Burke Alder - Leadership and Business Blogs
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Do you have a brand positioning statement? A business at any stage needs a strong brand positioning statement. This statement needs to be known by everyone in the organization. A clear statement helps marketers and companies rise above the competitive noise and articulate the value they provide to their target audience.
Last week (February 28 - March 3), Qualtrics held their annual customer conference called the Qualtrics Insight Summit at the Grand America Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. This conference attracts the best customer experience leaders from around the world. The line up of world renowned speakers is impressive and inspiring. Omar Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer, Beats by Dre, inspired the audience from the stage on day one with his keynote, "Your Product is the Experience: Why Beats By Dre Isn't Just About Headphones."
In my last blog, I discussed 6 rules to create a competitive advantage and win. In this week's blog, I want to cover five marketing positioning strategies that will help you differentiate your product/service and carve out your spot in a competitive landscape. These five positioning strategies will help you focus your company and help you create market value. As you watch TV commercials and marketing strategies unfold in competitive markets you'll see one of these five positioning strategies at work.
As I have built companies, there has always been competition. As you build your business or your brand there will be competition both direct and indirect. I've had to learn to embrace the competition and use it to make our company and our products/services better. There is one truth I've learned through the process, competition makes you better. So how do you compete and win when your competition has more capital and resources than you do?
For this week's blog post, I'm going back 7 years to an experience where I learned the importance of internal marketing. I was a Director of Marketing at AtTask now Workfront. Over a quick few years, we had acquired some great enterprise customer logos. For most of the company, they where just awesome logos, but we know that each of these customers had awesome stories to tell and we wanted to tell them. We developed a internal product marketing strategy to change this.
Over the past decade, I've been involved in helping Software as a Service (SaaS) companies go from concept to hypergrowth. I have gone through that that journey three times with Workfront Formerly AtTask, Lendio, and now ClientSuccess. During each of these startup journeys we have had to develop a strategic way we engaged with our customers. As we end 2016 and enter into 2017, the biggest impact in growth for a SaaS company will be in the ability to retain and grow their existing customer base. Revenue retention and growth of current customers is the catalyst to hypergrowth for SaaS companies.
Each Olympics I watch to see who will emerge victorious in Olympic branding. The IOC (the governing body of the Olympics) has many branding guidelines and restrictions to Olympic branding. These guidelines create opportunities for companies like Nike who look for creative ways to gain mass awareness and generate deep brand equity throughout the Olympics. This year was no different—Nike used it's shoes with yellow and pink to win the Olympics branding game.
The 2014 Winter Olympics were full of amazing stories of victory and defeat. From the underdogs to the favored champions, the Sochi Olympics did not disappoint. One of my favorite moments was a brand strategy from Oakley. A brand strategy that unified the best athletics in the world around the color green. With million of eyeballs watching the Olympics, companies (brands) try to use creative marketing techniques to seize the moment. Oakley did it perfectly—it started with green.
Everyone has moments of creative genius. Marketing ideas that are as big as life and their outcomes even bigger. So, how can you make the creative process and it outcomes more consistent. That's what this blog post is all about. You will learn four simple steps to tap into your creative genius on a regularly basis. In 1972, Alka-Seltzer launched one of the greatest ad campaigns in history. The campaign helped trible their sales and put their brand on the map. They used four simple steps.
