INBOUND 2016: Karla Morales-Lee "7 Positioning for Growth: How to Identify, Articulate and Market"

Hi, everybody, and welcome to this session on positioning for Growth. I'm Carla Morales Lee and I'm from London and I'm also CEO of Hunter and Farmer. So today we're going to talk about how to identify, articulate and market what makes you different and better. The session's 45 minutes, which is great because I'm pregnant and I can't really stand up for longer than 45 minutes without needing to sit down. So first off, we're going to talk about a little bit of introduction to the subject and also kind of how I position myself in the market. We're going to talk about how you can identify your brand position and then some 10 key lessons for agency positioning, as well as kind of a summary of it all. So I want to start off by telling you a little bit of a story about why I've come to position myself as the agency brand expert. So, way back in 2004, I went to university in a place called Plymouth on the south coast of England. Anyone been to Plymouth? Oh, nice. And I started marketing and at the time there wasn't any focus on social media and there definitely wasn't any focus on content marketing, but there was a lot of focus on how to create and build brands. So as a result, when I came out of university, I was really, really desperate to work for one of the major FMCG corporations selling either soap powder or chocolate. But I didn't get a job at either of those. So this is just a random dog with a sad face to show you how I felt about that. What did happen was I was called by a recruitment agent who said, we've got this great agency that does marketing for creative agencies. They're kind of an agency for agencies. That's amazing. So I went there, really excited about doing that, and I was given and I was asked to call 50 marketeers a week and to make credentials meetings for agencies. I wasn't asked to qualify those prospects, to find out if there was any opportunities there, but just to get those meetings. And after a few months, it took me a while to work it out because I was very young and going out a lot with young students who also worked there. I started to say, well, hang on, what's wrong with this picture? How comes by day agencies are out there talking to their clients about how to market their brands strategically and with great tactics, and yet under the COVID of darkness, they're hiring students to make cold calls for them and make meetings. But all wasn't lost with my kind of brand head on. I was also looking around the market and saying, and saying, there seems to be some agencies out there that are really behaving like brands, but no one's really talking about them as agency brands. And they're exhibiting some real behavior that brands would do the client side brands. First off, they had a really, really clear customer target profile. And I know you guys know a lot about Personas, but remember we're talking kind of way back in 2004 where I was thinking about how agencies were going to outperform and grow more than other agencies. This is an article from Campaign magazine in the uk, which is a bit like Ad Age. And it's a recent quote from Neil Christie, who's MD of an advertising agency called Wyden and Kennedy, where he said, I want some clients to be keen to work with us and some clients to be afraid to work with us. Now, all of you brand marketeers out here will know that you probably have quite a good, clear customer profile about who you want to work with, who you don't want to work with. And if you want to be an agency brand, that's absolutely crucial for success. They also had a really, really clear vision that served as an organizing idea for the business. Anyone know who this is? David Ogilvy? Yeah. So they talked about we sell or else. And that really defined a lot of things about how the business went about their day to day kind of goings. These agencies always had also had a really distinct culture which fed from this organizing idea. This is mother, an advertising agency in London whose kind of vision over the door is that they want to be a meeting place for creatives. So this is their office desk which they've designed to be a complete continuous circle where everyone can sit around together. And they also have a number of initiatives such as down here they have a pop up restaurant within their building where they regularly invite creatives from all walks of life to come and sit with them and have dinner. And to be honest, I could have put quite a few examples out there about how agency brands outperform the market. But the best way to really summarize that is that agency brands identify a position and then they make sure it informs all of the four P's. Once you have a position, it's very, very easy to answer questions like what kind of product should we sell? And are we able to charge a premium price? Yes, you are, because you're distinct. What kind of promotion should we do that's going to help us own this space in people's minds rather than just what kind of promotion should we do full stop? And also what should our place of business look like if we want to attract a certain type of employee or a certain type of client? How should it kind of feel when you walk in through our walls? And positioning is really quite a revolutionary idea in the sense that it does inform all of those four crucial areas for business success. How many of you right now, if I was to log onto your website predominantly talk about what you do rather than why you do it? Okay, now there's a very good reason why you do that. Because you want to tell customers this is what you can get from us. But the reality is, and this is a stat that you've heard probably all across the conference over the last couple of days, is that there's 120,000 agencies in the US alone. And the chances are what you do probably isn't that unique to what a number of other agencies do. So leading with what you do isn't a position, whereas why you do it can be. Positioning is about owning a unique space in prospective customers mind relative to the competition. And 7up is probably a great example of how they went about doing this when they thought about, okay, we're going to position ourselves as an UN Cola and actually saying you're an un something is a kind of tried and tested way of positioning a business. But actually if you want to have a position, you need to think about questions like, not, okay, how can we tell the clients what we do, but how do we tell clients what we're best suited to helping them address? So this question here, which agency would be best suited to helping me address this specific challenge on your website right now, on your social media, are you clear about the specific challenge that you solve for clients? Now that doesn't mean that you need to be a specialist. People get very kind of scared and worried about being a specialist. But you do have to have a clear idea where if your client comes to you and says, you know what guys, what do you do better than anything else? You need to say, you know what, the challenge that we time and time again succeed on is X. You also need to think about, do you have a way of working and culture that would fit with your target Persona? So you guys are experts in inbound marketing. You can draw somebody onto your website to do business with you, but if they came into your actual business, would they feel a way of working in a culture that suited that Persona? So let's talk about how you identify your brand position, a weak position. Again, this can make people feel Quite uncomfortable. But it is quite a clear way for you to read a line and think, that is me or that isn't me. We can do whatever you want us to. That is the best example I can give you of an agency that has a weak position, that there's lots of reasons that people say they do it. We want to have a variety of work and we want to be helpful. We're team players. It's a weak position. A strong position. Oh, dear. Is that your company is clear on what you do, how you do it, but also why you do it. It's also clear on how you are different and better to the competitors in your space, the challenges you're best suited to address and importantly the ones you are not. And finally the real value that you offer your clients. And we're going to talk about that a bit later on. Anyone here want to tell me how brands, so client side brands go about identifying their position? Any ideas? Yep. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the result of it. They'll go about. They'll conduct a brand audit. Now, brand audits are really, really, really simple. You can go and do them today, but lots of people won't go and do them today for their agency because we're busy. We've got priorities with our clients. It's something that we'd love to do, but we haven't got the time. But if you do it, I promise you it will transform the way you talk about your business. So I'm going to tell you really simply how you can go away today and do that for yourselves. Number one, ask are people aware of us? So you're going to need to conduct some research to do this. If so, what are they aware of us for? And is they aware of us, what we want to be known for? How is our market changing and evolving? How are our competitors positioned? It's very rare that I'll walk into an agency and say, okay, well, can you show me a spreadsheet that shows me how all of your other competitors that you come up against are talking about themselves? They'll say, oh, well, I think you know, drjones.com kind of says this and Smith and Son sort of says that. Know what your competitors are saying and how they're positioning themselves. What do our customers want and need? And you guys will know a lot about this with inbound marketing. Now, ideally, obviously you would get somebody external to do this for you. This last point, but again, you can do it yourselves. Send questions to your clients, asking them questions along the lines of what are our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Send them to your board and ask that they answer them without conferring. And send them back to your kind of internal head of marketing. Send them to your internal employees and ask them. You will get an unbelievable amount of insight about where your strengths are, where the opportunities are and how you should talk about how you're different and better to the competition. If you don't do this, your marketing will always be blind to the kind of message you need to be putting out there to be differentiated. So great, you've gone through, you've done your brand audit, you know exactly how you should position yourself. Now what? Well, positioning is absolutely brilliant for marketing. Anyone know or heard of this company? Yeah. So this is a global brand agency. They've got 22 offices around the world in 26 countries. 1976. Their management team sits around the table and they say, we need a mission. We need something that's going to organize our business, that we're going to hang everything around. And they identified that, what they needed to do. We want to be the agency that convinces companies to see brands as valuable assets rather than just logos. So they looked at the market and they said, everyone's talking about brands as logos, but brands can be so much more than that. Who's owning that space in clients minds? Who's owning that space in the market? We should do that. And once they had that, they were able to think, okay, well what should our strategy look like that builds on that mission? First of all, we need to change the dialogue around brands. We also need to redefine the meaning of brand management. And we need to lead the debate on understanding brands as valuable brand assets. Now these are huge things to do. But bearing in mind at the time they were just like any other small agency sitting around the table and saying, okay, what are we going to do to really elevate our brand, to really drive growth? And when you look at what they've established and where they've got to, I really believe that agencies that want to kind of get past that $1 million and then past that $10 million really need to have this kind of strategy to growth. And once they had that strategy, they said, okay, well how do we start changing the dialogue? How do we start owning the conversation? Let's create a best global brand study. Let's create a website called brandchannel.com where a number of people who are journalists talking about brands could come on and comment about brands. Let's do branding studies and papers and articles and blogging. Now, when I looked at this slide, when I was putting this presentation together, and having learned an awful lot about inbound marketing being at this conference, I thought, okay, well, these guys, they know a lot about tactics. They know the kind of things they need to do to drive revenue. But let me ask you, do those tactics tie back to your strategy? And does your strategy tie back to a vision for your business? So again, a few more stories that I'm going to share with you. I thought I'd keep it kind of light because it is one of the last sessions of the conference. So, 10 key lessons in agency positioning. After I did my marketing job for agencies, which was cold calling, I was lucky enough to land a job at product design innovation agency called Seymour Power. And they were designing products like the first ever cordless kettle for tifa. And when I worked there, I observed a behavior in them which has kind of underpinned a lot of how I work with clients today, which was rather than going into a meeting with a client and saying, would you like, we're a product design agency, we can design you a car, we can design you a kettle, we can design you, you know, whatever you like us to design, they'd say, we're an agency that really believes that things should be better for people and everything that we design is better for people. And this is a TV show as a result of having a philosophy that they were commissioned to do. So in each episode, they would redesign a shopping trolley or they would even redesign the bra, all kinds of things. And it meant that they had a point of view, a mission to talk about that really elevated them. Amongst every other product design agency that probably on the website says, we, we can design really great products. We do it really cheaply, we do it really effectively, We've got a great team and such and such. They realized quite quickly, you know what, if we want to establish a unique point of view in the market, we probably also need to have a way of doing things that were different. And they set up a department which is all about ethnography, which was going into people's home and watching how people use products. They said if we were doing ethnography, then we would be able to show the clients how products were being used properly. And then the client would say, hey, we need you to design us something better. And this led them to winning accounts like redesigning the iron to be better for people, redesigning a bike. So it was energy efficient. But also large companies like Unilever, the one I never got a job at approaching them and saying, we want you to be our first ever external creative director. Now, I know most of you are content marketing agencies. What would it mean if a major brand like HubSpot or any number of automation turned to you and said, you know what, you guys are so great with content, you're doing it so differently that we need you to be our external director on content. There's always a way to stand out and be better in every single category. And when you do that, you will elevate your brand and really achieve things kind of, I think, that are quite unexpected. Such as they were then asked to speak at the TED conference about their philosophy. And following that, they were asked to design the interior for the Virgin Galactic spaceship. We're talking about a small product design agency in not that cooler part of London that just started saying something consistently across all of their different channels. So the next point, speak the truth. This is a great, great way to position your business. This quote here actually says it really well. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is really a revolutionary act. Agencies are so good at telling clients what they need to hear, thinking that that's going to help them win more business from them or grow as an agency. But this company here, a packaging design agency again in Europe, is famous for when a client comes into the door and says, we want you to design us a new can for our Starbucks drinks or a new packaging wrapper for our bread, they'll show them all of the categories and say, this is how you look like absolutely everybody else. And they'll come up with a concept that completely blows out the competition and shows that they're completely different to everybody else. And not every client wants to work with them, but the ones that do want to work with them are absolutely desperate to work with them. So they get to charge almost three times as much as any other packaging design agency for a product. And interestingly, this very well known product approached them and said, we'd love you to redesign the Mac and cheese box, but we still need the spoon and we still need the steam and we still need the logo. And they said, that's great, we can't work on that for you. And they were really shocked. They're like, we're craft. This is like Mac and cheese. No one says no to us. They were like, look, we only work on creating difference for brands. What happens? Two years later, they come back to them, they ask them to work on their design language across all of their brands in Europe. So there's a lot of power in speaking the truth as part of your position. This is one that's talked about time and time again. But to be right for everyone is to be right for no one. There was a great example that I heard once about. If you walked into a restaurant and you said, what do you serve here? And they said, we've got Chinese, we've got Italian, we've got Indian food, immediately you start to question how can they do all of these things really, really well? And it's the same for agencies. Be really, really clear on who your customer target profile is and like I said, also who it isn't. The argument for focus, more revenues. Like I said, it's a kind of well proven point that the agencies that are very clear on what they specialize in will earn more revenues. If you are showing a unique purpose, a unique point of view, you will win business from outside of your market because you'll be seen to offering something that they need that isn't local. You'll have fewer competitors. And also quality clients like to work with quality agencies. Assume nothing. This goes back to the brand audit. You're making a lot of assumptions about your business right now. I can guarantee you if you haven't conducted a brand audit, conduct it. And then you'll have everything in kind of warts and alls about what you're good at and what you're not good at and what you need to do. If you say, you know what, we just really haven't got the resource to do a brand audit. I've got another hack for you. Take your 10 projects that you think you've done a best good job on, the best job on, and try and identify the golden thread between all of your work that connects those projects. Not what sector they were in, not what customer you had, but the story that connects everything together. An agency that approached me from Europe which designed restaurants, came to me and said, you know what? We designed some amazing restaurants and we feel like we're doing it different to everybody else, but we don't know how to tell that story. And when I looked at all of the work, I said, well, you know when you designed an Italian restaurant, the Japanese kind of. Anyone heard of Itsu? It's quite famous in Europe. Yes. So it's a kind of quick service retail Japanese restaurant. They designed it and it really stood out in the market. When Heston Blumenthal, the chef approached him and said, we want you to design our first ever airport restaurant, it became a real standard for how to design airport restaurants. And I looked at all of These different projects. And I said, every time you work with somebody, you're designing the category leader and everyone's saying they want to be like them, but you're not selling the fact that you do that. So she started to talk about category leading hospitality design, which is a bit of a kind of funny one because it sounds quite strategic. And within 12 months she was approached by a global hotel chain. Bear in mind, she'd never worked with a hotel Hilton, saying, you know what? None of our restaurants inside our hotels are category leading. We need somebody that can help us with category leading design. It was literally written in the email, we need somebody that can help us create category leading design for us. So look for that golden thread and tell that story. Lead with why. This is a guy called Tim Rogers. He runs a creative technology company in London, in New York, again, a client of mine. And on their website, the first thing you see is advertising is broken. The world has changed, but the creative process hasn't. We hack advertising to make it better. So immediately he's starting a conversation, or they're starting a conversation with their customers that feels different and unique, but even better, they talk about why plus how. So if you are doing talks or you're writing content in a different way that shows your philosophy, at some point someone's going to have the interest and desire to work with you and they're going to say, okay, well how does this agency work differently to other agencies? And they have a process on the website called Triage, which is very unique. So think about, once you've got your position, what can you do to show people that how you do it is differently? There's power in polarization number eight. So once I decided that cold calling was dead, which I know, again, you all know, I realized that there was an opportunity to go out there and talk to the market about new businesses and art, not a numbers game. And I created an event series where a number of speakers who kind of followed that philosophy, some big, well known names would stand up and talk about other technology or an approach about how they were doing things differently. And what happened is that people that believed that cold calling was dead started coming to these events. But the people that kind of still thought cold calling worked, didn't. And that was great because I was purposely polarizing audiences and attracting the customers that I want to work with. So again, going back to inbound marketing, I'm sure you've got a clear idea about your Personas, but are you also talking to them in a way where you know that you're going to be saying things that really resonate with the people that you want to work with, but also really resonate with the people you don't want to work with with. Share what you know, again, massive in inbound marketing. But I think there's, there's one thing to, to kind of share it online and there's another thing to put some real rigor behind it, whether that's, you know, a big study or to write a book to really elevate your brand. This is written by a guy called Adam Morgan for a brand consultancy in Europe called Eat Big Fish. And he was the guy who founded the term or coined the term challenger brand. And no one knew what a challenger brand was, but by constantly sharing his knowledge and writing about it, I think it's got something like 3 million return searches on Google now for the term challenger brand. And he was constantly sharing what he knew. So if you get to the point of having a position and you get to the point of having a strategy, what are you going to do to share that knowledge with people above and beyond, kind of sending them 10 ways you could do your content better? This one, sell the outcome. So as part of the brand audits that I do for my clients, I'll speak to a number of their clients globally. I've spoken to over 400 CMOs globally now and in the last, well, maybe a bit more than 12 months. The thing that I keep hearing from time and time again is we don't want to care. We don't really care what the output is. We don't really care if it's a TV advert or if it's a website. What we care is, is it going to get the result results that we need? And a lot of agencies are still very, very stuck in selling an output. So we'll deliver for you, you know, we'll deliver for you inputs, which is like, you know, the time we spend on it is what you're going to pay for. Some of them are moving to outputs and saying, you know what you're going to pay for the deliverable. But very few are saying, look, let's identify the value that you need from this project, the real benefits, and let's talk about how we could deliver that for you. So some key takeaways, sort of DIY slide for your business. Go away today, conduct a brand audit. Think about, once you've been through that brand audit, what is your positioning and what is the messaging that's going to sit beneath that? Then think about, okay, well, what's our goal for marketing? What are we going to center everything around that's going to build up to owning that position in the market? What is our strategy? And finally, what are the tactics that support that? If you take any one of those things away, you will be in a position where you won't outperform the market in the way that other agency brands in your category do. That's it.