During my career, I have grown to become very sceptical of one word that gets thrown around the business world. That word is strategy. There have been numerous times when I have sat in a presentation where the content was so convoluted and there wasn’t a clear roadmap to be seen! Yet, it was somehow justified because “strategy” was in the slide title.
The Oxford Reference Dictionary’s first definition of the word is that it is “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim”. I like to interpret this definition even more simply: the choices we make that will lead us to profitable growth. We all know that making choices is not always an easy task in the business world because the “major or overall aims” we are working towards are not only numerous, but they exist on different timelines, and have different scales of impact.
For nascent business owners and marketers, this will be a challenging part of the job and the choices they make will only get more difficult as their careers develop and as the business matures. However, I have always taught my students to rely on their brand’s chosen positioning when making choices.
Let’s remind ourselves on what a positioning is. A POSITIONING is what we want our brand to stand for in the mind of our consumers. It captures how you want your brand to show up, how it will be distinct and how it will connect with our target consumer. This is a vital part of any brand bible that guides you, your team, and your agencies in whatever project you embark on. You can consider it as your brand’s *North Star*
When you have a strong positioning, it will lead to the following:
Better planning: make strategic choices in line with brand positioning
Better guidance: know what is “on” and “off” brand
More inspiration: identify great ideas, content, engagements, and activations. It also helps to stimulate the creation of new ideas
It helps you to make choices and ensure you will act consistently with your brand over time. A strong brand positioning and strategy will help to drive growth and build equity for the long term. Additionally, being guided by your positioning will give you more ‘controlled’ flexibility whenever a new opportunity arises. Meaning that you can go after the opportunity whilst ensuring you maintain a brand-lens and avoid going off-brand.
This diagram from Les Binet and Peter Field explains this point perfectly.
The short-term opportunities / sales activation is messaging that is news driven such as the launch of an innovation or price promotion. Whereas the long-term brand building activity creates and maintains the emotional connection with your brand. The objective for this is to make your brand memorable and top of mind to eventually drive purchase and penetration. There is constant debate amongst marketers whether it is possible to achieve this in one piece of communication if you or not this is possible in doing/executing in one piece of communication but let me not digress on that point here and return to the point at hand.
One brand that I feel does a great job at staying true to its brand positioning is Coca-Cola. Their positioning is around refreshing the world and inspiring optimism and happiness for those living in it. By launching brand building campaigns such as “Open Happiness” and “Taste the Feeling”, and short-term activations such as the “Share a Coke” printed soda cans or their “Happiness Machines”, the brand successfully nurtures how they present themselves to their consumer.
(source: the smart local.com)
One thing I want to emphasise here is that although I encourage you to leverage the brand positioning to help make choices to grow your brand, there also needs to be an extra effort to ensure that your brand is truly relevant to your local target audience. Brands need to adapt to respond appropriately to changes in context, demographics, consumption habits and culture. Of course, this needs to be done with their positioning in mind unless elements in the positioning itself is no longer aligned or appropriate with the changing context.
Still looking at Coca-Cola, in 2008 the brand launched their “Coke Studio” in Pakistan. The digital-first, always-on program provided a space for emerging musical talent to partner with the brand to create and serve musical moments of joy to their audience. Since then, Coke Studio has expanded to a global scale with new content and collaboration to create joyful and unique experiences for the consumer.
The latest execution is an advertisement that I believe truly exemplifies Coke’s latest positioning: “Real Magic”. Launched in May 2022, “The Conductor” is a YouTube video that presents an exciting collaboration of diverse and emerging musical talent, including a K-Pop girl group, a Canadian Indian rapper, and a Turkish electro-pop music producer, singing the Queen classic “It’s a kind of magic”. The video is energizing and effervescent, a very appropriate metaphor for the product itself.
(Source: YouTube)
“Coke Studio is a direct extension of Coca-Cola’s Real Magic philosophy. It celebrates the unique ability of music to unite and uplift and provides a connection point for fans around the world to come together and enjoy a new experience.”
Pratik Thakar, Head of Global Creative Strategy and Content, Coca-Cola.
Although Coca-Cola has continuously reiterated their tagline overtime, you can’t deny that they have been consistent in their storytelling because their executions are recognisable to the brand. The tagline reiteration just allows them to explore the different ways and stories to deliver on their brand positioning: joy to the consumer. In terms of what to execute, in a time when content has become a valuable social currency, by using their brand positioning as a North Star Coke found its own distinctive way to leverage the consumer’s demand for it. They saw the opportunity to bring people together over and the brand’s positioning shines through this execution: refreshing the world and inspiring optimism and happiness.
To demonstrate a discord between brand positioning and choices the brand owners make, I think Johnnie Walker is a worthy example. In 1999, Johnnie Walker rolled out their “Keep Walking” global campaign that represented their new brand positioning, which aims to inspire progress and the celebrate journey to reaching one’s achievements.
(Source: Marketing Week)
It is interesting to note that in some Asian and Latin American markets, Johnnie Walker often does partnerships with karaoke bars and nightclubs as an important source of revenue; in Hong Kong Johnnie Walker is the mixer of choice for a late-night karaoke session! Here, a consumer is not likely to associate Johnnie Walker with their aspirational “Keep Walking” brand positioning.
(Source: indoclubbing.com)
However, you cannot completely criticise Diageo in pursuing these types of partnerships because the sales team can shift a lot of volume to this customer. If these partnerships are lucrative, who can really blame them? The unfortunate result of this is that the perception of the brand is not aligned with the brand’s positioning. This perception is what we call equity. If a consumer associates Johnnie Walker with late nights singing with your friends, that is the brand’s equity. If a consumer associates Coke Cola with bringing people together, that is also the brand’s equity. You can’t control equity like you can control positioning, but you can certainly influence your brand’s equity through the choices you make.
So remember, a strong positioning will lead to strategic choices and executions that ensure brands act consistently over time. It will guide the team to choose a course of action around some opportunities or issues that may arise in the market and tackle it in line with the brand’s positioning.
When you think about how you and your team make decisions for your brand, I want you to think about the following details:
Does your brand have a clear and distinctive positioning? If yes, how much is your team guided it?
Do you adhere to your positioning in everything you do? Why or why not?
If your brand does not have a brand positioning, what have you used until now to act as a consistent point of reference of how your brand should present itself to its audience? What are the challenges of not working with a brand positioning?
Are you interested in creating a brand positioning? Why or why not?
If you haven’t created a brand positioning yet, it should be high on your priority list. It cannot and should not be done in haste as it requires work to revisit each component that makes up your overall brand positioning. We cover these foundational principles of marketing during our 7-week Brand Positioning & Strategy Bootcamp. We believe in the power of active learning, so we created a learning experience to help facilitate that beyond the on-demand video lessons. You will learn how to grow brands through applying exercises on tools and frameworks we introduce during the bootcamp, and live Zoom sessions with myself, visiting consultants and the rest of your cohort. Head here to learn more: https://www.brandgrowthbootcamp.com/site/brand-positioning-and-strategy . We are also providing group discounts so get in touch if this bootcamp is something you and your team could do together!