Are you clear about your company’s place in the world?
Regardless of the industry you’re in, it’s incredibly difficult to stand out and gain the attention and interest of distracted, busy, overwhelmed buyers (people). Let alone get them to actually take action and pull out the credit card. Some research says the average american is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements each day. Chances of your brand being one of the few people actually remember is slim to none. As a marketer, that’s your starting point. Encouraging, right?
In this legendary video clip of Steve Jobs, he quipped: “We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is.” This is coming from the guy that led the most iconic brand of our time. A brand with a market cap of over one trillion dollars. Yes, trillion with a T.
He went on to say “so we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us”. These 16 words are the essence of marketing.
We all try to channel our inner Steve Jobs from time to time, but even then we still need frameworks and tools to help us work towards superior clarity in our brand values and messages. In reading ‘Power Branding’, by Steve McKee, I ran across a framework that seems to do a good job with this challenge of getting to clarity with our brands. He calls it the ‘Five S Framework’. The goal is getting really clear about where your brand fits in the world.
Here’s what it looks like:
- Someone… your brand serves better than others. (Mountain Dew)
- Something… that makes it unique. (Altoids)
- Somehow… about the way it’s made. (Maker’s Mark)
- Sometime… that it’s best used. (Weekends were made for Michelob)
- Somewhere… it’s perfect for. (Tide to Go)
On average, I don’t think we spend enough time thinking deeply about each of these dimensions of our differentiation strategy. We think about them, certainly, maybe just not deeply enough to where we really stress test our ideas on who our ‘someone’ is, for example.
It’s interesting to combine the five ‘S’ idea with ‘five whys’. In other words, when you say your someone is the director of IT at mid-market enterprises, ask why five times until it becomes crystal clear. You’ll uncover other specifics about your ‘someone’ that you maybe didn’t consider before. Do that for each ‘S’.
“We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.” ~Steve Jobs
If you’re a marketer, I commend you for working in an incredibly challenging, very complex profession. You have the power to create meaningful, lasting work. That’s what makes the marketing profession so wonderful.
Thanks to both Steve’s (Jobs and McKee). You inspire us.
