Real-world actions to take to back off and get a better view of your marketing positioning and personality

Get going

If you’re going to back off, make the most of this rare time. You must be willing to suspend belief, and look differently at your product/service or organization. Sometimes what emerges will astonish.

Start by listing personality traits. Write down adjectives that describe your company. They will form the basis of your personality. MidMarketer, for example, defines our personality with the adjectives “authoritative, humble, direct, fun, efficient and approachable.”

Don’t contradict yourself in this exercise. Use only words that describe your organization and be truthful. Rather than use words that describe how you perceive the company, only choose those that describe the soul of your organization or brand.

A revealing side exercise: What adjectives would your competition use to describe you? Are they correct? Are they the same adjectives you use? Why would they use these?

Define yourself by creating short statements (make each of these no more than 50 words)

Develop the “Who” statement

Create a statement that quickly and clearly says who your organization is. Avoid buzzwords. Stick with words anyone can understand. The “who” statement should not be what you do, because that’s the next action. In doing this, think about your company makeup, its people, goals and aspirations. With a bit of work, this can be boiled down into a 1-2 sentence statement.

Develop the “What” statement

Write a short statement that describes what your brand/product/service does. Same as above (and continuing below) avoid buzzwords and write it for someone outside your industry. The simpler, the better. It must cover everything your brand, product and/or service does. The hard part will be trying to define it enough without being too broad. If you don’t spend enough time on this, you’ll end up with something not far from “we bring good things to life.” (Sorry, that’s taken.)

Create the “How” statement

Develop a statement that describes how you do things. Make sure to focus on the differentiators that characterize you. A good way to think about this is… “what characteristics enable you to compete?”

Create the “Why” statement

Describe in 50 words or less why you are here. Besides making money and adding shareholder value, why do you do this? What things really define your brand’s, service’s and/or product’s passion? Again, make sure these things are real. Be honest with yourself.

Creating Value

Once the above statements are done, themes should begin to resonate defining the who, what, how and why. While they’re still fresh in your head, try to create up to 5 very short statements that describe how your brand, product and/or service creates value. Think in terms of the value for your customer, for the industry, for your organization and for other industries. These should be based on the differentiators you’ve identified throughout this process. If your value was not created using differentiators, everyone’s values would be the same, and they wouldn’t be values.

Develop a Positioning Statement

Now, take what you’ve got in all of the actions above, and boil it down into one positioning statement. Create something that clearly and passionately puts your “stake in the ground.” Rather than worry about length at this point, try to define something that you believe “says the story.”

Tips

Print out all of your new statements and highlight key words within each. Then, populate your “position” with all of the adjectives you’ve already developed. Once you have a positioning statement you like, jot down the word count. KEEP this position and reference it as your long position statement. You can always go back to this as needed.

Figure out a way to turn the long format position statement into 50 words without losing the meaning. This will, naturally, become your 50 word positioning statement. Why 50 words? How many times have you been asked for a company, product, and/or service description that’s under 50 words? Then, take the 50 word positioning statement and cut it again to only 25 words, without changing the meaning. This may prove harder. Still, a few well-chosen words will always outperform a caldron of buzzwords.

Finally…

Compiling everything into ONE page gives you the Positioning and Communication Quicksheet. Doing this means you have effectively “Backed Off” and gotten a better view, as well as have created a solid base for marketing and communication.

Tips

Most likely, a few other people will want to be involved here. To avoid a week-long, corporate-wide “discussion”…

• Limit participants to NO MORE than six, including yourself

• Spend no more than a half-day total, breaking up each section into a time slot

• Make sure everyone knows why you’re doing this

• Avoid writing the final positioning with the group. If everyone agrees on the statements, they will agree on the final position, and can offer feedback on it later.

• Avoid complex statements. Keep them simple enough for ANYONE to understand.

• Get complete buy-in for each statement before moving on (but, don’t allow yourself to get deadlocked.)