About this document:

There are literally thousands of books written on the topic of best practices for positioning and value proposition. This is our cheat sheet.

Questions? Alice Lankester, [email protected] ​

Startup Guidelines: Positioning / Value Proposition Best Practices

Table of Contents Summary of this section

This document provides guidance for understanding how

Introduction to approach brand, product positioning, a value proposition, and components of a digital marketing plan. The Messaging Architecture How do I get started? Or Checklists and Templates restart?

The Positioning Statement Digital Marketing Plan Template, SmartInsights ​ Template for a positioning Managing a Digital Market Plan Toolkit, SmartInsights statement ​

The Value Proposition Reference sites

Positioning and Value Statement Creating a B2B Digital Marketing Plan for 2016 Examples (InfoGraphic) SmartInsights The Tagline Introduction to Building a Sales and Marketing Machine, ​ The Brand David Shok The Marketing Plan B2B Buyer Personas: Top Challenges, Tactics, and Uses, ​ Step 1: The Strategy MarketingProfs Step 2: The Tactics, Activities B2B Buyer Journey Mapping Basics, Forrester and Actions ​ Four Critical Components of Your Customer Journey Map, Step 3: Measure and Attribute ​ MarketingProfs Product Naming Resources for building buyer personas, MarketingProfs Made up words ​ 30 definitions of ‘brand’ by leading brand experts Heidi Real words ​ Team naming techniques Cohen

The Three Cs Of Successful B2B Positioning (Channel, ​ Customer, Competition) MarketingProfs The Ten Cs of B2B Marketing SmartInsights ​ SOSTAC: The Guide to your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan PRSmith

Books For Further Reading

Get to Aha! Discover your positioning DNA and dominate your competition Andy Cunningham ​ Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information Itamar Simonson & ​ Emanuel Rosen Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want Osterwalder, Alexander and ​ others

Introduction

Before embarking on any new marketing initiative, there must be agreement on the statement about the company’s brand, positioning and value proposition. These are ideally put ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ together into a messaging architecture.

Why? Because without these, there is no agreed direction on how to talk about the company, and its product and services, to customers and media. Teams will ‘make it up’ as they go along, which will present an inconsistent and confused message to the buyer.

Not only that, but the marketing plan itself will be directionless.

When the architecture statements are consistently agreed, every conversation and marketing material can consistently reflect the message.

The goal of this essay is to answer: ● Why you must build a messaging architecture, and what it is ● How to get started, or restarted, with a messaging architecture ● How to define, and write, a positioning statement ● How to define, and write, a value proposition ● Real world examples of positioning statements and value propositions ● How to craft a marketing plan

The Messaging Architecture

This article touches on brand, positioning statements, value propositions, vision, mission, and taglines.

These all, very often, get conflated and confused. But when a company has a messaging architecture in place, things (almost) magically become clearer.

A messaging architecture gives your team everything they need to talk about the company clearly, consistently and confidently. Done right, the components of the architecture can feed sales scripts, playbooks, and sales messages, and gives outside vendors the direction they need to springboard top quality deliverables.

Here are the components of a simple message architecture. You probably have all these materials in place somewhere. Pulling them all together into an internal handout for everyone can be really useful.

Vision Your vision is the difference you want to make in the world of your customers, and the world at large. It’s timeless. It’s often out of reach. The world will be a different place because of your vision.

Mission Your mission is what you do every day to service your vision. Every day you and your team should go home knowing that they’ve somehow advanced to business towards your mission.

Target market The market you are serving now with your product or service. Customers and potential customers.

Differentiator(s) What makes you most clearly stand out from your competition. Your secret sauce. The ‘thing’ your competitors wish they had, and don’t. Could be a short bullet list of things.

Category The recognized group of peers you belong in.

Positioning The differentiated place you have in the category, and industry, and statement your customer relevance. (read more) ​ ​

A template: Not always for public consumption, but For [insert target market] the [insert your product/service/brand] is the private [insert point of differentiation] among all [insert frame of reference] understanding. because [insert reason to believe]. Sometimes appears in the “About” area, Another template: as in XYZ company [Product name] is for [target user] who needs to [problem to be solved] is... an feel [emotions generated] while they do it. [Product name] is based on the [adjective] idea that [unique insight]. It will win because [reasons].

Value proposition The key benefit(s) you offer your most important customers, and the (read more) primary reason a customer chooses you over any other. ​ ​

These value propositions will dictate the content you create.

Key messages The top three to five key bullets that need to be driven home in every conversation about your company. Arm everyone with these.

Elevator story The brief pitch you say out loud when someone asks “so what does your company do?”

Often easily derived from your positioning statement and value proposition.

Every single person in the company should be able to sing this out loud on demand!

Brand : drivers and How and why the customers value and trust you, and your services. ​ values The personification of your traits. The promise of what you are making to your customers. The characteristics you want to be known for.

Tagline The one key, short phrase that usually appears alongside your name / (read more) logo. Different from your elevator story, positioning statement or value ​ ​ prop. But is derived from them, as it distills why you’re in business.

How do I get started? Or restart?

You may feel that your current architecture isn’t fitting right, isn’t fully agreed upon, or needs another look. How do you get started?

Here’s my agile, five-step, startup friendly process:

1/Conduct stakeholder interviews

Stakeholders are: ● Founders ● Employees ● Investors / board

Get feedback on what they think the product is for, why it’s great, what makes it fly above the competition. What does your brand ‘mean’ to them? What is your brand’s personality? Value system? Set of beliefs?

2/Conduct customer interviews

This is the most critical step! Don’t miss this one!

Segment customers into most relevant groups. Interview them, in person, on the phone, or virtually. If they know and love you, they’ll do it for free. You can also remunerate them for their time with an Amazon gift card or similar, or a donation to charity. Ask them all the same questions!

What motivated them to engage with you? How did they ‘find’ you? What gets them coming back?

3/Conduct workshops

Organize all your findings above, and bring together your brain trust as a working group. Work through what you’ve learned. Look for patterns and themes. Use the workshop to draft your messaging architecture / framework. ​ ​

4/Conduct qualitative research

Not everyone has time, or budget, to do steps 4 and 5. But they can be very useful.

Qualitative research asks questions about how the brand appears, feels, and the emotions it generates. Sometimes it asks what kind of ‘person’ the brand feels like.

(These are examples shared with me by the person working on branding for Thumbtack: Craigs’ List -- a rather untrustworthy fellow in a trenchcoat Angie’s List -- a somewhat boring lady in pearls and beige twinset Thumbtack -- a helpful, cheerful, capable looking fellow who walks in the door of your home with his toolbox)

5/Conduct quantitative research

Test the value proposition against similar cohorts. If you got a result of 80% preferring one thing over another, you can at least feel validated in testing that proposition in the market.

6/Crystalize the product description and messaging, differentiators and personality

This leads back to the messaging architecture / framework discussed earlier. ​ ​

The Positioning Statement

When someone asks “What does your company do?” Everyone in the company should be able to answer in terms that are understandable, free of jargon, and not burdened with confusing ‘insider’ terms. Your positioning statement impacts absolutely everything. If you’re not clear, everyone is working without guidance.

Your positioning statement is the differentiated place you have in the category, and industry, and your customer relevance.

We ran positioning workshops at Balderton in 2019. Here are detailed notes from those ​ workshops.

A S.W.O.T analysis is extremely useful to start the planning, and help guide the positioning ​ ​ statement.

Template for a positioning statement

For [insert target market] the [insert your product/service/brand] is the [insert point of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ differentiation] among all [insert frame of reference] because [insert reason to believe]. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

Another template: [Product name] is for [target user] who needs to [problem to be solved] and feel [emotions ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ generated] while they do it. [Product name] is based on the [adjective] idea that [unique ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ insight]. It will win because [reasons]. ​ ​ ​

Back in 2001, when Amazon only sold books online, its positioning statement was: For World Wide Web users who enjoy books, Amazon.com is a retail bookseller that provides instant access to over 1.1 million books. Unlike traditional book retailers, Amazon.com provides a combination of extraordinary convenience, low prices, and comprehensive selection.

Not all positioning statements have to follow this precise “MadLibs” style prescription of course.

Another way to approach a positioning statement is to use these questions to help frame the statement:

What do we do? How do we do it? Who do we do it for? And Why do we do it? ​ ​

Netflix’s example is below, with the positioning statement italicized in the copy. In this positioning statement, Netflix is telling us what it is — a leader in the Internet television network category. And goes on to tell us why it matters — because a critical mass of people ​ ​ are using it (and you should too).

“Netflix is the world’s leading Internet television network with over 93 million members in over ​ 190 countries enjoying more than 125 million hours of TV shows and movies per day,

including original series, documentaries and feature films. Members can watch as much as ​ they want, anytime, anywhere, on nearly any Internet-connected screen. Members can play, pause and resume watching , all without commercials or commitments.”

So long as your positioning statement is clear, free of jargon, unambiguous, and says what you do. I’ve included some real world examples of value propositions and positioning ​ ​ statements below.

The Value Proposition

The value proposition extends the positioning statement, by offering a statement about the emotional or rational benefit a customer gains for buying and using a product or service.

Your value proposition is the key benefit you offer your most important customers, and the primary reason a customer chooses you over any other. A good value proposition focuses on the clear and unique benefits that address a customer’s business needs.

Companies may find themselves in a position where they need to invent new value propositions to take on new opportunities; respond to competitive disruptions; or deal with a new or emerging technology change.

Or, companies may need to improve existing value propositions to upgrade outdated products; improve product and market fit; accelerate growth; or deal with customer misfit.

Communicating value and quality is a sustainable proposition. Communicating by price is not. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

Focus on: what can customers do better tomorrow, than they can today; contrast ‘pain’ and ‘gain’ with specific, dramatic emotional gain from using a product or service; provide documented, validated results.

Effectively you have to tell your story and explain how your product will actually make a business impact.

Source: Gartner 2015: Standard S.I.R. Storytelling Format

Positioning and Value Statement Examples

Some real world examples are below. Some more lively than others, but all would help people understand what these companies do.

Huddle is a secure cloud collaboration service that enables enterprise and government ​ organizations worldwide to securely store, access, share, sync and work on files with everyone they need to - regardless of whether they are inside or outside of an organization's firewall.

Huntswood is the UK's leading specialist resourcing and consultancy firm in the areas of ​ governance, compliance and complaints. Our ambition is to enhance the reputation of our clients with their customers, people and regulators. We do this by helping firms: quickly and effectively ​ react to regulatory issues, with high quality, swift intervention; develop and embed

appropriate systems, controls and processes to ensure robust governance and oversight; and better manage ongoing regulation

Darktrace is one of the world’s leading cyber threat defense companies. Its Enterprise ​ Immune System technology detects previously unidentified threats in real time, powered by machine learning and mathematics developed at the University of Cambridge, which analyze the behavior of every device, user and network within an organization. Some of the world’s largest corporations rely on Darktrace’s self-learning appliance in sectors including energy and utilities, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and transportation

Marketo provides the leading engagement marketing software and solutions designed to ​ help marketers develop long-term relationships with their customers - from acquisition to advocacy.

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of ​ services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. We develop and implement technology solutions to improve our clients’ productivity and efficiency. We enable our clients to become high-performance businesses and governments.

The Tagline

A tagline is a brief and catchy phrase that sums up your primary value. Taglines are frequently tied into a company’s logo. If your positioning exercise is done correctly, taglines emerge without too much pain and effort. Teams often make the mistake of starting with a tagline. ​ ​ That’s upside down.

Taglines are not a positioning statement. Taglines are not a value proposition. But taglines reflect both. Don’t try to make the tagline explain all. But ensure it accurately reflects your message.

The Brand

Why is it important to think about brand? Because a company’s brand is an essential and extremely valuable asset.

Brand defines how customers value and trust the company, its products and its services. The brand is the ‘story’ that is told to customers, and the ‘promise’ that the company makes to its customers.

A company has to work hard to focus on value and quality at every customer touchpoint, to help educate and inform those customers, support them fully, and be looked upon as an industry leader, trusted expert and responsible organisation. This is the company’s brand value. Protecting and increasing the value of the brand is a critical component of decision making in a company.

The Marketing Plan

The goal of the marketing plan is simply this: to agree on the strategy and tactics that ​ marketing will accomplish to support powering an increase in leads and sales while ​ communicating that the company is a trusted brand, and has a valuable, high quality set of ​ products and services. ​

Steps to build a plan are included below. Templates for B2B Marketing Plans are included at the top of this module.

The marketing plan cannot be built without integration into a sales plan. The diagram below is taken from David Shok’s excellent series Building a Sales and Marketing Machine. ​ ​

Step 1: The Strategy

● Identify segments, target markets, objectives, and positioning. ● Identify and document the value proposition. List the materials and activities you will be providing and building to communicate that value proposition. ● Define your three to five main customer personas. (Personas are realistic personality profiles that represent a significant cohort of your buyers and usually include:

demographics; buying preferences; drivers and motivators; fears and challenges; content preferences; professional associations; and personality traits.) ● Define your customer’s journey map — a visual representation of the various interactions a buyer will have with your business to make a purchase — built from the customer perspective. ● Identify how targets behave in digital channels — their digital ‘watering holes’ — what they read, where they read it, and how they learn about products and services like yours. Look at who the influencers are in the industry and who is available for co-marketing and partnership marketing. ● Look at the competitive brands, and benchmark against them.

Step 2: The Tactics, Activities and Actions

● Digital activities include: Website, SEO, email marketing and content marketing, social media marketing and lead generation. ● For all activities focus on the call to action. That is, some activity you want the buyer ​ ​ to do to engage with you. It may be to respond to an offer, complete a survey, open an email or similar.

Step 3: Measure and Attribute

● Confidence in marketing comes from attributing activities and proving results.

Product Naming

This article does not fully cover the question of product naming. The guidelines here assumes that a name is already chosen. However, here are some directions in advance of that longer article.

As Al Ries and Jack Trout said in their 1972 marketing classic book Positioning: The Battle for ​ Your Mind. "Not only do you see what you want to see, you also smell what you want to ​ ​ ​ smell. [This] is why the single most important decision in the marketing of perfume is the name you decide to put on the brand."

Your product name should be easy to pronounce — people have a greater affection for names that are easy to pronounce — and easy to spell. People are easily irritated and confused by names they can’t confidently say out loud. And they’ll find it hard to Google you if your spelling is odd and idiosyncratic.

Made up words

A name can be a ‘made up’ word that that reflects who you are, or more closely describe the ​ ​ functions your product offers. It could be a word reflects the emotion of your service, and just sounds nice.

Look at Moonpig. What does the moon and pigs have to do with greeting cards? Nothing. But ​ ​ it’s funny and quirky and cute, and that’s probably why they chose it.

Choosing a made up word is very liberating. People, particularly those with an engineering focused mindset, naturally start with logical, descriptive words. And that can result in getting strangled by the word(s) not being accurate enough. Or by the domain not being available. Or just being hard to spell or say.

The made up word can only somewhat vaguely reflect the service you provide without too ​ ​ much thinking required. Look at Hubspot. It’s a hub for marketing (and now sales). It puts it all ​ ​ in one spot. It’s easy to say. Easy to spell. And now it’s a multi-billion dollar company. Look at Salesforce. Like Hubspot, but requires less thinking as to why they chose it.

Real words

The name might be a real word that reflects your brand personality or has a good association ​ ​ ​ ​ that tells a story. Think Prego tomato sauce (Italian for ‘please.) (Be careful when choosing words from a foreign language, or even your own language. The history of marketing is peppered with stories of names that mean quite different things in other languages and cultures. Read this article about epic failures in global branding.) ​ ​

The name might reflect the founding story. Burt’s Bees pays homage to the founder’s original ​ ​ bee colonies that created their products sold originally in farmers markets.

The name might reflect a location. Cisco was based on San Francisco. (But don’t ever, ever ​ ​ call San Francisco ‘Frisco’ to a native.) FujiFilm was based on Mt Fuji in Japan. Geographical names can evoke an emotion too. Chevy Tahoe trucks make you think of the rough outdoors.

A name could be a metaphor. The Amazon Kindle sparks ideas. The Ford Mustang makes ​ ​ you feel wild and crazy and fast. The fitbit is just a little bit of a thing that helps you become fit. And is now extended to the Zip, One, Flex and Force, all of which are, also, real words.

A name could pay homage to an inspiring story in history. Elon Musk tells the story of how he ​ ​ named the Tesla after the inventor Nikola Tesla. That’s a name that’s easy to say, spell and ​ ​ comes with a built-in narrative that tells a deeper story. Looking at history never fails to improve us all.

Team naming techniques

Some techniques for getting to a name (when you’re not hiring a super expensive brand name creative agency):

1. Start with creating your messaging architecture; without that, your name is a shot in ​ ​ the dark. For ‘product name’ insert a ridiculous code name into your architecture, so you don’t get distracted by it or start believing it’s the real name.

2. Get a core naming team together. Choose members carefully. Keep it small. Get the core team in a room without phones or distractions. Get big post its for the wall. (These are, without doubt, my favorite ever piece of office equipment. Once you’ve ​ ​ used them, you can take them down transcribe, throw away, or keep for posterity.).

In that room:

a. Braindump all ideas so far. Good, bad, ugly. An unfettered release of ideas.

b. Free-associate words that ‘mean’ something with regard to your brand and product.

c. Do the Dictionary,Thesaurus, Wikipedia exercise. I’ve seen this done, and done this myself, and it is a well-trodden path now. Use these resources to find words that relate to brand value words, or functional words. Use Latin or Greek dictionaries to find words with interesting root meanings.

Use encyclopedias to find mythological beasts or gods that reflect their value. (Oracle is named after the Oracle of Delphi, and Nike after the Greek goddess of victory.) Is there some story in the cultural history of your founders and creators that can provide deeper meaning?

This mining is a good method, but it requires discipline. Huge rat-holing can occur. So this could be something you do outside the space of the group brainstorm, as pre-homework, in a comfy chair, with a good reading light, a glass of your favourite, and no distractions. That would be my preference.

d. Use a name generator like http://www.nameboy.com/. Kills two birds with one ​ ​ stone. A name, and a domain all in one.

e. End with a shortlist of 5–10 names.

When you have a shortlist, share it with a quick Survey tool to those people you trust. Be careful whose opinions you ask. Ultimately, you have to be the decider. Everyone, and I mean everyone, will have an opinion and those opinions with always, always contradict one another. Pick opinions you trust, and then go for it. Make the survey anonymous. Offer the short list in one page, a rating system, and a free text field for each for an opinion. Have them rate names on a scale so you can see which gather the most favor.

Finally trust yourself. Good names sometimes take a time to gel, and then time to love.

Can you imagine your child or dog being called anything other than what they are? No, me neither.