The most successful companies have a strong brand. People know who they are, what they do, what they stand for and why they are special. Too often companies in the technology sector are more concerned about their products and technologies than the customer’s connection to the brand.
The starting point of a strong brand is a clear articulation of why the company exists which is inextricably linked to the company’s strategy. The brand idea, or brand essence, is at the centre of this. Often summed up by the company’s slogan or tagline, the brand idea distils down into two or three words what makes the company special. The best ones drive all the company’s values and messaging - Avis’ "We try harder", Apple’s "Think Different" and salesforce.com’s "The End of Software" are three great examples. The idea will almost always be there - it is simply a case of finding it and articulating it in a compelling way.
The brand idea should be reinforced by the brand values and attributes. The values are the words that the company and its staff believe are most important about the way it does business. Needless to say values can’t be dreamt up. They need to be confirmed by internal research, re-articulated prioritized. The brand attributes follow on from the values as the external articulation of those values. These are the adjectives that the external stakeholders should use to describe the business.
The truth is that most companies’ values and attributes look much the same - hands up who has integrity as one of their values and honesty as a desired attribute? Where companies really start to differentiate themselves is with their positioning, proposition and messages.
Positioning - where the company sits in the marketplace now and in the future - is a tough challenge to get right. It means developing a full understanding of the company’s positioning and differentiation relative to its competitors, how the market is likely to develop and how the competitors are likely to position themselves in the future. With all this information in place one can then develop a space for the company to occupy and put in place the business and sales strategy and communications to attain that position.
The proposition follows on from this as how the company differentiates itself in a compelling way. We like the classic Elevator Pitch best as this forces a company to make decisions on the elements of its offering that it wishes to emphasise.
Try this Elevator Pitch test developed by Geoffrey Moore.
- For (target customer)
- Who (the current market alternative)
- Our company/product is a (new product category)
- That provides (key problem-solving capability).
- Unlike, (the next best alternative),
- we (primary competitive differentiation).
A proposition of this kind gives everyone one or two, albeit, long sentences that they can deliver in any situation that succinctly sums up what their company is about.
The final element of the mix is the messages. These are the compelling, simple phrases - often in the form of sound-bites - that break down the proposition into component parts and bring the proposition to life. In the technology market it is hard to construct sentences that look original and exciting.
These are all areas where Oriella PR Network partners can help clients. If a company has a strong grasp on all these elements it will fare better than a competitor with a better products but a poor proposition.
