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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Strategic Positioning And Brand Purpose
00:12:47
Daniel walks us through strategic positioning an brand purpose, breaking down what it actually means with some simple, practical guidance and examples of various brands who have set about achieving clarity on their positioning by putting a very clear...
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Transcript34 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast.
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B
My name is Kieran Rogers and I'm Daniel Rolls.
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A
And today, Daniel, we are going to be discussing strategic positioning and brand purpose.
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B
It sounds good, doesn't it?
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A
It really does. I'm getting very excited. Some of the titles we've had recently are really pushing the boat out. I, I'm impressed. I've got to thank you for them, Daniel, because you've come up with them all.
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B
But I can sum this up pretty quickly. All it really means is what do you stand for? And there you go, there's the podcast. No, not really. It really is trying to work out what you represent as a brand and let me give you a few examples to explain it. So we can't sit here shouting we make the best digital marketing elearning because although we clearly do, no one cares.
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A
Other providers are available.
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B
Yeah, exactly. But no one cares. And if our it's again down to this thing just shouting sales messages at people. So I need to know what I stand for as a brand in order that I can communicate about that topic. So rather than ask, that being our strategic positioning, our strategic positioning would be hands on and practical digital marketing advice. So everything we do should be hands on practical digital marketing advice. Therefore, people get hands on practical digital advice once. That builds trust, that builds rapport, and then when they need something, they're more likely to come to us for training or for elearning, whatever it may be. So you need to know what you stand for. And if you don't know what you stand for, you have a fundamental issue in that you don't really know what to say to people. So if you were to take a brand like Tesco and they've been very open about this as well, and you say we're the cheapest, we're the cheapest. And if you're not familiar outside the uk, Tesco is a large supermarket chain and then suddenly two other brands come along that are cheaper than you. So kind of the at the time, Audi and Lidl, you can't just sit there shouting we're the cheapest. And actually we're the cheapest isn't always the best way to go anyway. So then you need to say, okay, what do we stand for? Well, we need to stand for every little help. So it's about providing value and little helps. And then you start to work out the messaging around that if there are other brands where this is really difficult. So if You're a vodka brand. You can't say we get you drunk because you're not allowed to do that. Maybe in some countries, but certainly not in the uk. So what you need then says, what do we stand for? And I would go to this idea of content chunking. So you put your vodka at the middle. We make nice, beautiful, amazing vodka. You could go purity of ingredients and food littering. That could be one area of content. You could go cocktail making, you could go the best bars in the world. And you'll start to come up with these different kind of ideas for content and say, well, that's what we really represent. And then you can start talking about that kind of stuff. Most business to business organizations, they're kind of positioning, brand positioning, strategic kind of position, whatever you want to call it, brand purpose, it's all the same thing is we are the thought leaders in this particular market and that one goes wrong a lot because we are the experts in the field. But actually there's no real leading expertise there. There's nothing that interesting to kind of say you find this in the agency world a lot. The agencies do have lots of expertise, but they're not really different to any other agency. Most of the time it becomes a.
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A
Bit boring after a while. Oh, another thought leader.
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B
Yeah. And it's really, you know, how is it really thought leadership? Is it that cutting edge or should it be something else? Should this be, you know, practical advice, pay per click, expertise, whatever, whatever it may be, the particular agency does. So give you a kind of a couple of examples of this. Nike have been very good at this. And Nike don't say, we make the best running shoes, Nike. And there's a number of different reports around this, but help you achieve your athletic potential. They bring out the athlete in everyone. Because what that does is bridge the gap between what they want to say is buy our stuff and actually what the target audience wants to engage with and that target audience wants to engage with. Kind of motivation to go on that run, go to the gym, training programs, the kind of motivation, training data, all those kind of things. So they come up with Nike Training Club. And Nike Training Club is essentially an app. And the app allows you to go in and say, I would like to run further, run faster, I would like to lift more, lose weight. And it will give you a whole training program because they're bringing out the athlete in you and that fits into that ethos. And then they get lots of positive touch points with you. And then when you come to buy that, buy stuff you're more like to buy their stuff because you really like the brand and you associate with it. So it helps you to really understand what value you're providing to the target audience. But this needs to be universally agreed across an organization and people should, if you ask someone, what do you stand for? Everyone should better tell you. Practical, hands on digital marketing. It's nice and straightforward. So if you can't do that, it's a problem. And actually transparency becomes quite a key one as well. So I'll tell you a story about that in a second. But content chunking is a good way to get to it.
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A
Okay, so what do you mean by content?
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Well, I'll give you an example from a really practical point of view and then you can expand this out. So if I look at Instagram as a channel and I go, right, what do we do? We do digital marketing, E learning and trainings. Let's take pictures of digital marketing E learning. No one wants to see that. I mean, it's not exciting screenshots of stuff. So I said, okay, well, what are my kind of content chunks for Instagram? Well, it's behind the scenes, so it might be setting up a conferences and events, it's travel because we travel a lot to this kind of stuff. But technology, book covers, these are kind of things that we've got that reflect. And I would then use those chunks to say, that's the kind of content I should be posting to Instagram. And that's people actually is one of the key things obviously as well. So those are my content chunks. Now if you do that as an exercise and go, what are our content chunks? Right. What have they got in common? Can I take four of those or two of them or five of them and kind of put them as a kind of group thing? It might be thought leadership, but really what is it that we kind of stand for as a brand?
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So it's working out how those things connect with the customer base that we're after.
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It isn't it? And it's how you really communicate what you stand for. Therefore, I know why I use your product or service versus other people's.
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Is it relevant if, I mean, is this sort of thing only relevant for big organizations or does it work for the, you know, the small one man?
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Well, I think it does because I think everyone wants to grow and we're not, you know, we're not a huge organization, we're tiny, really. Relatively so. The reality is. But we know what we stand for. And then when we're doing content we can do a very quick sense check and go. Is this practical, hands on digital marketing advice, does this help people? And that's the key thing. So if it doesn't, if this is very kind of theoretical and model based, it's probably not the kind of stuff that we do a lot of the time. So even the title of this strategic positioning, brand purpose all sounds very theoretical, but actually it's very practically just saying what am I going to talk to my customer about when I'm not trying to sell them stuff? But you need real clarity because otherwise you could just go for all sorts of tangents. And it already confused people what you stand for from that point of view. So great to kind of go through that process. But you can also get this wrong. So there's a, in the digital branding book, we wrote a bit of a case study about the Pepsi Refresh project which is, I thought it was brilliant, but you can kind of see the challenges. Pepsi Refresh, if you're not aware, Pepsi always used to do ads in the Super Bowl. So they'd been like $20 million on a super bowl ad. And they decided that right, what we're going to do this year, Instead of spending $20 million on an ad, we're going to give it away to good causes. So we're gonna give these little kind of like micro donations to all these little good causes. And people would go in, they'd open it up once a month and you could go and submit your idea, get people voting for ideas and whichever was the best idea, the best, top hundred, whatever it was, they'd get the money, donations.
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Sounds lovely.
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It's brilliant, right? Really brilliant campaign. Loads of people kind of voting, loads of people submitting ideas, lots of good money going to good causes, celebrities getting involved, all those sorts of things. And Pepsi Refresh was a big kind of thing and everyone engaged with it and sales went up of Pepsi because people engaging around the brand now people didn't look at it and go, what an amazingly ethical brand Pepsi is. They went, they, they thought to themselves, that's a clever way of selling Pepsi, but you're doing something good. I'll join in.
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Right, okay.
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So that was okay. But then the problem is, is it.
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Okay because they've not really bought in heart and.
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Well, they haven't. And what's happened is that it's short termism because what will happen is. And then your get engaged during the process, but then what happened is they move back to putting the can in a sports star's hand and saying this sports star drinks Pepsi in this sports and it kind of went back to where they were before and people look at it and go, that's a bit.
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Cynical because I guess you can't mix something deep and meaningful like that with the kind of shallow, well, you have to live it.
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And I think this is a really important thing, is that it would have been perfectly fine for Pepsi to go down this route if they then said everything we do, we need to focus on being an ethical brand. Now the silly thing is actually there's something called the Pepsi foundation that's been around since Pepsi was formed and they've given over $2 billion to good causes and there was no mention of it in the campaign. So actually, you know, they could have continued but it has to be a brand commitment in the long term. And the problem is if you do it for a bit and then you change your mind. And basically what happened as well, you could see the sales of Pepsi went up and then they went back down to where they were pretty much afterwards as well. Now, to be fair to Pepsi, I think they were brave to do it in the first place. They've done some brilliant campaigns since. So it's, there's no negative thing about Pepsi. I think it was a good thing to do in the first place. And actually every time I watch the case study video I'm really impressed by it. But you have to be transparent about it. So if you, you can't just decide, we're going to be, we're going to make everyone like us.
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Yeah.
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If I mentioned the Tesco brand and Tesco had got a bad reputation in some cases with some people about how they were treating farmers and suppliers so they had to change what they were doing. And they've got a whole policy now about how they treat their suppliers, but to the extent it's intrinsic to everything they're doing. So for example, small suppliers, so. And that to them was anyone they were spending less than £100,000 a year with, they would start paying on 14 days instead of 60 days. Now for a small business that makes a huge impact. And it's that kind of, it's not just what we're talking about, we're living it. And I think that becomes really important.
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A
So it's kind of showing rather than just telling, right?
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Exactly. And because of the whole environment we operate in in terms of two way communication, social media, it's the idea of brand democracy. And the idea of brand democracy is your brand isn't what you say it is. It's what everyone else says it is. So it's all very well for a hotel to change, saying, we are the loveliest, most amazing hotel in the world and it's most comfortable and everything else. And then everyone goes on to TripAdvisor and says it was filthy and it was uncomfortable and the staff were rude. That's what people think about it. So this strategic position is not just about how do I position my content, but it's really what's the ethos. We're going to kind of live as a brand and that allows us to live it at every stage of what we're doing. So a lot of brands talk about transparency and they will publish their figures, their profit figures and things like that, and it's all that kind of stuff that really makes a difference. Take your whole brand and you can live around those things, but they need to be clarified from the outset. I would look. I'd look at what Moz are doing, because Moz have a really great set of kind of brand ethos and kind of things that rule their brand and everything they do is kind of live through that as well. So that's worth taking a look at as well. So we'll put the link into that onto the show notes as well.
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We'll include the Pepsi case study video as well.
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Yeah, it's a really nice video, actually. It's really worth watching. It's quite entertaining. Now, while we're here talking about branding and all those kind of things, Digital Branding, which is one of the books that I wrote. Did you write a book? I've written a few. I try not to mention them, but it keeps coming up. Digital Branding, the second edition has just come out. And a second edition of a book is always the book you would have liked to have written the first time around if you'd had a bit more time and you'd known a bit more and so on as well. So we've done the second edition book. It's got loads of great little case studies and new stuff in it. Kieran wrote a bit for it actually as well. So we've got some copies to give away.
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So a plus side, I didn't write much of it.
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Okay. Yeah. So don't worry, I've ruined it. So we've got some of these to give away. So what we're going to do is you might be now aware that we have a free membership on targetinternet.com so you sign up for free membership, you will get access to a lot of free resources, content, calendars and toolkits and various other things, you get access to some free E Learning and a load of other useful stuff. And if you sign up for a free membership, anyone that's a free member, we're going to take a kind of a draw and we're going to give away five copies of the book as a starting point. We might give some more away in the future as well. So sign up for a free membership, which is great anyway. Targetinternet.com and then as soon as you sign up, you'll be put into the prize drawer and we'll give away some of these books as well. And we will announce the winners on a forthcoming episode as well.
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Yeah, and we're going to be drawing this at the end of this month.
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Yeah, perfect. So we'll do at the end of the month and yeah, kind of get signed up. So thank you for listening and we'll speak to you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast. Thanks very much for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast. If you want to continue your learning in digital marketing, get over to Targetinternet.com and sign up for the free trial of our digital marketing E Learning platform. There's over 140 bite sized courses for you to try and lots of other learning resources as well. So get on there and sign up for the free trial.