THREE INITIAL COMPONENTS
Before you plan anything , announce anything , or
write anything:
• Develop a positioning statement
• Define Buy Involvement Audience
• Develop a message map

THE POSITIONING STATEMENT
• An image or identity in the minds of your target market for:
• The organization
• Product
• Brand
• Contingent upon identifying and communicating a brand’s
uniqueness, differentiation and verifiable value.
• “Me too” brand positioning contradicts the notion of
differentiation and should be AVOIDED at all cost

POSITIONING STATEMENT
Brand Positioning process involves:
1. Identifying business’s direct competition
2. Understand how each competitor positions their business and products
3. Identify current positioning
4. Compare to competitors positioning and identify viable areas for
differentiation
5. Identify customer’s need and value received from products in your
segment
6. Develop a distinctive, differentiating and value-based positioning concept
Creating a positioning statement with key messages and customer value
propositions to be used for communications development across the variety of
target audience touch points (advertising, media, PR, website, etc.)

POSITIONING STATEMENT
Product Positioning process involves:
• Define the market in which the product competes (who are
relevant buyers)
• Identify the attributes (dimensions) that define product space
• Collect information from a sample customers about their
perceptions of each product on the relevant attributes.
• Determine each product’s share of mind
• Determine the target market’s preferred combination of
attributes (ideal vector)
• Examine the fit between the position of your product and the
position of the ideal vector

POSITIONING STATEMENT
Outline:
• For … (target customer/person – not market)
• who … (statement of need or opportunity)
• The … (product, brand, or company name)
• is a …(product category or market segment)
• that … (statement of key benefit – compelling reason to buy).
• Unlike … (primary competitive products or alternatives),
• our product … (statement of primary differentiation).

POSITIONING STATEMENT
Process in defining positioning:
• Organize a few working sessions – include marketing,
communications, sales, those who know market and needs of
target customers)
• Use powerful verbs and adjectives that resonate and
differentiate
• Align product with strategic objectives of target customer
• Don’t stop here. This will improve over time with each new
iteration.

BUY INVOLVEMENT – UNDERSTANDING YOUR
CUSTOMERS
• How much time, money, ideas, energy and other resources customer tries
to use in order to buy the product.
• Two types of customer involvement:
• High involvement (rational or emotional) – buyer is prepared to spend
considerable time and effort in searching
• Low involvement – products bought frequently and with minimal thought
and effort. They are not of vital concern nor have any great impact on
consumer’s lifestyle.
• This is a range and not one or the other and can change over time or
circumstances
• Initial choice of a product may be high involvement; but once they make
the choice to buy a brand any repurchase of that brand would be low
involvement.
• Impulse buys would be low involvement
• Your task is to determine how the majority of your target market relate to
the purchases of the particular product or service

BUY INVOLVEMENT
High Involvement / Rational
• Includes expensive business purchases, anything relating to
technological infrastructure, office location and lease, company
health insurance
• On consumer side – tend to be linked to high cost and includes
home, car, major appliances. These can also vary significantly on
the rational/emotional scale from individual to individual
• For both B2C and B2B markets, advertising for high
involvement/rational purchases tend to be copy driven with clear
explanations of features and benefits.
• You can also add some emotional aspects to the rational buy
decision with some success.

BUY INVOLVEMENT
High Involvement / Emotional
• Business purchases in this category include office design,
advertising, and perhaps hiring of certain employees.
• For individuals, purchases include jewelry, weddings, holiday
travel plans and in some cases homes, cars, etc. These
purchases vary depending on culture, person and how much
purchasing power the individual has.
• Advertising in this category tends to focus on visual and
emotional appeals. Give people visual details with music.

BUY INVOLVEMENT
Low Involvement / Rational
• Things we buy out of habit without much thought
• Typical role of advertising: get people to sample or switch. To
break the automatic habit of spending.
• Coupons, samples, demonstrations, can work well. Also adding
some emotional appeal can also work well.

BUY INVOLVEMENT
Low Involvement / Emotional
• Gratification we get from these products is emotional or
sensual; however, it is fleeting and does not last a long time.
• Includes movies, candy, an entertaining magazine, birthday
card, selecting a restaurant for a special occasion
• Advertising challenge tends to be the flash promise of pleasure,
or of gratification, the promise of a benefit,
• Strong positioning can help, especially in a crowded product
category

BUY INVOLVEMENT
Six Stages of Consumer Buying Process
1. Problem recognition (awareness of need
2. Information search
3. Evaluation of Alternatives
4. Purchase decision
5. Purchase
6. Post purchases evaluation
Not all decision processes lead to a purchase. All consumer
decisions do not always include all 6 stages, determined by the
degree of complexity.

BUY INVOLVEMENT
6 Roles in the Purchase Process in corporate
environments:
1. Initiator – first identifies the need to buy a particular product or
service to solve an organizational problem;
2. Influencer – their views influence the buy decision makers
3. Decider – ultimately approves all of any part of the entire buying
decision – whether to buy, what to buy, how to buy, and where
to buy;
4. BUYER – holds the formal authority to selec the supplier and
arrange terms of condition
5. User – consumes or uses the product or service
6. Gatekeeper – controls information or access or both to decision
makers and influencers.
An individual can fall into one or more of these roles.

BUY INVOLVEMENT
Isolating the important players involves:
1. Isolate the personal stakeholders – Those individuals who have
an important personal stake in the purchase decision, making
exert more influence that other members of the buy
2. Follow the information flow – Influential members are central to
the information to them.
3. Identify the experts – Expertise is an important determinate of
influence in the buy.
4. Trace the connections to the top – powerful individuals often
have direct access to top management.
5. Understand the role of the purchases department – Purchases
department is dominant in repetitive buying situations.

BUY INVOLVEMENT
Defining and Increasing Buy Involvement:
• Methods to consider
• News
• Blogs
• Social Media outlets,
• Case Studies, podcasts,
• Forums

BUY INVOLVEMENT
Defining and Increasing Buy Involvement
• Before defining messaging or methods to increase the buy
involvement of those involved in the buy decision, first analyze
each stake holder using a chart similar to the following:
Executive Buyer Technical Buyers Users
Importance
Interest
Emotional appeal
Badge Value
Risk

BUY INVOLVEMENT
• Once you have defined each of those involved in the buy
decision from high involvement to low involvement:
• You can define a plan to increase the involvement of each.]
• This is also a very useful tool to create the types of messages,
collateral, or other approaches to not only increase
involvement, but to develop awareness campaigns.
Awareness is an important part of every plan!
Awareness leads to demand generation!

CREATING A MESSAGE MAP
Create a message map for any product or brand.
1. Create a headline
 Make it twitter-friendly. No more that 140 characters.
 One single overarching message that you want your
customers to know about the product.
 What is the single most important thing I want my listener
to know about my product, service, brand, idea
2. Support the headline with three key benefits
 The human mind can only process about three pieces of
information in short-term memory
3. Reinforce the three benefits with proof points
 Stories, statistics, examples

KEEP YOUR MESSAGES:
• Short and to the point
• Simple sound bites
• Easy to remember
• Focused on the User’s need
• Example: A drill manufacturer’s customers do not need a drill,
they need a hole
• Differentiate from the competitors’ messages.
• Analyze their messages and find a different approach, different
angle …. Make it stand out. Make it compelling.
• Listen to the market. They will tell you what is missing or the short
comings. (monitor blogs, social media to get existing feedback.)
Remember: We are opening up a dialogue with our customers and
not talking at them.

NOW START OVER AGAIN!!!
 If properly implemented, we will engage in a campaign that not
only creates a compelling story, but also creates a dialog with
the end users
 This sparks a relatively untapped tool with messages that are
thought provoking (can invoke their passion)
 Be ready to change at any given moment,
 If we properly open up a dialog with our campaigns, we will
learn as much from out target customers as they will from our
campaign. Probably more from out target customers.