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The Seven Fundamental Management Skills for Leaders at All Levels
August 24, 2007
Excerpted from:
Lessons on Leadership by Jack Stahl.
At the heart of creating value and long-term success for most organizations is the ability to design and develop a product or service to serve a targeted group of end users.
For purposes of this discussion, we will call those end users "consumers." In most cases, consumers are people like you and me who buy items for our personal use. An end user also might be another company that buys your product or service for its own final use or to use in producing some other product to be on-sold.
A "brand" represents a promise to consumers of what to expect from a product or service. Brand positioning is the process of establishing that promise in the minds of consumers. Through effective brand positioning and related marketing actions, your product or service can become a recognized and valuable brand, known for delivering real benefits to consumers that are distinct and different from your competition. When brands deliver on their promise, they can create real power in the marketplace—and shareowner wealth. Think hard about what each of your products or services uniquely delivers to your target consumers. Write it down in a paragraph or so. These key words and ideas will be at the center of how you market your product or service. Ultimately, they will become a focused corridor from which to build strong brands.
Consumers understand that the brand Coca-Cola, or Coca-Cola Classic, delivers three things: genuineness (which translated into "The Real Thing" advertising campaign), its ability to help make special times with friends and family even better, and great refreshment. These key points guide all marketing actions. It's interesting to note that Coca-Cola's original brand positioning in the late 1800s indicated that Coke was a headache or brain tonic. The product was sold in the "drugstores" of those days and was positioned to relieve symptoms of a headache and provide an emotional lift. Point-of-sale material, signage, and billboards reinforced these benefits, and the Coca-Cola brand grew to be recognized.
What functions does your brand perform? How does it help its ultimate consumers function better? What exactly does your brand deliver—physically or emotionally—to those consumers? The sum total of your marketing actions (advertising, packaging, promotional materials, in-store merchandising, etc.) should answer these questions for your consumers.
As women grew tired of the fashion industry's unattainable ideal of beauty, Kellogg of Canada launched an unusual ad campaign in the fall of 1996 to promote their Special K® cereal. A series of advertisements attacked society's obsession with "thinness," while positively stressing fitness and health—including Special K as part of your diet—as the keys to a positive body image. This emphasis was very successful—so successful, in fact, that Kellogg's continues to use positive body image in the marketing campaigns for Special K cereal. Although fashions and diet trends have changed since 1996, the idea still resonates with today's health and fitness conscious consumers. It works because it provides a solution for their target consumers' need or problem.
Always think about your product as a potential solution for the consumer. Furthermore, always understand that this focus is entirely different from being centered on the internal attributes of your product, such as its technical makeup or how it is manufactured. Those factors may be foremost in your mind about your product, but they are important to consumers only if they are translated into a solution that they value, and are willing to pay to have. Consider that manufacturers such as Nike no longer appear to be selling just shoes and apparel to women; they are also selling the image of empowerment through personal strength, which is a "consumer solution"—offering women the chance to gain the ability to defy entrenched stereotypes.
When I came to Revlon in early 2002, we conducted consumer research to understand the current positioning of the Revlon brand in the minds of its consumers. Based on in-depth consumer interviews (done both on a one-on-one basis and in focus groups), we learned that the Revlon brand was indeed recognized and well known worldwide for its outstanding color cosmetic offerings, innovation, and excitement. It also was thought to be the "glamour brand" among mass-market color cosmetics. However, based on our market research, we concluded that we needed to take additional actions to reinforce our positioning. To do that required articulating better what the positioning should be to attract today's cosmetics consumers. We ultimately chose to position the Revlon brand as the brand that will create feelings of confident sexiness in our target consumers. This positioning of "confident sexiness" then became the core centerpiece of all of our marketing efforts. We based our print and television advertising around it. "Confident sexiness" would translate right through to our point-of-sale materials, our packaging, and every touchpoint with the target Revlon consumer. Once we were focused on the idea of confident sexiness, our marketing actions became more focused too. They became clearer, and more streamlined, and we were able to create a very positive impact for the brand with our consumers.
Your brand positioning must be clear and straightforward. You should be able to define for others what your brand represents in a simple statement. It must ring true to you and be stated in a way that consumers understand. Only then will your people have a clear positioning around which to build effective marketing programs that strengthen your brand in the eye of your target consumers. Unclear brand positioning leads to fuzzy direction for your marketers. That in turn results in a scattered and very expensive approach to the development of your marketing programs. It is amazing what happens when you can describe what a brand means in just a few words (i.e., "confident sexiness" for Revlon, "exhilarating to drive" for BMW, or even the word "search," which to many users is the meaning of the Google brand) and when your organization rallies around that positioning to develop targeted brand and revenue-building programs. This saves time and money. It also avoids useless effort. To an organizational leader or general manager, it's a dream come true. An organization is then positioned to deliver on the brand's promise! If you are selling washing machines and your brand positioning is one of reliability, such as Maytag's brand, then your marketing should reinforce reliability as theirs consistently does. If your brand positioning is about the low cost of your product or service, then say it! If your brand is uplifting emotionally, then show it! One way to define what your brand delivers to your consumers is to have a clear understanding of those consumers' habits as they relate to your product.
At Coca-Cola, for example, we took a hard look at the way our consumers moved through the course of their daily activities, how they spent their time from morning until night. We then identified the related "thirst occasions," an industry term for the moments during the day when consumers were most likely to want to consume a beverage. For example, a thirst occasion might mean wanting something to drink that provides a "pick me up" in the morning, like coffee, or it might mean needing to rehydrate after a workout in the late afternoon, or maybe seeking a final caffeine-free drink late at night. We mapped these thirst occasions, and then asked ourselves the question, "What products or packaging would be best suited to meet these various thirst occasions in the best possible way for consumers throughout their day?"
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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