CenterBrain Partners

As an independent consultant, the way I feel every morning is a little bit scared and excited. I think that’s the emotional description of properly balanced risk. It hasn’t always been this way—there were times, particularly in the early years of my practice, CenterBrain Partners, that my fear was pretty strong, mostly when I encountered things for which my MBA and corporate experience hadn’t prepared me. For example, I didn’t expect to need an intimate understanding of the accounts payable system of every single company I worked with.

If you are considering leaving your corporate job, I’ll say that I fully believe the grass is greener on my side of the fence—but there are some bald spots you need to recognize. Here are a few of what I consider myths about the world I work in.

1.   You are going to make a lot of money.

I always started a New Venture Creation course I taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga by saying something like this: “Welcome to America, where you can make as much money as you can.” Pay attention to the words in that statement. It is not so much one of encouragement as it is one of caution. Some people can’t make much money—I hope you’re not one of them.

2.   You’ll get to focus your work only on things you enjoy.

I hope you really enjoy selling, because selling accounts for 90% of the work you’ll do in the first five years, 75% of the work in the next five years, and at least 60% of the work in the five years after that. If you can’t sell you’ll be among the 80% of consultants who fail in their first year in business.

If you can’t sell, find a partner who can. And split your profits equally because no matter how talented you are, your partner’s selling talent is at least as valuable as yours.

3.   Your life will be more balanced.

Yes and no. In the first few years you will need to work incredible hours. I used to tell people that my consulting job “gave me lots of flexibility, the flexibility to work all the time!” If you are passionate about going out on your own the long hours won’t bother you—but they will bother your loved ones. Prepare them ahead of time. I wish I had.

4.   You’ll get to choose the people you work with.

Again, yes and no. In the first years of business I took any assignment I could find, which helped me formulate two hard and fast rules:

1. Only work with nice and ethical people, life is too short.
2. Don’t accept catfish accounts.

The first rule was one I started applying after I encountered businesspeople so insecure they made an art of torturing “suppliers and vendors,” a couple of really denigrating terms. “Vendor” is one I particularly abhor. It puts my services on par with the guy who manages the contract for the corporate cafeteria. If you aren’t considered and called a partner on a project, move on. It’s a simple matter of respect.

The second rule, “Don’t accept catfish accounts,” applies to times when business is slow. A catfish is a bottom feeder—in business, catfish are level C, D, and F clients you might be tempted to take work from in slack periods. You’ll be eager to help, maybe discount your services, and overpromise. I know, I did all those things. Catfish clients are easy to spot. They have unclear or no objectives, their business issues go far deeper than what they want you to do, and they’re slow-pay. Or no-pay. Plus, at the end of a project, because they have a weak business model and weak project objectives, they’ll always be disappointed. Their disappointment, in my experience, will often be partly the consultant’s fault, because you overpromised to get the business you thought you needed. What has frequently happened to me is that I take on a catfish and a whale shows up at my door. I end up resenting the catfish because he is taking time away from my money-making accounts.

5.   The people who encourage you to follow your dream will be your first clients.

Some of my friends and colleagues were so encouraging during the time I was considering going out on my own that I felt I couldn’t let them down, so I took the leap. Since many of them were decision makers who could easily throw me a project or two, I thought I’d instantly have the business I needed. That isn’t exactly what happened.

There’s a big difference between friendly support and the willingness to risk a career by dealing with an untried new business. Over time, however, the people who encouraged me did become my clients, and not just because they liked me. It was because by then I had a track record of success—something you can only build if you get out and sell, sell, sell!

Some parting thoughts

Yes, the economy has been in a very bad downturn and many clients, especially the young ones, have adopted a “deer in the headlights” look. My experience is that fear, especially in business, is not a productive emotion. A lot of those “deer in the headlights” get hit by trucks.

Tough times may not seem like the best time to launch your own consulting practice—but for some of you, it will become the only option you have. I encourage you to give it a try. Position yourself, perhaps using some of the methods in my book, CenterBrain Thinking©, (http://www.amazon.com/CenterBrain-Thinking-practical-positioning-ebook/dp/B003RWS5BY ) and get passionate about your success. I have never regretted the decision I made 20 years ago.

“You don’t blog enough.” I heard this yesterday from a nice and knowledgeable friend. I don’t actually agree. I never was much of a memo writer back in the day, and I don’t write a lot of emails. I actually like talking to people and getting things done over the phone. If that makes me old-fashion, well okay. I like humans and human interaction, but the world is changing. So, I’m writing a blog today about something I am working on with my friend Gary Lumsden right now. I call it the “3 M’s for 2012″.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the virtuous cycle. Most of us have heard the term. It just means that something starts and continually gets better. It’s a cool concept and I’ve seen it work a few times in my life. With the the 3M’s for 2012 I can see it working again. First let me tell you what the 3 M’s are.

1. Media-As in traditional and social. There is no difference now. You have to deploy both simultaneously with solid positioned brand content. Please go to (www.centerbraininc.com) to learn more about positioning.
2. Mobile-As in lots of people with smart phones and pads engaging your content and your promotional activity.
3. Mining-As in all the data you receive from that engagement being mined by professionals for real insights (beliefs and behaviors), so you can improve the content of your media, and your mobile engagement.

See how the virtuous cycle starts happening. Conceptually your marketing and promotional activity just gets better and better and you drive more sales. No, not conceptually it really does work. Let me go into some more detail.

Let’s say you have a restaurant or retail brand, or dare I say a Higher-Ed brand. You have a good idea of who your target audience is. For media let’s pick radio, yes radio. It still exists and is listened to more than you think. It is very easy to target with radio, you can buy lots of reach and frequency and if you have good positioned content you can get people to act. So, let’s run some radio directing people to social media with some great positioned content, ask them to opt in to our mobile number, which now can be customized for every restaurant or store in your chain, or every department at your university or college. We gets lots of opt-in because we make it worth the customers while to opt in. You know, a great trial offer…..remember 29 cent trial sizes. Now we have the consumer’s mobile number and we can start “engaging” them, say over a 6 week period, once a week, with promotional offers that get them to act. Let’s try a bunch of promotional offers and see what works. As we collect data and collect “engagement” chatter we can mine it, parse it, analyze it, and look for insights. As we learn more in near real-time we improve our content, our offers etc. and we keep getting better and better about driving sales or enrollment or whatever your goals are. A very simple and powerful concept.

Now here is the good news. My friend Gary Lumsden who is seasoned and cool, but seasoned, not 30 anymore, figured out how to do this as a turnkey operation. Turns out that you have to have a bunch of skills to pull that off, ones that are learned over time. You see, you can learn new things, but apparently it is hard to go back in time and learn the things (like media buying, producing real positioned content etc.), that only come with experience.

Now, some of you will read this and say, “Nothing is new here.” You are right. But innovation is not necessarily about inventing new things, sometimes it is about figuring out new ways to bring several ideas together, and then executing flawlessly. The devil is in the details.

If you want to find out more about how this works, give me a shout at 859.750.7259. I’d love to have a human to human discussion with you.

All the best in 2012.

Recently I was able to enjoy a tremendous presentation from a good friend, Tom Marchese, entitled “Breakthrough Thinking”.  Tom has organized how great ideas come about by beginning with setting goals that aren’t incremental, but rather “in the clouds”.  You set these fantastic, but attainable goals, and even if you fall short by a bit, you achieve so much more than say a goal of “we’ll meet best practices.”  The difference in how groups perform just by this simple practice of “cloud” goal setting is remarkable.  He showed lots of examples, going back to the best “cloud” goal I ever heard…”Let’s put a man on the moon by the end of the decade”, a paraphrase of John Kennedy’s great challenge to America.  Often when I am dealing with people who can’t think in the cloud, who tell me why something can’t be done I reference Kennedy’s cloud goal and add, “We put a man on the moon in the 60′s without computers, and the Government did it.  Surely that means anything is possible.”  I think Steve Jobs was one kick-ass cloud goal setter.  He also pissed a lot of people off, but I think I would have gladly put up with the personality to be on that ride.

Cloud goal setting  and achieving the goal requires a leader to be comfortable with risk taking, be passionate, be committed to success, be willing to concede knowledge to others, and to give trust when it is warranted. I’ve always worked best when these conditions were present, and I’ve had the chance to work with leaders who meet the criteria of “cloud” goal setters.  I know I strive to be a cloud leader, but humbly know that I fall short on some of the characteristics.  My solace is knowing that at least I am aware of what I fall short on, and can work on it.  I’ll bet we’ve all worked for people who are oblivious to the weaknesses of their leadership, or for that matter have no clue about what their leadership style is.  That type leader can be incredibly frustrating.

Leaders who set cloud goals are often ridiculed or even  undermined by the people they are leading.  My experience is that when you are actually in a situation where meeting the cloud goal is critical to the success of your organization, you have to identify the people who can’t get with the program and exit them stage left.  Of course you give them a period of time to “fake it till they make it”, but not long.  These naysayers are poisonous and slow you down.  You have to surround yourself with passionate, positive people who challenge you on the basis of your path to the goal, not whether the goal is the right one.  I love direct, logical, and emotional argument.   I hate political bullshit and game playing.  Which leads me to the title of this post.

When I was little I watched, “Spanky and Our Gang.”  It was a series about a bunch of kids and their dog and the adventures they had every day.  It was set in the 30′s but it was relevant to any kid who had friends, a neighborhood, and a dog.  I was good to go.  One of the things I remember about the show was that when  it seemed the plot was going nowhere, someone would shout out, “Hey Spanky…Let’s do a play.”  Then the show would switch to the preparation and presentation of the play.  It was a great time filler and often was comical because the gags surrounding preparation for the play were pretty funny.

Now think about your own experiences with leadership.  How many, “Hey Spanky…Let’s do a play” leaders have you worked for?  These are the leaders who have a bias for activity, but no bias for action, who have vague goals or lots of incremental ones, who seize the jargon of the day and spew it at you meaninglessly, but with great “energy”.   Think about how mind numbing it was, how hard it was to come to work, how trapped and powerless you felt working for these people.  Worse yet is realizing you’ve been dumb enough to fall for the “Let’s do a play” tactic and now are a tree on  stage.

I now work in a system that is winning Oscars for “Let’s do a play” activity, and richly rewards this leadership style.   Higher Ed as an institution has been maintained because of a “blind trust” by the public that the leadership actually knows what it is doing, and that the institution is an essential part of our civilized and progressive society.  We have never doubted, and we show it by taking every tuition increase and reduction in productivity higher ed can throw at us.  This blind trust breeds leaders with no vision, a sense of entitlement, and a real knack for focusing on the minutia.  Politics and operations rule the day.  I think as a society we know that higher ed is really screwed up, but we’re afraid because we can’t vision anything better, or perhaps no one is bringing the nation any cloud goals.  So we’re content to do “One More Play”, only sometimes the play is a tragedy, not the comedy I enjoyed with “Spanky and Our Gang.”

Yesterday I got caught in the “Let’s do a play” syndrome.  I didn’t come to higher ed to do this.  I came to higher ed to serve the students, convey my experience, offer guidance.  So, I am contemplating something.

I do know this.  As my friend Tom Marchese pointed out, I have the power to set my own “cloud” goals and act upon them.  You do too.

In the time I’ve spent in higher ed, the thing that institutions spend enormous amounts of time on is strategic planning.  Yet, now having seen the process at  three schools and the actual practice day-to-day at all levels of administration my conclusion is that like many things in higher ed, this too is a façade.  My headline for these strategic initiatives is, “The Quest for the façade of Excellence.”  In fact, I think you could take about 10 words (these are off the top of my head) and throw them up in the air, let them randomly fall to the ground and arrange them into sentences and maybe have the basis for every university’s strategic plan.  Let’s see if you agree.  Here are the words.

1.  Transformation

2.  Purposeful

3.  Empowerment

4.  Diversity

5.  Vision

6.  Future

7.  Sustainability

8. Innovation

9. Tradition

10. Excellence

Note that we did not include students, faculty or staff in this list of words, especially students, other than we need lots of them to be the financial engine of growth, sustainability, tradition, excellence, and of course transformation.  I could add some other jargon too.  One I particularly like is pedagogy, which sounds like an issue Penn State is dealing with but is really related to how you teach a cohort, which is simply a group of students.  I digress.

In my opinion the best strategic plan I ever heard, at least that I could understand was…” Better students,better faculty.”  Wow I liked that, and as a marketing guy I really got what we needed to do.  Unfortunately, the chancellor of that school backed off making that profound statement.  That school went on to a bold new vision of empowerment, transformation and sustainability.

Higher ed might try instead of Vision 2020 etc, something as simple as the “virtuous cycle”.  In business it is a fancy way of saying, “I’m pleased but never satisfied”.  It’s pretty simple because it starts with a good idea that you invest in making people aware of, you continually improve the idea to build long-term brand loyalty, which  leads to more profit, that is then invested to make the product better and so on and so on.  The virtuous cycle goes round and round and the business gets richer.  It should work for higher ed too, here’s how.

You start with a good product, perhaps something like delivering an education that leads to skills and knowledge that gets kids employed, you make people aware of it, you attract  students who want to learn something that will get them a job, they attract the best faculty because good teachers like to teach good students, that faculty makes the students better, the students graduate and give back to the school as alumni, that money is invested in building better programs, and so on and so on.  Pretty simple, right.  It would be, except for a couple of things…those damn students and that bold vision of transformation.

We’ve built immense institutions of higher learning.  Where I teach there are 33,000 students in a state that ranks 49th  in education and income, go figure.  This scenario is repeated in all 50 states at some level.   Universities decide to get big ostensibly to “create access”, which may be a nice thought to begin with, but it turns into a nightmare business scenario.  Because there is very little real long-term planning, these universities run out and build multimillion dollar buildings, develop lots of programs and majors, hire faculty and fill classrooms to capacity.  Now, to sustain the business model it has to be fed every year with more and more kids and higher tuition.  And it has to be fed by a population that falls into a 4 year age range.

OOPS, what happens when demographics shift and there is a scarcity of this age range of kids.  Well, now the pressure is on to provide more access (that’s code for make it easier to get in), and provide lots of ways to improve retention (that’s code for remedial, do-over, lower standards etc.), and yes keep them here longer, learning less and less from a faculty that becomes cynical and less “engaged”.  By the way, higher ed now measures itself on 6-year graduation metrics.  So if you been saving for 4 years of tuition good luck. If your kid gets out in 4 that is a real exception.

Also this business model creates all sorts of other bad decisions.  For instance things like  universities not aggressively enforcing underage drinking laws, because after all, that’s a huge drawing card for some kids, or pushing student loans to kids majoring in “communication”.  In Morgantown, WV (a college town) there is a thriving bar scene where 3/4 of the student body is underage, and kids live in apartments with workout facilities, pools, hot tubs, free wi-fi and house parties.  Most of the students are more flush than the rest of the city, because they’re living on borrowed money or someone else’s money who is trying to keep up with the borrowed money.  But Morgantown is just one example. It’s happening all over America in every college town. Most college towns have completed missed the economic downturn felt by the rest of the country.  Figure it out.  Students loans have been artificially propping up the economy..duh.

Under these circumstances, what chance do you think the virtuous cycle has? Hmm, how about none.

So is it all bad…well not all.  There are pockets of real excellence, usually honors colleges that go out and buy a 1000 or so really smart kids every year, and then isolate them from the general population.  These kids are amazing and exceptional.  They get a great education and they achieve the way everyone at college at one time was expected to.  These kids also do a superb job of creating success stories for university marketing, and of course they do a bang up job driving up overall grade point averages.  Meanwhile for the rest of the students, they get recognized for the least of achievements, like making a video for working at a soup kitchen.  That’s what passes for excellence these days and that list goes on forever.

I am convinced that higher ed will begin to crumble in the next 5 years if there isn’t a drastic housecleaning of the institutional guard.  The “Quest for the façade of excellence” turns out is not very transformational, or even purposeful, and it certainly isn’t sustainable.

P.S.  I’m writing a book entitled Decade E (entitled)….Why 40 million young people are colliding with America.  It will have an extensive section on Higher Ed and Mr. Ed and Ed in general.  This group of young people born between 1983-1993 are an interesting bunch and if you are a boomer and expecting them to take care of you, I have one thing to say….learn Spanish.

A Strategic Brief has 6 sections when you work with or for me.  Here they are:

Target Audience: Gender, age, lifestyle (or in the case of healthcare products a consumer’s condition), and “marketing” actionable beliefs or behaviors.

Insight: Written in first person and always with an “I wish statement at the end.”  It’s how you convey what’s going on inside the consumer’s head when they think about the problem your product/brand/or service is going to solve.

Strategy: Always the answer to the “I wish” and always contains the words first, best, or only.  Followed by the technology or the main unique feature, that supports how the wish will be granted.

Positioning: The one thought you want to leave in the consumer’s mind so they will buy your idea or at least want to find out more.

Support for the Positioning: No more than 3 features of the product with an explanation of why they are important.

Tone and Manner….See below

In my experience tone and manner is often the least thought about part of a strategic brief.  It might simply be because this section of the brief offers so much opportunity to be abstract, or that writers at this point are tired.  Strategic briefs are tough to write well, because they require an economy words to convey big ideas to people who have to create effective advertising campaigns.  Strategic briefs have to follow logically from one section to the other and “tone and manner” is no exception.  For instance you can’t write about a hi-tech healthcare product that relieves back pain in a new way, and then provide guidance in the tone and manner that instructs the creative team to write in a tone that is funny and a manner that is direct.  More reasonable would be to write in a tone that is empathetic and in a manner that is educational.  Okay, so now we’ve stumbled on an even bigger problem.  What is the difference between tone and manner?  I searched for the answer and no one seems to have a good definition.  So, I’ll add mine to the pile and see if it makes sense.

Tone-This describes the way the reader needs to hear the message in the context of the brand, product or service in order for them to digest the message most effectively.  It is important that the tone match to the product message you are delivering.  Comedy may work when you’re selling soft drinks, but not when you’re selling cemetery plots.

Here are some examples of words to use…Tone should be friendly/authoritative/professional/gentle/empathetic/newsy/exciting/sad/ sarcastic/comedic.  Many times tone reflects a brand’s personality.

Manner-This describes the method in which the communication should be delivered and is less emotional in nature.

Here are some examples of words to use….Manner should be direct/educational/collegial/inquisitive/professional (yep sometimes tone turns into manner).

Maybe a more effective way of saying this is that tone is the artist and manner is the genre.  Notorious B.I.G. can’t be rendered as bluegrass except in some very whacked out mind.

You can see that it is very hard to separate the two concepts of tone and manner but they should always work in concert, and work within the context of what you are saying is the message you want to leave in the consumer’s head.

The general problem I see with my students’ and other professionals’ writing of strategic briefs is that they don’t view them as being holistic.  My students tend to “fill in” each section to get a grade and “turn in something completed” as an assignment.  Except for a few, they don’t really grasp that the strategic brief is not the sum of its parts, but a living document that has to have all its parts working in harmony to be effective or even alive.

Most of the strategic briefs I see these days are dead on arrival because they contain so much organized nonsense that no one could possibly write something meaningful.  Actually I wonder sometimes if anyone is actually using them anymore.  A great example is a former client of mine that is in the restaurant business and owns a positioning that is full of heritage, uniqueness, and aspirational taste benefits yet has somehow settled on the line…Come see what’s cookin (note the clever leaving out of the g ) at Bob Evans.  HMM that’s some news I needed…..people are cooking at restaurants.  I’m running right in…sigh.

Good luck and good strategic brief writing.

To really do effective and efficient brainstorming I’ve found that the process can’t be a free for all.  You have to have objectives and you have to have structure.  It almost sounds counter intuitive to the idea of creative exploration, but really it isn’t.   Structure and objectives provide focus and a level of comfort for those important people on a team that may not think of themselves as being creative.  Often those same people who feel uncomfortable have a lot to offer and a big stake in whether some ideas go forward.  So, it just makes sense to include them in the early creative process.

I find that creating the opportunity for intense focus on a problem or a product starts by eliminating variables.  Let’s face it, just by the nature of doing group work there are a lot of variables…personality, background, political agendas.  I use a technique that comes out of  the world of quantitative research and is actually something I learned from my good friend Ron Nelson.  Ron looked at the technique of problem-detection with its ensuing statistical analysis, and thought why not turn it around and evaluate the positive.  He taught me about promise testing and I took it a step further for use as a way to structure brainstorming.  Here is how it works.

First, whatever the opportunity you are working on begin by framing it using the 5-steps I outlined in a previous post.  Here they are again for those of you who missed it.

1. Problem (What problem is the new idea trying to solve)

2. Solution (How the new idea solves the problem)

3. Benefit to you (What is the one major benefit to the buyer, consumer etc.)

4. How it works (What are the features of the idea that support the benefit)

5. Don’t worry (The answer to the one major objection your consumer would have.  Think of this is the lingering doubt we all have about new ideas)

Once you’ve done the framing, now fracture the idea to get the creative juices flowing.  You fracture the idea by using promises.  Promises are simple.  They are sentences that state a benefit followed by a reason why, or if you will a reason to believe.  Here is an example.

This blog post will make you more confident in your next brainstorming session, that’s because it tells you the structure for expressing your idea in over 50 ways.

Notice how the promise is written. It always starts with a benefit (not a feature) and is followed with a reason the reader should believe you can deliver the benefit.  I generally write 50-60 of these going into a brainstorming session, after I’ve had a chance to gather individual input from the project team.  Note I said individual input not group.  Individuals, if interviewed correctly, do a lot less political censoring.

I write all the promises for a brainstorming session, because I can then eliminate one variable…writing style.  When the team comes to the brainstorming session there is a big reveal of all the promises and most people see their ideas expressed creatively, and that makes them energetic about the work ahead.  Even the most pragmatic in the group can see how they have contributed to the creative process.  They all see how the idea has been fractured and feel confident that when we re-frame it we have virtually left no stone unturned.

I won’t get into the mechanics of a brainstorming approach I’ve branded CenterStorm, but perhaps you can see that structurally fracturing your idea helps everyone focus, allowing for better expansion and contraction of ideas and ultimately better creative outcomes.

When I was a kid I learned about the concept of purgatory..not quite heaven and not quite hell.  I think that is where many people I speak with find themselves when they choose the route of “professionally qualified” to teach at a university or college.  For those of you who are not real familiar with the term it refers to people who have significant practical or professional experience but not a PhD.

I am now the Harrison/Omnicom Professor in Integrated Marketing Communications at West Virginia University, a post I took after looking at a number of options once we decided to leave Ole Miss.  I was CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) at Ole Miss and liked the work, but because we’re Jewish and I have small kids it was a difficult place to practice our faith.  So we decided to move and struck out for Morgantown so I could try my hand at full-time faculty work.

I’m classified as a Visiting Assistant Professor, have a contractual arrangement with the university, which means I’m not on a tenure track.  I’m a lucky guy in the higher ed world, because I have an endowed chair even though I don’t have a PhD.  In fact, the school of journalism actually sought out a professionally qualified person for the job, which is  pretty progressive thinking so I hear.

Making a career in the academic world is not something I ever intended.  But, somewhere along the line I figured out that I was a pretty good teacher.  I proved that by teaching as an adjunct and becoming an executive-in-residence at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.   My students learn important things they can use in the real world where increasingly our students know virtually nothing about the real world when they enter the real world…you know the place they are going to work and be the engines of an economic renaissance in this country!

Despite my fortunate situation, I know from talking to others who are considered professionally qualified too that we are viewed as second class citizens.  The second class status comes both ways..from the PhD’s and from the those who are still working in the real world.

PhD’s dominate the academic world and I am buying this dominance in some subjects..particularly the sciences.  My dad had a PhD in Chemical Engineering.  He was a smart guy.  People with PhD’s in Higher Education Administration, well not so much.  But the PhD club runs our universities and they have formed an alliance of entitlement. I’m not in the club and never will be.

On the other side are those who practice in the real world.  In my case that’s people in marketing or advertising.  They view the professionally qualified as the “hacks” that couldn’t make it.  I can’t relate all the  conversations with people in the business world I’ve had since taking my academic position, but suffice to say their first assumption is that I don’t really know much and they go out of their way to instruct me on the basics of branding etc.  Fact is, I still consult to the biggest companies in America and have put nearly $4 billion in new business on the market in the last 20 years.  I also own a growing healthcare company.

Here’s my point in all this.  PhD’s and Business Folks need to help those of us who are professionally qualified out of purgatory and preferably to the heavenly side!  PhD’s need people who understand the world they either never were in or left deliberately for academia and they need us to teach, something many find to be a pesky impediment to their research work.  Business folks need professionally qualified people to train their workers, yes train them, because you are not doing this anymore.  You also need to hire professionally qualified academics to work with you, because many of us gave up tens of thousands and more in annual income to do this noble work and believe or not we actually are on top of the latest techniques because universities study these things.

Actually right now we’d all just settle for a little respect.  Give it some thought.

We Spell Positioning with Three T’s.

Ask 100 marketing executives to define positioning and you may get a surprising array of answers. Some would focus on the brand’s benefit, some would focus on product performance, and some would focus on the consumer insight. Each would be partially right. Our experience is that breakthrough positioning contains a balance of these three things. That’s why all positioning developed through the CenterBrain process meet the Three T’s test.

I want to pass along a tidbit of wisdom that was given to me 25 years ago. It’s about how to know if you have an idea that is even worth positioning. It’s also a tried-and-true way to communicate effectively in just about any business situation, and as I will illustrate it works on Sunday mornings too.

Take your new business idea, your new product, or your new service, and start by writing a sentence for each of the following five steps:

1.      Problem: What problem or problems created a basis for interest in this idea?

2.      Solution: How does this new idea solve the problem(s)?

3.      Benefit: What benefit(s) does the new idea offer to the target user?

4.      How it works:. Describe the way the idea works or how it is used.

5.      Don’t worry: Overcome the one major objection a user/buyer would have.

This template is brilliantly simple in its approach. I’ve never seen it fail. Once on a short flight between Chicago and Appleton I even enlightened a Lutheran pastor about how to use it. He was skeptical at first—he probably viewed marketing guys as something akin to the devil! Nevertheless I won him over with the following example.

1.      Problem: You have sinned.

2.      Solution: Ask God for forgiveness.

3.      Benefit: You’ll feel a burden lifted from you.

4.      How it works:. Get down on your knees and pray.

5.      Don’t worry: If you sin again, you can do the whole process over.

That minister was a quick convert, and I suspect he now has a flock that is much happier with his single-minded, direct, and hopefully brief sermons.

1.  Thou shalt not use the word “brand” in vain, blaspheming it as a slogan or logo.

2. Positioning is the guidepost for all brand strategy; thou shalt have no other principle before it.

3. Honor evidence and research over opinions and conversations.

4. Honor your constituent groups and keep them prioritized.

5. Thou shalt have brand standards and enforce them.

6. Thou shalt integrate brand strategy into all ways that thou communicates.

7. Thou shalt not kill a creative idea, innovation or risk taking unless it is inconsistent with brand strategy.

8. Thou shalt covet another brand’s success, and learn from its mistakes.

9. Thou shalt not change your brand strategy, forsaking it for clever taglines or the quest for collegiality.

10. Thou shalt be the brand champion for thou art the marketing professional hired to do the job.