Clarity is the key to getting your brand positioning realised

It’s hard enough to come up with a strong brand positioning; one that is credible, inspiring, competitive and brave. It will have taken months of reviewing the data, analysing the market, commissioning new research where there were gaps, and wrangling as a team over the needs and peculiarities of different parts of the global matrix. Not to mention flashes of imagination and iconoclasm when the going got tough.

But here you are, with it all beautifully set down in the template dictated by your marketing best-practice unit. What’s sobering now is the knowledge that the much harder phase is yet to come.

Does that mean taking it out and making it real in the lives of your consumers? If only. Consumers may be mercurial, contrary and hard to please, but they are relatively passive recipients of the fruits of your labour. Yes, they may ignore, may tut or – let’s not get too negative here – may intuitively warm to the new contours of your brand.

What they are not going to do is break into your shared drive and change the definition, rewrite the background charts, alter the reasons to believe and insert a new, and completely dissonant, brand idea in the pointy bit. In short, they won’t seek to change your stuff.

Your own colleagues, though – and the specialist agencies beyond them – are another matter. Nobody will use the word ‘change’, of course. It is understood by all to be rude and inflammatory. The term they will use is much more insidious and harder to deflect. What they are doing, they suggest, is ‘interpreting’.

It sounds soft, it seems reasonable, it comes across as a natural concomitant of the creative act. But what it amounts to is change, change, change, in all but name.

Team members and agencies need to feel better about assent and understand that willingness to work with what’s there is not seen as weakness.

Internally, that can take a variety of forms. One is to seize upon a concept that is buried in one of the subsidiary parts of the definition document, like the consumer pen portrait, and elevate it to become the principal idea. An interpretation based on emphasis.

Another is to soften the phrase at the sharp end of the model – the brand idea – to make it more ‘palatable’, and a lot less, well, sharp. An interpretation based on cowardice.

Or they might delete, or elide, or completely rephrase key elements based on some claimed but unsubstantiated knowledge of what ‘works in our market’. Interpretations based on mystique.

The agency brief – or, more accurately, briefs, since there are so many external partners these days – is a notorious interpretative fork in the road. Marketing managers will resist passing on the entire brand model to agencies on the basis that this internal opus is too weighty for them to digest. So, they will paraphrase, to conveniently bring a focus on what they deem ‘inspiring’.

At this point two things are predictable with ironclad certainty: 1) each agency planner will reinterpret the brief and come back with a creative brief of their own, and 2) all these interpretations will be different from one another.

And that’s before the creative teams get their hands on it. Or the video director. Or the actors. Interpret is what these guys do, and they can eloquently explain how they got there – even if the results now seem a dispiriting distance away from your original vision.

Making a contribution

No matter what your levels of certainty and seniority, the task of disseminating your freshly crafted brand-positioning model is one that puts you in a terrible bind.

On the one hand, you don’t want robotic obedience; you do need team members to bring their talents to dramatise and extend what’s been set down. And if they genuinely do see improvements or flaws, you’d want to hear them.

On the other hand, what will blow the wheels off the whole enterprise is change (sorry, interpretation) for the sake of it, by people who have not been in involved in the process, delivered without due thought, only for the next person along the chain to reinterpret the interpretation.

One thing you can try to do is to understand the psychology that’s at work here. In today’s open, collaborative cultures everyone can have a voice. But that comes with an unintended consequence – the pressure to speak or be seen as irrelevant.

Those both inside and outside the organisation can end up feeling that if they haven’t made a comment, they haven’t made a contribution. If an agency planner, for example, were to simply accept the brand model and run with it, they might prompt the whispered aside, ‘Well, what are we paying them for?’

The solution is to reframe intelligent, enthusiastic acceptance as an active contribution, one every bit as valuable as putting in your twopence worth. Team members and agencies need to feel better about assent and understand that willingness to work with what’s there is not seen as weakness.

Repetition is your friend

Another, more basic, way to come at the problem is to craft that brand model with a bit more bloody-minded clarity. Usually, because there are so many preordained boxes to fill in, teams aim to avoid repetition and use different words and expressions in each discrete section. The result is a kind of even-handedness that belies the force of the main thrust of the intellectual endeavour.

If there is a big core thought at the heart of your new positioning – and there really should be – then find ways to bring it into every part of the definition model. Repeat the seminal word everywhere. Make it seamlessly part of the brand character, the purpose, the insight, the reasons to believe, the customer pen portraits, the various target-specific propositions, as well as the main proposition and brand idea.

It won’t stop people aching to interpret but it will raise the stakes. They’d have to be willing to call into question the entire positioning, rather than the usual nibbling around the edges.

There will still be some, of course, who insist on resisting whatever it is that has emerged from your months of pivotal marketing toil – the self-declared contrarians, the players of devil’s advocate, the predictable and tiresome pushers to the next level. What do you do about them?

You discreetly explain that continued demurral is not without its sanctions. Sorry, that last sentence was a bit vague, so let me reinterpret it for you: speak softly, and carry a big stick.