Every firm of every sort is working hard to incorporate AI into every process, every output and every pitch. It’s AI or bust. It’s not clear if it’s tulips or not, but interest in AI is unprecedented and shows no signs of abating anytime soon.
There is no 21st-century business trend that looks like it. Some quick work with Google Trends finds that compared with AI, peak interest in Big Data, cloud computing, and social media barely even registers. Bitcoin holds up, though just barely. Only mobile shows anything near the interest of AI.
I asked ChatGPT about these comparative trend lines. Its takeaway is that AI is a general-purpose technology with everyday applications. All the others are specialized. Except for mobile, which, in its own way, is more like AI’s universal presence, impact, and functionality.
I agree with ChatGPT. I think that’s the best way to think of AI—a general-purpose technology that will serve primarily as a platform for applications and derivative technologies. We will all use AI, but not AI per se. Rather, AI will be embedded into the things we use.
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This means three things to me.
First, the benefit of AI is making the benefits of other things better. AI is a platform, not an end-use itself. Just like mobile. The value AI brings is making shopping easier, so the connection with consumers is about easier shopping, not AI shopping.
AI won’t change the benefits that people seek from products and categories. It may change which brands deliver those benefits better, and it may change the quality of experience for a brand or category. But there’s no new benefit that AI will bring to a category.
This is the soft underbelly of AI. It may not take AI to deliver something better. The leisurely family stroll through the Saturday morning farmers’ market that is part of the pricey neighborhood vibe may be beyond anything extra AI could deliver.
In other cases, something other than AI may be a better way of delivering the relevant benefit. There’s nothing AI can do about legroom on a plane or the original formula for a soda. Experience and taste will often trump anything AI can deliver. AI will not always be the differentiating factor for consumers.
Second, as a platform, AI will be available to every company. Some will use AI better, of course. Human taste and judgment become more important as technology becomes more available. But advantage won’t come from AI itself. It will come from the things that generate and facilitate better usage of AI, like innovation, leadership, culture, and organization. That requires a disciplined way to identify where AI can strengthen value creation, build the right capabilities, and connect investment to commercial outcomes, which is the focus of The Blake Project’s Value Acceleration Studio.
However, best practices travel fast. Companies learn from one another. Key executives switch jobs and take skills with them. Conference presentations show off the successes of one company to every other company in attendance. Consultants learn from working with pioneering clients and share that learning with all clients.
As companies get up to speed on AI best practices, AI will become table stakes, not a source of differentiation. Given the take-up rate of AI and the ongoing experimentation with applications, parity of competencies is likely to happen faster with AI than with past technologies.
Companies that fall behind will suffer competitively. But companies that keep up will be the same as every other competitor. A few companies always stand out with novel applications, but nowadays, and especially in the fast-moving marketplace of AI functionality, these gaps close quickly.
More than anything else, AI is likely to deliver a more advanced marketplace in which stubborn inefficiencies have finally been fixed for every brand and product. It is unclear if there is any potential for AI to enable one company to assume a commanding position when all its competitors are AI-proficient as well. The AI future may simply be a mirror image of today’s market share and profitability, just with AI instead of without.
That is why brand positioning that improves the economics of growth matters more, not less, as AI becomes widely available. When technology raises the competitive baseline, the companies that create stronger preference, greater pricing power, better conversion, and more durable demand will be better positioned to benefit from it.
I call this the paradox of quality, which is nothing new. Every product and service today is better than the past. Quality is greater across the board—because quality is contagious. Once one company finds the best way to do something, all companies follow suit. The result is both higher quality and greater parity. That’s the paradox—over the long-term, differentiating innovation works against sustained differentiation. The thing that really changes is that the cost of doing business gets bigger.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
Finally, AI is hard to layer onto something already in place. Which is a challenge for big, established brands. Big brands will be the eventual winners in the AI race, but they won’t be first out of the gate with the biggest breakthroughs. Because big brands can’t afford to experiment with platform shifts.
Over the immediate term, AI-native firms will get more out of AI and do more with AI, as big brands watch and learn to later acquire and integrate. Big brands can afford to be behind at the get-go.
A new paper from a pair of researchers at INSEAD and the Harvard B-School finds that advantages of AI mostly accrue to AI-native firms not established non-AI startups. AI-native firms employ 25% fewer people, have 13% more engineers, and have 15% fewer entry-level and manager-level employees. Making AI-native firms flatter by half a seniority level. AI at AI-native firms is also more likely to be embedded in both process and product, not merely layered on top of existing workflows.
This isn’t anything new to AI. We’ve lived through past hockey-sticks of digital-native, social media-native and internet-native firms. We have seen that there is a good bit of truth in the idea that native firms have more savvy with new technologies.
But as a colleague of mine once observed, there is a difference between managing for value and managing for valuation. Native firms tend to be the latter, looking for a payday that transfers their systems, know-how, and people to a bigger home.
Out-of-the-box AI innovation is unlikely to come from big, established brands. They have built their processes and products on existing general-purpose technologies. It’s impossible to justify breaking that mold for something untried and untested. AI-native firms will sort out what’s what, then big brands will upgrade and adapt.
We see a lot of AI action these days with firms big and small. But the future is a platform shift like the move to mobile, not an operating update. Platforms are fully embedded in the operating structures of big brands. Big companies are not going to leap out of the box just yet.
AI is changing so rapidly that big moves for big brands are risky. For example, brands are busily adapting to stay visible with the text-based LLMs that are powering consumer search and recommendations. But such LLMs are certainly not the best that AI can do. There will soon be AI technologies better than text-based LLMs. Going all-in on LLMs as they exist today is a bet that the AI future has arrived, when in fact the future has barely begun to unfold.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
]]>Over time, these choices accumulate into patterns that shape what is rewarded and what is overlooked; what receives protection when pressure rises; what is held firm and what is negotiable; and what employees, customers, partners, and communities are asked to accommodate.
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This may be why “coherence” is appearing in conversations across disciplines: leadership, governance, education, AI, organizational design, brand and culture.
Different fields. Different ambitions. Each reaching for language to describe the need for the parts of a system to move together in ways people recognize, rely on and participate in.
Recently, I’ve heard coherence described as:
For brands, this is especially tangible because they come to life through more than marcoms: through culture, systems, and choices people make when there is no time to consult guidelines.
Coherence is lived integrity: the relationship between what a brand says, how culture guides decisions, and what people actually encounter over time.
If a brand is the human face of a business, culture is where that face becomes recognizable from within: in the choices made, the judgment trusted, and the behavior gradually normalized.
A brand may have a compelling ambition, a well-articulated purpose, and an integrated plan for growth. The question is whether those elements move from the same center in the accumulated experience of those inside and around it.
This is where coherence is felt.
In how people are treated when resources tighten.
In whether stated commitments guide choices when conditions are difficult.
In whether customer insight changes the system or simply informs the next campaign.
In whether people have the clarity, trust and agency to bring a brand promise to life with integrity.
These are the places where strategy becomes culture, and culture becomes the brand.
They reveal the underlying logic of an organization: whether its systems reinforce the value it seeks to create, and whether it is building a future people genuinely choose to belong to.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
When a brand is structurally aligned, and culture, decisions, and experience move in coherence, purpose, strategy, and experience become living patterns rather than adjacent conversations—patterns people recognize, trust, and contribute to.
If this gives language to something you are seeing in your own organization, share it with someone helping to shape what comes next.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Anne Bahr Thompson, Author, Do Good, Embracing Brand Citizenship to Fuel Both Purpose and Profit.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
]]>For beverage brands, these changing expectations are reshaping what relevance means. The issue encompasses more than appealing to a younger generation. It is understanding how people’s needs, tastes, and occasions are changing across generations.
PepsiCo provides a useful example. Across Pepsi, Gatorade, Mountain Dew, and poppi, the company is adapting established brands and adding new ones to respond to changing definitions of refreshment, hydration, indulgence, and wellness. That is the new definition of brand relevance: staying close enough to changing customer needs that the brand continues to earn a role in people’s lives.
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Remaining relevant in a changing world is critical to a brand’s health. Brand Relevance is a key driver of purchase intent. It means the brand is up to date and top of mind with customers. And the brand is perceived as addressing current customer needs.
The president of Beverage US at PepsiCo, Mike Del Pozzo, in a video interview with The Wall Street Journal, spoke about how Pepsi’s beverage brands are renovating and innovating to remain relevant as customers and potential customers redefine their wants. As Mr. Del Pozzo stated, “ The category of carbonated sodas is focused on those who want this, but want this differently.”
Mr. Del Pozzo also commented on how the beverages division understood the importance of needs within specific occasions. He noted that although having availability across different pack sizes was important, usage occasions were much more important to the brands, especially Pepsi. Mr. Del Pozzo said, “Sixty percent of Zero Sugar Pepsi (usage) is associated with food occasions.” The wildly successful Mountain Dew Baja Blast is specifically designed to complement “the savory, cheesy, and spicy foods on the Taco Bell menu.” People have different needs on different occasions. Segmenting by needs-based occasions is critical for enduring profitable growth.
Gatorade is a PepsiCo beverage that is undergoing “new explanations” renovations. As a bit of background, Gatorade is a brand based on problem-solution. Finding a relevant, differentiating solution to people’s problems is a great source of innovation and renovation.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
The football coach at the University of Florida recognized that his team, the Gators (hence the brand name), sweltering in the Sunshine State’s heat, needed to replace their carbohydrates, electrolytes, and water lost during practices. He turned to the lab folks at the University. Gatorade was born. Gatorade is an immensely successful and well-known brand. But times change, people change, and athletes change. Gatorade is no longer just a sports drink. People consume Gatorade for “everyday hydration.”
Many people, including athletes, are also more concerned about their sugar intake. Although there are different versions of Gatorade with varying amounts of sugar, there are also Gatorade Zero (0 grams of sugar) and Gatorade Fit (0 grams of added sugar), which use electrolytes from watermelon juice and sea salt.
Gatorade’s G2 is a lower-sugar alternative to Gatorade. Mr. Del Pozzo indicated that 20% of lapsed Gatorade users returned to Gatorade through its low-sugar alternative.
For a “whole” younger generation and a generation of wellness seekers, PepsiCo bought Poppi. The Poppi brand is a prebiotic soda that aligns with the desire for “gut health.” With 35 calories or fewer, Poppi is an alternative to more sugar-intensive sodas. According to Mr. Del Pozzo, Poppi is “redefining soda“ for a young cohort of soda users. Soda may no longer be seen as a sugary drink. New explanation. As Mr. Del Pozzo told Bloomberg, the Poppi brand “is on fire.”
Pepsi, the company’s flagship brand, is struggling. Reporting in The Wall Street Journal indicated that Pepsi’s hard-core focus on its snack division and the division’s profitability may have shifted some resources. On the other hand, Mr. Del Pozzo said that Pepsi has always been a challenger brand. Always the Avis to the leader Hertz. A challenger brand is neither a niche brand nor the market leader. A challenger brand is aggressive, bold, and ambitious, and can be disruptive to the marketplace. A challenger brand has a burning desire to outshine, outclass, outdo, outpace, outperform the industry.
Pepsi’s challenger advantage will not come from repeating old rivalry. It will come from making the Pepsi brand more relevant to contemporary occasions, tastes, and definitions of value.
The 1980s Pepsi Challenge is a great example of how Pepsi disrupted people’s views about Coke relative to Pepsi. In today’s marketplace, Zero Sugar Pepsi is a true Coke contender.
In an ever-changing, increasingly competitive marketing world, brands need true customer-insight-driven innovation and renovation to stay relevant. Innovations and renovations breathe active life into brands.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
]]>This shift has introduced a structural challenge: expanding reach too quickly, without establishing a strong experiential foundation, can dilute the effectiveness of engagement efforts. Experiential marketing companies in Toronto can help brands focus on depth and consistency before expansion. Engaging with audiences at a smaller scale creates a stable framework that can be extended without compromising on quality.
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Why Prioritize Experience Over Scale in Marketing?
Traditional engagement strategies have largely focused on maximizing reach, with campaigns often evaluated based on impressions or attendance. While these indicators provide a measure of exposure, they do not capture how audiences interpret or respond to a brand’s message.
Audience expectations have evolved in parallel with increased exposure to content. People are more selective in how they allocate attention and favor interactions that are relevant and provide value. They expect to engage directly with experiences, and this shift has redefined the foundation of engagement: experience has become the primary driver of meaningful interaction.
The quality of an audience’s interaction with a brand directly affects their understanding and retention of messages.
Experiential Strategies Build Stronger Emotional Connections
Experiences structured to evoke a response, whether through participation, environment, or narrative, create stronger associations. Audiences are more likely to retain information and develop favorable perceptions when they feel connected to an experience, which reinforces the message without requiring repetition at scale.
Experiential Marketing Makes Message Retention More Effective
Experiential formats allow audiences to engage with content actively, which influences how they process and retain information. Participation encourages attention, and interaction reinforces understanding.
Structured experiences guide audiences through key messages, which means information is not only received but also contextualized. This process increases clarity and reduces the likelihood of misinterpretation, which is critical before expanding reach.
How to Integrate Expertise Into Experience Design?
Without a defined framework, even well-designed activations can produce inconsistent results. Planning must account for audience flow and interaction points, as well as the relationships among different elements within the experience.
Organizations often work with marketing companies that specialize in experiential campaigns to ensure consistency across different environments and formats, and that execution aligns with strategic objectives. Coordination is essential for integrating logistical, technical, and creative components and ensuring that each interaction contributes to a unified outcome.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
What Are the Best Practices for Scaling Engagement?
Effective scaling requires planning to preserve the integrity of the experience. They must be designed with adaptability in mind so they can function effectively across different contexts while maintaining their structure.
A modular approach supports this process: by defining key concepts and interaction points, organizations can reproduce experiences without altering their fundamental characters. This method ensures that the quality remains consistent even as reach expands.
Technology can play a supporting role here. It can facilitate interaction, collect data, and connect physical and virtual environments. Audiences can participate in ways that align with the original design through hybrid formats, interactive interfaces, and real-time feedback mechanisms. These tools must be implemented carefully to ensure they do not diminish the quality of engagement.
To measure engagement, brands must focus on patterns of behavior. It is necessary to assess how audiences move through and interact with an experience over time.
How to Align Experiential Marketing With Long-Term Strategy?
An experience-first approach must be aligned with broader organizational objectives to remain effective. Experiences should function as components of a larger engagement framework.
Consistency across touchpoints is essential. Messaging, design, and interaction patterns should reinforce one another to ensure that audiences encounter a cohesive identity regardless of where or how they engage. Long-term effectiveness depends on the ability to maintain this consistency while adapting to changing conditions.
Scaling Through an Experience-First Approach
An experience-first approach ensures that participation, understanding, and connection form the basis of engagement. Once you establish these elements, scaling becomes a process of extension. Experiences must adapt to audience behavior and environmental factors without losing their structure. Focusing on them as the starting point can help brands expand while preserving the quality of their interactions.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Tufail Ahmed, Digital Web Solutions
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
]]>That is clear. However, problems arise when an organization drifts from its core strengths or when those strengths are now weaknesses.
Over time, growth adds complexity. Leaders make reasonable decisions in isolation that, when taken together, make the brand harder to understand and choose.
That is when positioning stops being a marketing concept and becomes a leadership issue.
The cost of weak or outdated positioning reveals itself in familiar places. Sales teams explain value differently. Business units pursue growth from competing assumptions. Acquired brands remain loosely connected. Customers understand parts of the company, but not the whole.
Those costs are high in business. Leading brands avoid them by paying attention and revisiting their brand positioning often.
As a refresher, positioning is the strategic choice that defines:
The strongest brands make this choice easier for the market to understand. Volvo built meaning around safety. BMW built meaning around the pleasure and performance of driving. In both cases, the brand did not ask customers to remember everything it could offer. It made one valuable idea easier to understand, recall, and associate with the brand.
That is the discipline positioning requires.
For mid-market companies, this work is especially consequential. These organizations often carry the complexity of larger enterprises without the same operating infrastructure. They may have grown quickly, expanded through acquisitions, added channels, multiplied offerings, or entered new markets faster than the brand system could keep up with. What once felt entrepreneurial can begin to feel fragmented.
At this point, leadership should be asking, “What value do we create that customers are willing to choose, pay for, stay loyal to, and recommend?”
It’s a question that belongs in the room with the CEO, CFO, CMO, sales leader, HR leader, business unit heads, and, when appropriate, investors or board members. Because the answer has a wide-ranging impact well beyond communications. It affects the core of competitiveness: pricing power, demand quality, customer confidence, employee behavior, sales effectiveness, portfolio decisions, and enterprise value.
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Positioning Is A Business Choice
A strong position clarifies what an organization is willing to stand for, what it is willing to stand against, and where it will place its greatest emphasis.
The power of brands lies in focus. That is why positioning work is difficult.
Most companies are not short on things they can credibly say. They have too many truths competing for attention. Customer focus, innovation, trust, quality, responsiveness, experience, agility, and differentiation may all apply. But truth alone does not create an advantageous position.
Positioning is not the collection of everything a company does well. It is the discipline of deciding which source of value matters most, to whom, and why the organization is better equipped than others to deliver it.
Put another way, positioning requires leadership to decide which truth should lead.
That decision forces important choices. Which customers matter most to the future? Which problems are most valuable to solve? Which strengths are commercially meaningful? Which differences can be defended? Which promises can the organization actually keep? Which parts of the portfolio create advantage, and which create confusion?
These are business questions before they are brand questions.
When answered well, positioning gives leadership a practical form of discipline. It clarifies what to emphasize, where to invest, what to simplify, what to stop supporting, and how to align the organization around a more valuable source of growth.
That discipline is often the difference between a brand that is known and a brand that is chosen.
Where Advantage Is Created
The Brand Positioning Workshop is where The Blake Project helps leadership teams identify, create, and expand the advantages the brand must use to grow.
We’ve seen several companies enter this work with more strength than they are fully converting into market value. They may have customer trust that is underleveraged, technical expertise that is poorly explained, a culture that customers feel but the company has never named, a portfolio that contains hidden growth paths, or an experience advantage that sales and marketing have not translated into pricing power.
The workshop is designed to surface those advantages, test them, sharpen them, and decide how they should be used.
The power of brands lies in focus. In this workshop, we focus on three forms of advantage.
Emotional Advantage: What customers feel about the brand that they do not feel about alternatives. This may come from trust, confidence, ease, pride, relief, or the belief that the company understands what matters most.
Distinctive Advantage: What the organization does, knows, owns, or delivers in a way that is meaningfully different, hard to copy, and valuable to the customers most important to its future.
Connective Advantage: How the brand creates stronger relationships across customers, employees, channels, partners, and communities, turning the brand into a source of alignment, loyalty, and momentum.
These advantages are often already present in the business, but they are not always visible, disciplined, or fully activated. Our work is to help leadership see them clearly, decide which ones matter most, and build the brand around them.
The workshop is highly structured, but not formulaic. It brings together evidence, experience, judgment, and executive consensus. We examine the market, the customer, the competition, the culture, the portfolio, the sales story, and the business’s financial ambition. We look for the places where the company can create more value, command more confidence, reduce complexity, and give customers a stronger reason to buy.
The result is an advantage platform leadership can use to guide strategy, culture, sales, experience, and growth.
This is why the workshop is central to our brand strategy engagements. It is where leadership moves from describing the business to deciding how the business will compete and win.
What The Workshop Delivers
The outcomes of our Brand Positioning Workshops are alignment, clarity in decision-making, and a stronger foundation for growth.
Before the workshop, we gain insights through stakeholder interviews to understand how leadership sees the brand, the customer, the market, the competition, and the choices ahead. This preparation helps surface agreement, tension, ambition, and blind spots before the leadership team enters the room.
During the workshop, we create a shared strategic language. Even experienced leaders often use brand terms differently. Position, promise, essence, personality, archetype, value proposition, associations, and messaging are related, but they are not interchangeable. A common language makes the discussion sharper and the decisions better.
From there, we work through the essential elements of the brand’s position:
The work also tests the strength of the position. The benefit a brand chooses to own must be important to the target audience. The organization must have the competency and intent to deliver it. Competitors should not already own it, and it should not be easy for them to copy. The position must be unique, compelling, motivating, understandable, and believable.
Those standards matter. Without them, positioning becomes aspiration. With them, positioning becomes a strategic asset.
The output is an executive summary of the decisions made and the strategic implications of those decisions. It can inform and rally employees, guide external communications, shape customer touchpoints, influence corporate strategy, support sales alignment, and serve as a foundation for identity, messaging, experience design, and growth planning.
The best workshops create more than consensus. They create conviction.
Brand Strategy For The P&L
Brand strategy earns leadership attention when it improves the economics of growth.
That does not mean reducing brand to a spreadsheet. It means recognizing that brand affects the conditions under which revenue is created. A stronger brand can make value easier to explain, confidence easier to build, choice easier to influence, premiums easier to defend, employees easier to align, and growth easier to sustain.
For a CFO or investor, the relevant question is whether the brand helps improve the quality, efficiency, and durability of growth.
A brand position that cannot influence that conversation is not strong enough.
Brand should strengthen competitive position, pricing power, and enterprise value. The Blake Project helps make that happen.
Built From The Inside Out
The most common mistake in positioning work is treating external expression as the destination. Expression matters, but it is not the whole of brand. A brand has to work before it performs.
If a company claims partnership, customers must experience partnership. If it claims simplicity, the sales process, service model, and portfolio must reduce friction. If it claims premium value, employees cannot be trained to default to discounting. If it claims innovation, the culture cannot punish smart experimentation.
This is why brand culture is central to brand work.
Brand culture is not internal decoration. It is the system of beliefs, behaviors, decisions, and standards that determines whether the organization can keep its promise. It is where strategy becomes lived reality.
We approach positioning from the inside out because mid-market companies cannot afford a gap between what the brand says and how the organization behaves. That gap weakens trust, slows growth, and makes differentiation harder to believe.
A strong position should help people inside the company make better decisions. It should shape how leaders lead, how sales teams sell, how customer-facing teams respond, how products and services are prioritized, and how the organization understands the value it is there to create.
Human-Led, AI-Enabled
Our approach is human-led and AI-enabled.
Today, AI improves brand strategy work. It accelerates evidence gathering, competitive mapping, customer language analysis, pattern recognition, synthesis, and scenario development. It also helps reveal themes worthy of closer examination.
It’s useful, but AI cannot decide what a company should become.
It cannot resolve the trade-offs leadership must make. It cannot understand the cultural realities that determine whether a promise can be delivered. It cannot judge which advantage is most meaningful, which tension matters most, or which strategic choice the organization has the courage to pursue.
Brand strategy requires human judgment because positioning is more than an analytical exercise. It is an act of interpretation and commitment.
We use AI to see more. We use human judgment to decide what matters.
What The Work Produces
The first outcome of a Brand Positioning Workshop is strategic clarity. The more important outcome is confidence.
The work helps leadership make decisions. It helps sales explain value. It helps marketing create demand. It helps employees understand what the company is asking them to deliver. It helps customers understand why the brand matters. It helps investors see a more coherent value creation story.
The deliverable includes the brand’s target customer definition, competitive frame of reference, core promise, reasons to believe, brand essence, strategic enemy, personality, messaging implications, culture requirements, and activation guidance.
But the document is not the point.
The point is whether the work can guide behavior, investment, communication, sales, experience, and governance.
That is the standard.
The Leadership Decision
Every organization in the marketplace is already positioned somewhere in the minds of customers, employees, partners, and the market.
The question is whether that position is intentional, valuable, differentiated, and supported by the organization’s behavior.
For mid-market companies under pressure to grow, simplify, professionalize, integrate, expand, or prepare for their next stage of value creation, this question becomes urgent.
A strong brand position gives leadership a sharper answer to why the company deserves to win and what must be true for that advantage to endure.
To discuss how a Brand Positioning Workshop can help you build a brand that performs, please contact us.
Dr. Derrick Daye is the Managing Partner of The Blake Project and Publisher of Branding Strategy Insider.
At The Blake Project, we help leaders turn brand into a disciplined driver of financial performance — strengthening pricing power, competitive position, and enterprise value. Email us to start a conversation about enduring profitable growth. For The EBITDA.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy focused on turning brand into pricing power, growth, and enterprise value.
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