Talk to me…

If I see one more industry babble, jargonistic “positioning” statement crafted to “speak to our audience” I think I might just have to shred my thesaurus in protest.

Last time I looked, your audience was probably comprised of people. And chances are most of those people speak, write and read English (among other languages but we will deal with the whole multi-cultural consideration issue another time). Now using the English language requires a bit more than just stringing random words together in the vague hope that they will mean something to someone.

The process that usually generates these “statements” (I use the term loosely), is often a committee (first mistake), it tries to appeal to everyone (second mistake) and doesn’t want to offend anyone (third and biggest mistake).

Let’s work through them with the starting caveat that unless you have a good sense of what your brand is – what you stand for and are willing to defend any “positioning” exercise you go through is most likely to fail. But back to the mistakes.

Positioning by committee
You want to create ownership of the statement, make sure that all the relevant people have an opportunity for input. Okay fair enough, but that doesn’t require them to be part of the entire process, and certainly doesn’t mean that they need to have sign off.

A general rule of thumb is the more people involved in the final decision the more watered down and devoid of personality and oomph the statement will be. By all means, ask for input and opinions, consider them, keep what will work and discard what won’t. Then craft something that makes sense.

Appeal to everyone
Apart from the obvious fact that this is impossible to do, “everyone” are not your customers, they are not your employees or other stakeholders. “Everyone” don’t care about who you are and what you are selling. “Someone” does. So that is who you should be talking to – your “someones”. Do you know who they are? What they care about? Why they might care about who you are? No – then find out. Yes – then talk to THEM and don’t worry about “everyone”.

Try not to offend
We have all heard the statement – “if you aren’t upsetting someone you aren’t doing it right” (or something to that effect). I am not saying you should go out of your way to be offensive. But the thing is if you take a stand, draw a line in the sand with your position and are willing to defend it to and against others, then you will upset someone. It’s okay. Revel in it, be happy that you have passion enough about your business to risk the wrath of others. It’s a good thing.

There are plenty of articles, books, papers, blogs and the like out there that will tell you how to go about writing your positioning. There are even websites that will generate one for you (all in good fun).

Often what these resources fail to tell you is that the most important thing is to be authentic. One of my favourite stories about why this matters was when I was working with a group of forensic engineers. Their positioning was unintelligible goobly de gook.

“Optimise the outcomes of major events to generate successful results for all…” or something along those lines.

During a workshop to discuss their positioning I kept asking, so “what do you do and why do you do it?” In total frustration at my repeated questions one of the engineers finally said: “It’s like this, when things go wrong, we keep looking until we figure out why it happened.”

Thank you. Finally a sentence that not only told me what they did (look for answers when things go wrong), but also why they did it (because not giving up until they found those answers was the most important thing). AND, did it in normal, non-jargonistic language.

So, next time you are trying to come up with a positioning statement, throw out the committee, stop trying to speak to everyone, be happy if you upset a few people and most importantly – just say it. You might be surprised by the results.

See you next week.

Michel is a Brand Advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations recognize who they are and align that with what they do and say, to build more authentic and sustainable brands. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment.