Branding’s sole objective is to grow a business, The path to achieving this goal is to identify the sweet spot.
This work isn’t a fluffy exercise but strategic in nature.
It begins with research and diving deep into understanding the marketplace and where your product or service can find opportunities. When you uncover the sweet spot, that’s when the magic happens. The goal is discovering uncharted territory or a fresh way to view a category.
Many business folks don’t understand how important this process is to unlocking value. They think it’s like an “arts and crafts project” to make things pretty.
Sorry, no.
Branding isn’t fluffy, artsy-fartsy stuff – but strategic and foundational for business growth.
Companies typically love to talk about themselves.
“We do this, and we do that – here’s our products and features. And here is our newest widget. Oh, wait – let me show you are building too.”
But brands are shorthand for problems to be solved, and branding is an exercise in finding your tribe – who you serve, who will care, and providing a purpose that pulls an audience toward you.
The brand platform gives you a set of tools to speak to your tribe. It gives you language that they understand and touches them with an emotional connection.
Why Your Brand Exists Matters
Branding is the driver or reason WHY a tribe will rally around you.
In other words, if you are the champion of a group of people, who share a common need, they will rally around your company. Nike is the champion of everyone who wants to see themselves as an athlete – even if you define athletics as walking around your neighborhood for a stroll. Volvo is the champion of people who put safety first for vehicles.
People who have an unmet need that no one else champions can use a new brand to help them solve problems.
How We Buy
We all act emotionally and then logically tell ourselves a narrative of why we bought something. Brands must tap into that feeling to serve their tribe. The greatest thing a brand can hear is the quiet voice in a customer’s head who says – they get me. This brand understands what I’m all about – whether it’s Dyson, Dunkin Donut, or Dansk.
Several years ago, I bought a Dyson vacuum after seeing some ads on TV. The brand spoke to me and a problem I had with keeping my carpets clean. I saw Dyson as my champion, and they helped me solve an issue where I felt that I kept pushing a vacuum around and it kept losing suction, thus not cleaning the cat hair off the carpet. Other vacuum cleaner brands didn’t speak my language.
An Ownable Space
How can a brand find something ownable, relevant, and sustainable?
You don’t want to be just another company – but a brand that stands for something that matters to a select, narrow, and limited group of people.
- Qualitative and quantitative research is the best starting place. It helps you learn about real humans in some market segments who have problems, needs, and challenges close to or within your category. You can probe to understand what they care about, and in one-on-one research, you can hear it in their emotions.
- Analysis and insights come from the human capital – the team that listens, hypothesizes and finds meaning in what is learned. As you complete some research, including the landscape, the competition, and stakeholders, hypotheses emerge, and perhaps you find a fresh way to segment the marketplace. For example, maybe travelers aren’t just business or leisure travelers – maybe that framing isn’t suitable, and a simple bifurcation of the market misses other types of travel.
- Brand platforms emerge from finding “white space,” gaps, or unchartered territory. At the intersection of a Venn diagram – a sweet spot appears. The sweet spot is unchartered and unclaimed territory. It can represent an opportunity that others are missing and no one owns. Recently, some hotels and travel companies are marketing their assets as “remote work locations” – tapping into the desire to work outside of the office from some fun environment.
If Not Now, Venn?
At the intersection of a Venn diagram where all this magic happens. The intersection is often called the sweet spot.
A brand needs to find that sweet spot so that everything they do (marketing, product development, channels, etc.) is filtered through this lens. This is how value is created. The WHY helps us determine how to bring ourselves to the market.
Pieces of The Pie or Donuts
When you discover a sweet spot, you need tools to communicate your value and a language that is consistently spoken.
For example, a positioning statement helps you with an internally rallying cry that aligns everyone inside the company. (Who we are, what we do, who we serve, and – why). Core messaging and a tagline help you attract and communicate to the external tribe we want to bring toward us.
When your internal and external messages align, you have a strong brand narrative that helps you build your brand and the value you deliver.
Remember, people choose emotionally, then tell themselves they made a good choice.
Values matter – the story you tell a Volvo owner versus a Lexus owner tells a story based on what that tribe values and believes in. A Volvo shopper who cares first about safety looks at a brand and says – I can feel safe with them. I can choose them. When consumers respond to your marketing effort and say to themselves, “they get me,” you are on to something special.
A brand doesn’t just sell products. They are selling an emotional feeling and a story.
When you can get beyond the transactional nature of marketing, that is where something special can happen, and opportunity is unlocked.
Branding and the market research associated with it can help reveal your tribe and the language they understand.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
