Personal Case Experience

DEFINING THE RIGHT BRAND POSITIONING & ARCHITECTURE

While the vision and business strategy might be emotionally inspring, they are somewhat rationally-driven. The brand, on the other hand, constitutes an "emotional shortcut" - directly into the people´s hearts and souls. It drives your management peers and partners, your staff and, not to forget, your customer´s buying decisions. Loyalty to a brand, although most companies don´t include the respective metrics as part of their KPI, is about the biggest driver of value for a consumer-oriented premium and luxury-lifestyle brand.

However, all of the above only works out, when your brand is properly positioned - not to narrow to restrict your perspective for growth and not to wide, not to be arbitrary. Defining for what a brand represents, the products areas, the value proposition, and even more important the underlying human values and the reason "why" your company exists is probably one of the most challenging management exercises. That is why more than one company has outsourced this effort to external marketing agencies. I believe that this is entirely wrong and will hurt your brand authenticity - one of the key prerequisites for successful brand communication.

In the past 17 years, I have developed a number of different brand positionings and re-positionings - for new ventures, for business units and for existing brands that went off track or disconnected with their customer base. Developing the brand positioning means answering many different questions. Some of them rationally and some of them with our intuition. As every successful brand´s DNA comprises more than just a smart business idea and concept - it includes personal beliefs, desires and aspirations. That is the true source of power for a brand, that is represented by the logo. There is nothing magic about an apple. There is nothing magic about check-mark. But when you add Steve Job´s motivation to break the rules of the dominant suppliers at the time and Nike´s spirit, those symbols become signs of power that unleash an extra-ordinary energy and momentum.

Let´s invest the time to define the energy of your drive to the future.