Wednesday 18 June 2014

Brands on the Black

Do you ever get paralysed by process, fed-up with frameworks while working on positioning a brand?

In the past, I can remember long debates about semantics - was "long-lasting" a benefit or a feature or a reason to believe? And, if it was a benefit, was it an emotional benefit or a rational benefit?

This kind of discussion usually leads nowhere and is often missing the point: what is really important about my brand? What makes people love it? What makes it indispensable?

Ulli Appelbaum is currently developing a new way (I hasten to call it a tool as actually it's more like a game) to help position brands and tell brand stories. It's currently in beta mode, so Ulli is open to thoughts, additions and subtractions.

It's called Positioning-Roulette. The thought behind it is that the act of brand positioning is as much about creativity and ideation as it is about intellect and process, although pre-given frameworks, agendas and philosophies often force marketers into thinking only along certain lines.

Positioning-Roulette helps you to find more creative solutions in a shorter space of time to a Brand Positioning task.

It's all about approaching the task from different angles - 25 of them, in fact, which are selected by random. These 25 areas include the usual suspects, such as Brand Purpose and Benefits, through to areas that you may not normally consider, such as Appeal to the Senses or Romancing how the Product Works, through to turning the task on its head - Conventions Disrupted, Problems & Paradoxes.

Just what you need, maybe, to move your brand from the red to the black.

4 comments:

Barbara said...

I had no idea it was all so complicated. Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong! I like the mix of posts on your blog, there is always something to make me think.

Sue Imgrund said...

Thank you Barbara! Between you and me, I suspect that a lot of people in marketing make it complicated deliberately to justify their existence. I am always for the simple, but not simplistic approach!

Stephanie Faris said...

I just had to write about how to "heat up" your social media presence this summer for a client. It's so difficult to be heard in a world of marketing messages...everyone's looking for a way to stand out. I see that with my book, but also in writing articles to help small business master it.

Sue Imgrund said...

With social media, it's all about being informative, helpful, entertaining or useful - and about trying stuff out as you never know what will lead where. But of course that's all more easily said than done!