, “Here lies another ill-fated marketing plan.” The victim, one can assume, of preposterous research.

But Kevin wasn’t merely preaching optimization. He was very clear about what to optimize—profitability. Not survey metrics of what consumers think, believe, want or would buy. Or at least not such metrics apart from profitability. Nowadays, some measure of financial value is almost always built into segmentation and targeting. But not then. Kevin was channeling OR and marketing science into better research.

Mind you, it wasn’t that Kevin saw no role for qualitative or purely descriptive segmentation. Rather, he felt what consumers said had to be calibrated not taken literally. And he believed strongly that stopping with qual and making decisions just from that kind of information was a sure path to failure. True marketing intelligence required quantitative modeling, and Kevin had a tried-and-true way of making this point, one that always got people lining up after every conference speech.

Death Wish Marketing. This was Kevin’s favorite phrase for marketing decisions made with poor rigor, bad data and/or no science. Which made him no fan of brand managers. Too often, he had watched marketers rely on gut instinct to make critical and costly decisions. Which generally ended in failure. Kevin’s favorite way to open a presentation about how to do research or why to work with Yankelovich (or his later firm, Copernicus) was to cite the apocryphal stats on marketing failure rates (from two-thirds to 90 percent). In other words, marketing almost always fails. Then Kevin would tell you why.

Make it simple, he would say. Twelve decisions in a marketing plan—target, positioning, ad execution, product and packaging, pricing, distribution, media spend, media mix, media schedule, promotion spend, promotion mix and promotion schedule. Even simpler, assume there are only seven choices per decision (although in reality there are always many more). That means the number of potential marketing plans is 7 to the 12th power, or 13.841 billion possibilities. Gut instinct is a one in 13.841 billion bet. I.e., death wish marketing.

Kevin’s point was that the odds are well against making the correct decision in the absence of quantitatively-based decision-making. Or as Kevin liked to put it, “There are many roads to disaster. Only a few to the Emerald City.” Picking one without first using rigorous modeling and simulation methods to iterate through all alternatives is almost certain to be a bad decision. Death wish marketing is the inevitable product of death wish research.

The problem stems from marketers being too sure of themselves. It’s a job that attracts strong, confident personalities, but that mettle needs to be tempered. Kevin used to joke that brand managers have a high testosterone to IQ ratio. Kevin was all in favor of nerve and pluck. He just wanted that to be guided by smarter thinking.

Kevin doubled down on this point by recasting common marketing rules-of-thumb as myths. “The most appealing product is always the least profitable.” “You don’t need to deliver perfect products.” “If your prices aren’t based on strategy or research, you must be clairvoyant.” From this small selection of Kevin-isms, you get a sense of how he thought of marketing intelligence, the absence of which means death wish marketing.

The Strategic Cube. The most important thing I learned from Kevin was the necessity of bringing a model to data analysis. That is, always have a structure to organize and interpret your findings, one that leads automatically to a specific decision. Never post tables or run analyses willy-nilly, and certainly never sort through data haphazardly looking for patterns or something, anything interesting to report.

The Strategic Cube was a model for identifying the optimal brand positioning. Which embodied a theory about what constituted an optimal positioning, derived from prior research into what worked best in the marketplace. It was also a model that told you exactly what you needed to research, how to pull everything together, and how to interpret the results to make a decision. In short, a blueprint for action. The Strategic Cube is straightforward. The best theories always are. Three things combine for an optimal positioning—a highly motivating attribute or benefit (whether tangible or intangible) that is credible for your brand and preemptible versus the competition. Every attribute and benefit of a brand can be plotted within the model, and each cell of the blueprint corresponds to a specific implication or decision.

When we think of models, we often envision gobs of equations and millions of Monte Carlos. Those are models, but there are many kinds. Most are simple. A model is just a way to organize data that structures thinking and points to a decision. Kevin believed in the power of models, both complex and simple. Both types organize data and structure thinking for better decision-making. As Kevin put it in the title to another book, Your Gut is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head (Wiley: 2007). As long as you are using a model to make yourself smarter, that is.

Every time Kevin tackled a new area of marketing, he would develop a model for turning data into decisions. He did this for segmentation, for pricing, for forecasting, for tracking, and for the corporate reputation system he developed, with help from others at Yankelovich, for Fortune.

Building a forecasting model is how Kevin ended up running Yankelovich. He’d been hired as a consultant to modernize YSW’s forecasting system, which he did. But YSW decided not to implement it. So, YSW’s Robert Shulman left to partner with Kevin and start a new firm that was all-in on ‘state-of-the-science modeling.’ Soon thereafter, it was bought by Saatchi; then, ironically, merged with YSW, another Saatchi business.

Throughout much of his commercial career, Kevin was also on the faculty at Boston University. Kevin’s salad days were the heyday of close ties between academics and practitioners, who working in concert to develop the new science of marketing. A few, like Kevin, straddled both, which made Kevin particularly attuned to the need for applied science. Those are the kinds of models he favored.

Of course, for many, the idea of models conjures up the dirtiest word in custom research—product. But Kevin’s models weren’t mere products to peddle. They were the structured embodiment of theories and ideas about optimal marketing. Ideas were what I sold at Yankelovich. Sure, they were Kevin’s ideas, but in my opinion, they were, and by and large still are, the best ideas out there. I wanted to sell them. I got to traffic in ideas. Theories of marketing. Concepts about doing research. Viewpoints about what makes ads and brands work. All in the form of models for making those decisions correctly; indeed, optimally.

RIP, Kevin. It was a heady time, those days. I was hired to open an office in Atlanta. A year later, a deal by Saatchi to sell Yankelovich to private equity firm Wand Partners meant that my time working with Kevin was brief. But Kevin has continued to inspire me ever since. As well as many others. I am forever indebted. Thank you and godspeed, Dr. Clancy.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar

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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.

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• The brand promise clarifies what the brand stands for, and it is one of the most important reasons for stakeholders to choose a particular brand.
• The least a customer should expect from a brand is that the experience with the brand lives up to the promise made.
• The positioning is an outline of what the brand stands for and should include target customer, brand essence, brand promise and brand personality. Ideally the brand positioning is forged through stakeholder consensus, ensuring brand owners are committed to moving in the same direction.

The brand position or brand positioning is how the brand is perceived in the context of competitive alternatives in the mind. A component of brand strategy, a strong brand positioning must simultaneously be three things:

• Authentic. Your positioning must be an accurate and true reflection of your organization – what it believes in, what its culture and values are, how it really reacts in any given situation. Organizations that try to be something that they are not are generally unsuccessful – particularly in the era of social media and increased transparency and access to information by virtually all of your stakeholders regarding virtually every aspect of your organization’s operation, wherever it operates.
• Relevant. In addition to being true, your positioning has to be relevant to the stakeholders you are seeking to influence. If what you are saying is not of interest or not aligned to the interests of those whom you seek to turn into advocates, it doesn’t matter how true or different your brand is – it just won’t matter to them.
• Different. It might be true, it might be relevant, but it has to be different…and be different in a way that matters. Differentiation is where your value discipline generates a premium price or greater margin than your competitors.

Brand Strategy Drivers

There are 6 key drivers for any brand strategy:

1. Humanity – the behaviors and motivations of consumers and the perceived senses of personal priority that results from those habits and schemes;
2. Value – the ability to effectively evaluate costing systems and to generate profit and margin that exceed what the market is inclined to give;
3. Competitiveness – the ability to compete meaningfully and gainfully by being able to distinctualize an offering from everything else around it;
4. Markets – the ability to understand the dynamics and tensions of a sector and the effects those factors will have on consumer predilections for a brand;
5. Responsibility – the ability to develop brands that behave ethically, responsibly and with clear purpose; and
6. Creativity – the willingness and skill to address and resolve an issue laterally, and to tell a fascinating story in a wonderful language.

To successfully activate the brand positioning:

1. Determine the most important contact moments and/or channels
2. Summarize the brand positioning in concise promises
3. Examine the gap between promise and proof
4. Map the needs and expectations of customers and prospects
5. Determine the ways the positioning is brought to life at the most important contact moments
6. Ensure CEO driven support
7. Commit to relentless consistency in how you communicate and deliver the brand promise
8. Ensure it is embedded in the brand culture, driven from the inside-out

The positioning affects everyone in the organization, at The Blake Project we recommend implementing it in a cascading fashion: top-down from business units to departments to individual employees. Each department within the organization writes down what the positioning means for their tasks and respon­sibilities and makes sure the changes are implemented. By letting your colleagues actually work with the positioning and by showing them what it means in their day-to-day activities, they will be understood and accepted within the whole organization.

Brand Strategy Expiration Date

Brands earn a place in the future by thinking of their positioning as a direction rather than a fixed position. Markets are always moving and there will come a day when your target customers need a new promise from you because your existing promise’s relevance has faded or for a myriad of other reasons. Staying close to your target customers by ‘outlistening’ your competition will give you the best chance of shifting your brand strategy with the currents of the marketplace.

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