Healthy Conversations
Imagining & Creating New Value For Health Brands & Consumers

Imaging and creating new value for your audiences starts with your brand positioning.

Sramana Mitra, strategy consultant and Forbes columnist, just ran an interesting series – Blogosphere on Positioning - that captures some interesting and complimentary thoughts on positioning from some pretty smart people: Steve McKee, Tom Asacker, Susan Gunelius, Rober Bly and David Meerman Scott.

Here are a few highlights:

• grow your appeal by targeting fewer people
• evaluate whether your positioning passes six key tests
• instead of trying to occupy a unique “position”, develop a unique attitude
• make internal changes to meet customers’ needs, which will lead to the brand experience and perception you want your brand to convey

Have a read. There are good insights here that you can start to incorporate into your efforts right away.

I read an article “Four Lifestyle Rules To Keep You Healthy” on Time. com and thought to myself what would the four rules be to keep brands healthy.

Tough to narrow to four, but here are mine.

1. An important and differentiating idea – the starting point for all great brands.
2. Relevance to audiences – based on understanding their hopes, desires and real life practices.
2. Tapping emotion – because the majority of our decisions are made with our “guts”.
3. Brilliant execution – which is so uncommonly excellent across the board that it reflects a clear leadership position.

Would you substitute any others? Please share your thoughts.

There’s no magic bullet that will help you come out stronger on the other side of the downturn. But there are ways to seize what is admittedly an awful situation and steer it to your advantage. By discovering new insights. Uncovering and providing what your customers are hungry for.

Address these five questions to help you position yourself as the one to turn to when things come around. Questions that revolve around three “R”s – reshaping, refining and rationalizing. And which are ultimately about customers. Because without them, nothing us really matters.

1. Is your message simple and sharp? Are you providing a crystal clear understanding of the value of your offering?

2. Does your portfolio reflect this clarity and simplicity? Is it focused on those offerings that drive reputation, relationships and business? Is it simple for customers to easily shop and choose what they want?

3. Are you adding value in ways that are important to customers while building on your differentiation and strengths, e.g. through new product or service enhancements, channels, partners, content, experiences?

4. Are you investing in what matters most to customers? If not, go dark. Because nothing else really matters. Stop marketing to them, and do for them. Engage then where they are and how they want. Align all your activities and spending to deliver that value. And if you can’t find the value in an activity, let it go.

5. Are you operating with integrity and treating employees, customers, shareholders and partners with respect? Too many have already let us down. And they’ve been called out. Rise above, and you’ll come out stronger on the other side.