Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

How 2 Position Your Brand

The following post is from Sara Wu ’17, a Butler Venture Accelerator team member.

How 2 Position Your Brand with Doug Fox

How 2 Position Your Brand with Doug Fox

This past fall, we had the honor to have Dough Fox of Brand Fox, host a session teaching entrepreneurs how to position a company’s brand to better connect and convert their audience.

Doug has twenty years’ experience as a brand strategist. His company Brand Fox focuses on B2B brand strategy services.  Doug is also a mentor, speaker and judge at Mass Challenge.

What is a brand?

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company.

A brand involves many parties. These parties include customers/users, prospects, investors, media, partners, employees, friends/family. A good brand marketer will make all these parties trust his/her  brand and convince people that his/her idea will work. However, there is always going to be a gap between a person’s perception of the brand and how it is in reality. That is when brand management comes in. Brand management aims at closing the gap. As an entrepreneur, one of the most important lessons is to find the pain points of the problem and address it. People come to know brands by the problems they solve. Apart from this, an entrepreneur must focus on user’s experience, not only once, but repetitively and with focus, so that customers will have a positive impression of the brand.

Top five mistakes people make

  1. Having an unfocused target audience.

Advice: sharpen your focus (make sure you know clearly what your aim is, who your target market is). Simplify your message and convey a succinct, yet clear message.

  1. Lack of audience understanding

Advice: study your audience deeply. Understand their wants, needs and desires. Validate your approach by communicating your benefits instead of product features.

  1. Emphasizing only what you do

Advice: What you do does matter to your audience, HOWEVER, “How” you do will differentiate you from your competitors. Explain why you do and it is more motivating, uncover the “WHY”!

  1. Ignoring emotion

Advice: In the real world, customers make all decisions emotionally and justify rationally. Therefore as an entrepreneur, you need to uncover the emotional benefits associated with your offering, and you need to connect with your target audience first before converting rationally.

  1. Overlooking internal brand

Advice: You need to make your employees understand the brand. Make sure they are aligned with the message your brand is trying to convey.

Takeaways:

  • Focus on the EXPERIENCE you bring to your customers so they have a positive association of your brand.
  • Brand Matters!
  • Know your audience intimately
  • Uncover the “WHY” (why are you doing what you are doing?)
  • Connect with your audience emotionally, then rationally.

See you for #How2Tuesday this February!

What are #How2Tuesdays?:
Want to learn something really practical to get your startup moving in the right direction? #How2Tuesdays are short, workshop style sessions meant to bring you very specific, user friendly instruction on some of the most important things you need to know how to do for your venture. Every Tuesday at 5pm in the Blank Center!