Brand marketing is really a question about positioning:
- Where do you play?
- How do you win?
- How do you want to be known?
I love these questions. They originated with A.G Lafley and Roger Martin in their brilliant book on strategy, Playing To Win.
Lafley and Martin write, “Strategy is about making specific choices to win in the marketplace… More specifically, strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.”
To answer these questions we developed a model at Sticky Branding called the 3M’s — Market, Message, Method:
- Market: Who and where are the customers that will drive your next stage of growth?
- Message: What is the brand messaging that will provoke your customers to buy?
- Method: How do you deliver the right message to the right customer with the right call to action?
When you get the 3M’s aligned into a brand strategy it drives growth.
What makes the 3M’s so effective is they enable strategic planning on two strategy horizons:
- Immediate: How do we activate and drive sales right now?
- 3-5 Years: How do we position the brand to win?
Throughout the pandemic we have been using the 3M’s to focus and activate sales. On average, business revenue declined by 30% in 2020. The stakes were high and with layoffs looming our clients needed to activate sales quickly.
Starting with Market — Who and where are the customers that will drive the next stage of growth? — focused our strategies to solve the immediate need: who can we sell to right now?
By identifying needs in the immediate you can tailor your brand messaging and marketing strategies to provoke your customers to buy.
As you sell you learn. You gain insights on where the market is heading, or how it’s changing, and that gives you a leading indicator of where your brand needs to evolve. This makes brand positioning in the future much easier.
Brand positioning is about making choices. Lafley and Martin continue, “Attempting to be all things to all customers tends to result in underserving everyone. Even the strongest company or brand will be positioned to serve some customers better than others. If your customer segment is ‘everyone’ or your geographic choice is ‘everywhere,’ you haven’t truly come to grips with the need to choose.”
Position your brand to win with the 3M’s:
- Market: Who and where are the customers that will drive your next stage of growth?
- Message: What is the brand messaging that will provoke your customers to buy?
- Method: How do you deliver the right message to the right customer with the right call to action?
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