This is a great question, and one that could feasibly be dealt with via several volumes of a business book. The answer depends primarily on whether you consider your communications to be lumped largely into either one of the two main categories. So, are you business, or lifestyle? This somewhat vague “50/50” partitioning may seem haphazard, but whether you’re trying to position yourself in a B2B or B2C segment will drive how you seek to set up your position – and subsequently your relevance and audience connectivity capture.
01. Business brand positioning
For business communications, the best approach nearly always is to seek clarity. If you sell photocopiers into the Thai market but service them via contracts too, you would say that you are a solutions provider for sales and service for those products. If you don’t service them and only sell machines, your positioning should indicate that you are either a retailer of copier machines, a reseller (for used assets), or a manufacturer, if you make and sell your own devices.
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For large multinationals which create power stations in Japan, sell marine services in Australia and have a contract to option military vehicles in Malaysia, you would take a more “top-down” approach, and back it up a bit – perhaps a global power and infrastructure and civil security operations provider is how you choose to go. This gives you a wider halo, particularly in terms of potential future M&A which may not fit into your current services offering roster.
We can assemble a quick formula for establishing our initial good brand positioning concept. Consider the following, which will get you in the ballpark quickly:
XX is a XX
At first this seems too simplistic to be useful in any way, but this is essentially how our good brand positioning will be adapted and represented in press releases, media info sheets, exec speeches, etc.
So, we may build it out thusly:
XYZ Co. Ltd. Is a leading provider of integrated office solutions in Thailand, with a focus on the manufacture and distribution of high-quality photocopier machines and service & maintenance contract support to leading businesses in the Kingdom.
02. Lifestyle brand positioning
When we are a lifestyle business, it is often harder (and perhaps even unwelcome) to capture our offering in such a straight-up and unambiguous way. We may believe that our brand essence is built around high luxury, our consumer journey, bespoke services, or a knockout experience that our user-chooser customers are not able to access without the VIP golden ticket we offer to them as a result of them being our customer and not a customer of our nearest competitor.
However.., having said that, our basic formula still applies, and the desire to position with clarity, relevance, consistency and focus is still our intended goal.
Consider then:
XYZ Co. Ltd, Miami’s hottest jewellery designer with a custom lab and boutique design house in the Keys, and the leading brand of glamor jewellery chosen by stars such as XX and XX, has now launched XX
You can see here that we have “pivoted” slightly to expand our formula to allow for a little flash, but we’re still following the same basic format. The reason for this is that in PR and marketing comms, a lot of our messaging outreach is achieved through the humble press release document format. Even when we are not intending to send out a release specifically, creating the document – even as a dummy/temporary workbench for our messaging ideas – is a powerful tool for getting us started, and even as we progress with our brand build over time, it pays to keep our brand messaging unified and consistent for maximum coherency.
We at Gemini love talking about brand positioning communications, so reach out for a free consultation session today.
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