The Empowered Consumer Challenge

POSITIONING MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE

The explosion of digital marketing over the past decade has created the most complex challenge of all for brand owners, marketers, consultants and agencies: the ‘Empowered Consumer’.

The Empowered Consumer demands more, needs more, expects more than ever before.  And when the Empowered Consumer makes a decision about their preferred brand or service, they spend more, stay longer and act more frequently.

The Empowered Consumer formulates beliefs based on perceptions they discovered across multiple marketing channels and messages.  Consumers behave based on their beliefs.  But beliefs are not created overnight.  They solidify over a period of time and experiences and are highly influenced by perceptions.

To reach and capture the Empowered Consumer a brand must tightly craft and control their brand positioning to both influence consumer beliefs in their favor and, simultaneously away from their direct competitors and indirect competition. 

Is Your Brand Making This Fatal Mistake?

When brands do not craft and control their positioning perfectly, they invite competition and competitors to literally eat their lunch.  They allow perceptions and micro-impressions to be determined randomly by their consumer targets.  This is almost always a commercial and marketing fatality.

Regardless of marketing channel or messaging, every brand in their category knows that chart-topping success depends on achieving the most cost-effective and ROAS-effective customer acquisition, conversion, stimulation and retention strategies possible.

Brands compete now in the most competitive marketing environment of all time.  With the advent of the Empowered Consumer the winning brand amongst competitors is the brand that can shave every millimeter off the cost, effort, resources and time required to win the mind of their target, both in favor of their brand and away from their competition.

Absent a truly unlimited budget to literally ‘buy’ your market share, there is only one path proven over decades of hard marketing science to achieve this: using brand positioning science to craft and then execute a powerful positioning platform across all marketing channels.

To truly capture the mind (and buying intent) of the Empowered Consumer brands must either create a competitively winning brand positioning program, or refine and reset their current positioning to what it needs to become to gain massive and sustainable competitive advantage.

The Single Objective

Your brand positioning program has focus on a single objective: to craft your Positioning Platform and messaging deployment set to create unimpeachable competitive advantage for your brand and solidly de-position competitors and competition in the mind of your targets.

STRATEGIC FOUNDATION

As effective strategies can only flow from well-defined and realistic objectives, you must first engage an effort to ensure your brand’s objectives are translated into a set of brand positioning, branding and messaging strategies that can achieve your desired objectives.

This is best comprised of:

• Stakeholder interviews
• Competitive review (direct competitors and indirect competition)
• Precision analyses of user and target personas
• Target audience goals and their unique customer journey
• Key user groups and points of influence opportunity for each
  • Demographic information
  • User KPIs
  • Customer value proposition
• Key target pain point and needs analysis

POSITIONING DEVELOPMENT

Once the strategic foundation is properly defined and validated, the next phase focuses on development and crafting of your brand’s specifically tailored competitive advantage Positioning Platform.

Your Positioning Platform becomes the foundational base for all marketing and messaging activities across all channels.

This component is best comprised of:

• Positioning Matrix™ development
  • Define precisely the 4 Essential Elements
    • The ‘Meaningful Benefit’
    • The element of ‘Provability’
    • The element of ‘Differentiation’
    • The ‘De-positioning’ element
  • Define precisely the primary target Marketing Environment
    • Introductory?
    • Offensive?
    • Defensive?
    • Remedial?
    • Hybrid for creation of a ‘Category Class’

Once your Positioning Matrix™ is completed you can then craft your brand Positioning Platform.  This is the ultimate objective to achieve in order to ensure that all marketing and messaging fulfills your brand objectives for competitive advantage.

The Positioning Platform is a proprietary formulaic model to craft the foundational positioning message.  It is not used as a verbatim script, but as the roadmap for crafting, tailoring and adapting all marketing messages to effect your competitive positioning advantage based on the specific requirements, opportunities and limitations of each channel (including web, content, messaging, social media, SEO, paid search, advertising and remarketing.  In essence your Positioning Platform guides ALL marketing and messaging to convey and cement your brand positioning for your targets.

POSITIONING DEPLOYMENT

Once your Positioning Matrix™ and unique Positioning Platform are created and validated you can then tackle the requirement of creating both guidelines and the actual executional assets for every channel of your brand marketing and consumer acquisition objectives.

Here’s a guide to the most important elements of what a full brand positioning execution program should comprise:

• Visual identity and branding elements
  • Logos, marks, symbology, typography
  • Color palette selection
  • Photography and imagery
  • Brand style guide
  • Marketing collateral

• Website and digital destination requirements
  • Positioning incorporation
  • Keywording for competitive advantage
  • Content
  • UX
  • Conversion optimization
  • Search optimization
• Social Media Marketing
  • Social platform strategy
  • Campaign creation
  • Content creation
  • Behavior monitoring
  • Content publishing
  • Results reporting
• Content Marketing
  • Marketing strategy
  • Email marketing
  • Landing pages
  • Explainer videos
  • Microsites and authority sites
  • Copywriting and content

• Analytics & Analysis
  • Site behavior tracking and audience behavior analysis
  • Engagement metrics
  • Conversion optimization
  • Search retargeting
  • Search Engine Marketing
    • Organic search optimization (SEO)
    • On-site optimizations (all aspects: code through visible)
    • Off-site optimizations
    • Inbound link strategy and acquisition
    • Citations and authority creation
  • Paid search optimization
    • PPC / display
  • Remarketing
  • Web analytics
  • A/B testing
  • Analytics audit

To own the mind of the Empowered Consumer, your brand must become empowered itself through solid brand positioning and strong, consistent execution and deployment of your brand positioning across all marketing and messaging channels.