Know-How Exchange : Branding

Yogesh,
Asking for branding help to differentiate your firm or a positioning strategy when you state, "There is little that differentiates us from other outsourcing services vendors" is a lot like asking what color to paint the deck chairs on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg! Drop back and develop a strategy that differentiates you first You do that by developing your marketing strategy:

MARKETING STRATEGY

Analysis

• Customer and Market
  
  • who are your customers?
  
  
  • what are their needs?
  
  
  • what are the influencers in the part of the decision process - those words and images that affect the emotional part of the decision making process?
    what media do they go to to find out about your products and services to satisfy the intellectual part of the decision process?
  
  
  • how would you divide these customers into segments so you can focus on the segment that best matches your capabilities to satisfy their needs?
  
  
• Competitors
  
  • what are their strengths and weaknesses?
  
  
  • how well do they satisfy the customers' needs and where do they miss?
  
  
• Your Company
  
  • what are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?
  
  
  • what are your core competencies - what do you do better than anyone else in the industry?
  
  
  • what are your unique selling points (USPs)

Direction setting

• Competitive Actions
  
  • how can you leverage your strengths to exploit your competitors' weaknesses?
  
  
  • how can you make your weaknesses into strengths?
  
  
  • how can you recast your competitors' strengths into weaknesses?
  
  
• SWOT Actions
  
  • look for actions where strengths align with opportunities - these are the "base strategies" and you should spend most of your time/resource executing these actions
  
  
  • where weaknesses align with threats, develop actions to overcome the weaknesses - these are "survival strategies" - spend much time and resources here.
  
  
  • where weaknesses align with opportunities, develop plans to overcome your weaknesses and these become "expansion strategies." Use your "leftover" resources here.
  
  
  • where strengths align with threats, develop plans here and monitor - these are "defensive strategies"
  
  
• Product/Service Strategy
  
  • Given your customers' needs, your core competencies, your unique selling points, and your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, develop a product/service strategy to take advantage of your strengths to satisfy customers' needs better than your competitors
  
  
• Position Statement - develop a statement for guiding your marketing activities:
  
  • Placement within a market segment – In which segments does the product/service play?
  
  
  • Placement of the product relative to other products/services categories and application – What are upstream and downstream in the supply chain with respect to the product/service? Is the product/service high value or low value with respect to other product/services used by the customers?
  
  
  • Placement versus competitors' products/services – How well does the product/service satisfy the customers’ needs versus the competition?
  
  
  • Placement of the product/services in terms of features and benefits - Is the product/service high performance or basic in features and benefits? What is the value proposition for the product/service versus the competitors?
  
  
  • Placement in the sales channel – How is the product sold by whom to whom?
  
  
  • Placement in the minds of decision makers and influencers – For those who make the “buy” decision, is the product/service critical or a commodity? Does it represent a major determiner for success and therefore involved in a major part of their daily activities for buyers and influencers?
  
  
• Brand Strategy - Develop brand rules:
  
  • Name (both company and product)
  
  
  • Logo
  
  
  • Product/service characteristics - colors, features, quality
  
  Packaging and packaging characteristics (colors, font styling, logo and logo placement)
  
  • Tag lines - develop to communicate your company's differentiating points

Developing this strategy in this way will help you to develop differentiation and then communicate it the right way to your customers in a comprehensive marketing plan. I hope this helps.

Wayde