Smart Brand Positioning and Messaging for Engineers

What is Brand Positioning & Messaging?

 

What is Brand Positioning?

 

Brand positioning is the process of getting your target audience to know your brand and associate it with specific characteristics and attributes. Part of the brand positioning process is to create a company positioning statement that describes your target audience, what you do, and how you do it.

Developing a positioning statement helps you clearly define your company and your audience by articulating customer concerns and the unique solutions your company delivers. Once you’ve created your positioning statement, it will  help align your organization and allow you to message differentiators and a corporate pitch that will become the foundation for consistent, compelling content.

 

Who Are You?

 

If you ask your CEO, your VP of Sales, and your VP of R&D to summarize your company, you’ll likely get very different answers, all skewed to the aspect of business where that person is involved.

Through the brand positioning and messaging process, teams interview stakeholders and strategically define messaging that represents the company.

To see a few examples of technical companies’ final corporate pitches after a complete brand positioning and messaging project, download the complete guide.

To get in the right frame of mind for a brand positioning and messaging process, let’s take a break from thinking about your company and think about other markets.

Consider the automotive services industry.

Imagine that Austin Mechanics Inc. (AMI) works on any make or model, but German Automotive Specialists (GAS) specializes in only German-made cars.

Now, imagine you personally own a BMW.

Which mechanic would you choose? More than likely you’ll choose GAS, even if its prices are a little higher than AMI’s.

Why? Because GAS mechanics are experts in German engines. You perceive that they have more experience, understand your car better than the generalists at AMI, and offer a higher quality of work. You are willing to pay a more for the specific domain knowledge you expect to get at GAS.

Say you own a Lexus, and you take it to GAS. The mechanics would likely decline to work on your car and refer you to a Lexus specialist. Each time GAS mechanics say yes to German autos and no to other makes, they reinforce their expertise and differentiated reputation, and they keep their bays open for the next German car they can fix efficiently with a higher margin.

In these cases, the GAS mechanic says yes to specializing and no to generalizing. Finding and defining your specialized niche is the key to a differentiated brand position, and it starts with the heart of the company.

Define Your Target Audience

 

Whether your company is a startup with one product or service, or a multimillion dollar enterprise with a diverse client base, it’s smart to break down the large pool of potential customers into audience segments, called buyer personas.

Creating personas is a straightforward process and allows you to customize your messaging and marketing to each group’s concerns and needs. 

 

Buyer Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on demographic data, online behavior, and your educated speculation about personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

 

For example, you may define one of your personas as VP of Engineering Val, a business executive who cares most about cost and long-term support.

A second persona could be Engineer Evan, an engineering manager or senior staff engineer who is an expert in your technology area and wants to do a deep dive into the technical capabilities of your product or how you deliver a service.

Evan greatly influences Vince, but Val makes the final decisions. Val and Evan have very different concerns. They want varying types of information about your company and product, and they go to different places to find their information.

By walking through the exercise of understanding your customer segments, such as Val and Evan, you can put faces, personalities, job descriptions, and key elements of the buying decision to each and better customize your website and marketing efforts, from messaging to content selection.

With this approach, you ultimately produce more effective marketing that has a greater impact on your prospects and, in turn, increases your marketing efficiency.

 

Identify and Prioritize Personas

 

The first step in creating your buyer personas is to brainstorm who they could be. Personas consist of both end-user customers and influencers, and you likely need to include both types.

To develop a comprehensive list, think of your typical buying process.

• With whom do you first engage?
• Who influences that person?
• Who makes the final decision?
• Are your personas different across industries, product lines, service types, or company size?

Once you have your full list, identify the ones who have similar needs or roles and consider merging them.

From here, prioritize your list of personas by considering their impact on the final purchase decision, their relationship to your company, and the size of the audience persona group.

For example, if a key influencer group has only a few members, you may decide it’s best for sales to own those relationships and not have marketing prioritize them as a larger group.

By the time you’re done, you ultimately want to have three to five primary personas because having more becomes too complex to segment, especially when you’re just starting.

Once you’ve finished brainstorming, create your actual personas. To do this, identify the following types of information for each persona. Start by creating three personas and then build from this number to further refine them and generate new ones as needed.

• Who are they? Include demographics such as gender, age, location, and education/degree.
• What is their job? Include data such as title, company size, industry, career path, and general job responsibilities.
• What is a day in their life like? Describe what an average day is like for them, who they work with, how they prefer to communicate, and what decisions they make.
• What are their primary pain points? Describe the primary challenges they are trying to overcome that relate to your products and services.
• What do they value most and what are their goals? Explain what they value most in making a purchase decision (price, support, etc.) and what they are trying to accomplish in their application.
• Where do they go for information? Identify the primary sources they use to gather information in their research and purchase decision processes.
• What type of information do they prefer? Consider the style of content they are seeking: content that inspires vs. concise guidance vs. a very thorough process including all of the research, specs, and small print.
• What’s important to them when selecting a vendor? List what is most important, such as being a technology leader, having proven experience, being a domain expert, etc.
• What are their most common objections? List the reasons you hear most often for why your solutions will not meet their needs.

 

Example Persona Exercise

 

The best way to explain personas is to use examples.

Let’s talk about Oil/Gas Engineer Evan.

A first step in developing your personas is to select a photo. You don’t have to start with a photo, but each persona is not complete without one. You may choose the headshot of an actual customer who represents the prospects you want to target, or you can Google the job title to get ideas. It is important you get the photo right, and you will find the debate that ensues in the search for the perfect photo is enlightening.

People often have very distinct images of customer personas. They only wear jeans. They wear designer glasses. They are older. Younger. They look nerdy. Cool. Maybe there is one customer in particular who accurately represents the persona segment. You may want to choose a photo showing the persona at work to give context to the application environment. Keep debating until you find the picture of the person everyone agrees on, and take note of the visual cues throughout the process.

Who is he?

• Male, 20 years of experience in his field
• Master’s or PhD-level degree
• Early adopter of new technology, deeply knowledgeable in related technologies and systems
• At the No. 2 or 3 market-leading Fortune 1000 company

What is his job?

• Oil/gas exploration
• Stays abreast of new technologies, serves as internal technology expert/consultant

What is a day in his life like?

• Works on manufacturing/engineering processes
• Regularly evaluates technologies to assess their potential for meeting his needs

What are his primary pain points?

• Top concern is system reliability
• Secondary concern is finding the best, most reliable new technology
• Cost is a concern only in a few corner application areas

What does he value most and what are his goals?

• Reliability
• Specs
• Ease of integrating new technology into his current system

Where does he go for information?

• Trade shows
• Trade journals
• Respected speakers at technical conferences
• Google

What type of information does he prefer?

• Lengthy data sheets
• Testing benchmarks
• Third-party reports from national labs, academic institutions
• Technical content such as white papers and webcasts by credentialed subject-matter experts inside the company

What is important to him in evaluating vendors/technology?

• Detailed and extensive field and lab testing, third-party testing, reliably proven specs
• Face-to-face meetings, eye contact, high morale

What are his most common objections/concerns?

• Can you pass his business and technology litmus tests?
• Can you do it? Proven? Credible?

What would he be quoted saying?

• “I research new technologies that are proven, reliable, and have the potential to give our systems a competitive edge. Company leaders and my engineering peers rely on my technical opinion, so I am analytical and meticulous in my due diligence. I enjoy working with technology and the engineers who create it, especially when I find an innovative new partner who has promising technology and is trustworthy and technically competent. I keep up by reading technical journals and seeing my cohorts in the industry at technical conferences and symposiums.” 

Looking at Oil/Gas Engineer Evan, you can see he’s a well-respected, senior engineer in his energy firm with superior academic and field credentials. He is the go-to guy inside his Fortune 1000 company for opinions on adopting new technologies.

When Evan is researching his products, he goes first to the specifications to determine what is required to integrate a new technology in an existing system.

In the energy sector, existing systems can live in very remote, rugged areas such as on the ocean floor or in desert terrain, and they are very expensive to maintain, so Evan is thorough in his research. He reads all the technical information he can and seeks out quality and test/trial data to see proof of real-world performance.

He must be convinced that the product is proven and reliable before he ever meets with a technical counterpart at the supplier. He has no room for error in his applications, and his reputation is on the line with each decision he makes.

Evan is well known in his tight-knit community of energy technologists, and he gets most of his information from technical conferences, leading academicians, and peers he trusts.

At the end of the description, a fictional quote summarizes the feelings of the persona. Writing this quote serves to add a voice to the persona and helps crystallize what they really care about.

 

Where is your buyer in the technology adoption lifecycle?

 

One last element of persona development is to add to your definition is where the persona is on the technology adoption lifecycle. This model for high-tech marketing was made famous by Geoffrey Moore in his book, Crossing the Chasm. 

As you can imagine, customer personas can vary widely with differences in educational levels, pain points, care-abouts, preferred information sources, and risk level. By defining these and other elements and finding the right persona photo, you are ready to prioritize your audiences, define your positioning, develop your messaging, plan your content development, and decide on the optimal targeted marketing approach to reach each group.

Another benefit of clearly defining your buyer personas is aligning your organization, from the CEO and sales engineers to R&D and marketing. Many organizations feel a lack of clarity in identifying their customer audiences, and employees often do not fully understand how their actions directly impact potential customers. Even engineering teams are at times charged with creating a new product, but no one is exactly sure who the product is targeted to. Unfortunately, this misalignment can translate into wasted time and resources. For marketing, this reality sets in when you or your team members are reworking content multiple times, debating the topic of your next white paper, or trying to reconcile conflicting opinions that slow down initial, clearly defined objectives.

Using informed data, outside research when needed, and your collective experience to create your personas, and then ensuring leaders in your organization agree and understand them, can result in significant efficiency gains and employee confidence. When these fictional characters start to become part of your regular language and references to Engineer Ed or VP Val lead to heads nodding in agreement and understanding, you will experience the power of personas.

Develop Brand Positioning

 

Brand Positioning Process

 

Going step-by- step through this positioning process leads to a well thought out, carefully crafted positioning statement that you can use on your website, in your content, and as talking points for your sales team. From that statement, you can create a shorter elevator pitch that all your employees can use to clearly describe who your company is, what customer pains you are solving, and how you are uniquely differentiated from competitors to solve those challenges. This will ensure that your company will be delivering the same message in every interaction with your target audiences, and will serve as a critical first step to establishing your brand.

 

Define Your Mission, Vision and Core Values

 

It’s important to first document your company’s mission, vision and core values. These core elements serve as the foundation for your company’s positioning statement. Below are brief definitions and examples to reference in writing yours.

Mission Statement:

A mission statement is a brief written statement of the fundamental purpose of a company or organization that rarely changes through the decades.

Examples of Mission Statements:

• Nike: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
• Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• TREW: We create smart marketing to promote the innovations of our world’s technical leaders.

Vision:

A vision statement is your long-term dream that states what your company wants to be, serves as a source of inspiration, and is sometimes time-based and updated every 10-15 years.

Examples of Vision Statements:

• Toyota: To sustain profitable growth by providing the best customer experience and dealer support.
• Google: To create the perfect search engine.
• BMW: To become the most successful premium manufacturer in the car industry.

Core Values:

Core values are the fundamental beliefs and expected behaviors of your company.

Examples of Core Values:

• Rackspace: Fanatical support; Results first, substance over flash; Committed to greatness; Full disclosure and transparency; Passion for our work; Treat fellow Rackers like friends and family
• National Instruments: Thinking globally, acting locally.
• Keysight Technologies:  Value Creation, Customer Insight and High Performance.
• ANSYS: Customer Focus, Results and Accountability, Innovation, Transparency and Integrity, Mastery, Inclusiveness, Sense of Urgency, and Collaboration and Teamwork.

 

Define Your Positioning Statement

 

The positioning statement defines our company and our audience by identifying your target customer, articulating customer pains, and describing the solutions you deliver. It provides clarification on exactly what you do, and how you do it, and can be used for reference internally -- it will become the core foundation for your external messaging.

Often, teams skip these steps and dive right into messaging pitches and differentiators. Don’t be that team – take the time to debate, come to consensus, and  document your company or product position before you get to messaging.

Who:

Your potential customer’s job title, function, decision-making authority, etc.

Examples of “Who”:

• Directors/managers of R&D, technology, or products in Houston and Southeast Texas
• Engineers and program managers/directors
• Lab managers and their teams
• Technology leaders: engineering managers, VPs and CTOs
• Plant engineers, corporate engineering, & manufacturing operations

Where:

The industry(ies), region(s), department(s), division(s), etc. of the types of companies where your potential customers work.

Examples of “Where”:

• Managing test and measurement in validation or production for government and private military and aerospace organizations
• In labs managing increasing amounts of data
• At manufacturing companies building new facilities that require batch process control systems
• In high-growth automotive-based organizations
• At Fortune 1000 companies in the chemical, pulp & paper and power industries

Why:

Your customer’s technical challenges or pain points.

Examples of “Why”:

• Face product quality, production or cost issues and are seeking a new approach
• Coping with increasingly complex automation systems that must share and report plant-floor information to the enterprise
• Need a reliable test and measurement system from a proven supplier that can meet stringent time, cost and technical requirements
• Face increasingly complex electronic embedded systems and seek solutions that scale with more demanding industry standard
• Need faster test equipment that is smaller, more energy-efficient and lower in total cost.

What:

Your solutions, including products, services or overall solutions.

Examples of “What”:

• We create commercial-off-the-shelf products and customs solutions with military-ready, aerospace-quality, scalable specifications
• We provide large-scale plant-floor automation, industrial IT and smart manufacturing solutions that improve OEE, increase agility and reduce time-to-market
• We design and build new, custom test solutions and build high-volume automated test equipment to your exact specifications
• Our ESP product is a centralized data management platform for tracking samples, processing data, reporting, and managing workflows

How:

The way you solve your customer’s problem, such as processes, tools, service, unique expertise, and best practices.

Examples of “How”:

• With a customer-first, consultative approach that includes a plan of action that leverages the talent and skill of 100+ industry professionals, from plant floor processes to enterprise systems
• We use proven electronic design practices, expert LabVIEW programming, tailored COTS hardware to help clients design and deliver new products to market
• Our expertise tackling the demanding precision of aerospace test carries through to our work in manufacturing applications, creating test equipment that is modular, high-performance, low-power and delivered quickly.
• We created an end-to-end software platform with streamlined workflow, the ability to comply with any standards, and strong data provenance.

Unlike:

The drawbacks of alternative approaches such as competitors, using in-house resources, or delaying resolution. While some words, phrases or even whole sentences from other parts of the positioning statement may end up being used publicly, the “Unlike” section is only meant for internal use.

Examples of “Unlike”:

• Offshore outsourcing where communication is difficult
• Integrators that lack experience solving industry challenges and meeting demands of government contractors and aerospace/defense applications
• Costly, brand-name business consultants who lack real-world experience with plant-floor automation systems and manufacturing business processes
• Incumbent suppliers that offer only COTS components and over-promise on products labeled “easy to use” or under-deliver with solutions that reach obsolescence quickly.

With your core foundational pieces defined- mission, vision and core values, and the six elements of the positioning statement created, you are now ready for the final step in the positioning process: defining your tone, or company personality.

 

Your Positioning Should Inform Future Opportunities

 

A corporate positioning statement is not the place to describe each and every product you make, but to define as a company what types of products you make or services you provide. This approach will give you the freedom to add or modify specific products or services over time without having to change the core positioning and “who you are” as a company. That said, when you’re pinpointing what you do and how you’re different, you should take into consideration future possible products and ventures and make sure they fit under the definition you’re creating about what you do and how you do it.

If future ventures don’t fit, the positioning statement gives a good checkpoint for you to ask:

• Do these new ventures really match the specific market we know?
• Are our customers even asking for these products?
• Do we have the expertise to transition into this product/service/industry, etc.?
  
  

To see how Silex Technology developed their positioning statement, download the complete guide.

 

Define Brand Tone

 

Once all of the elements of your positioning statement are complete, you can identify the tone of your brand and communicate it in a voice that reflects your corporate culture and personality.“Tone” is the mood or feeling of your brand, while “voice” is the style of your writing.

Here is a list of tone and voice examples that can help you brainstorm and explore what defines your brand.

 

How to Find Your Brand Tone

 

To develop your brand tone, here’s a few easy and fun questions to get lots of ideas on the table:

• If your company was a car, what manufacturer would it be? Why?
  • Examples: Honda, Ferrari, Ford Raptor, RollsRoyce, Lexus
• What 2-3 brand name companies have a tone you want your company to emulate? Why?
  • Examples: Dyson, IBM, Apple, GE, LL Bean, Southwest Airlines
• Make a list of all the words you could use to describe your company’s personality
  • Examples: Smart, Dedicated, Transparent, Flexible, Approachable, Fun, Respected, Buttoned-up

Develop Your Brand Messaging

 

With your brand position now defined, you have the foundation in place to develop your brand message. Often, people skip this positioning process and jump straight to messaging. While this may save you time in the short-term, it will leave you dissatisfied and inefficient in the long-run when you find yourself changing it often trying to get it right. 

 

Define Differentiation Pillars

 

Corporate differentiation pillars articulate what makes your company different, and how those differences positively affect your customers. These pillars each have a core message – or headline – and supporting details that prove how the differentiators are carried out in your business.

• Differentiation Pillars should be valuable to your customers and articulate aspects of your company that cost you something to uphold
• Headlines should convey the value of your differentiators to your customer
• Supporting Details should be specific facts.

Start by brainstorming 5-10 key differentiators. Then, narrow those down and pick your top three. For each of these three, write a headline and 3 supporting details. Here is an example from a TREW customer in the aerospace and defense industry:

 

Develop Your Company Tagline

 

With your top 3 differentiators identified, your headlines drafted, and your supporting details listed, you now have the basis for creating your overall company headline, also known as a “tagline”. The tagline should capture the essence of everything you’ve documented up to now:

• Mission
• Vision
• Core Values
• Positioning Statement
• Differentiation Pillars

Here’s a few tagline examples to get your creative juices flowing:

• Nike: Just Do It
• Apple: Think Different
• BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine
• TREW: Smart Marketing for Engineers 

With your brand positioning and differentiation information handy, start brainstorming. Write down 10 – 20 tagline ideas. You may find you go down a creative path with one word or idea – cluster those into a group so you can see the various versions all together. You may end up with 4-5 clusters of 3-5 different taglines, or more. Just let the ideas flow at this point, don’t judge one as bad or good.

Ideally, you should try to create a tagline that is:

• 5 words or less
• Intriguing
• Memorable
• Unique to your company
• Tied to emotion
• Inclusive of a benefit

From your list, find the best three tagline ideas and shop them around to your colleagues, and even best customers. Get feedback, discuss them more, sleep on it, see what other ideas spawn from the ones you have, and ultimately, you will have your company tagline.

 

Create the Elevator Pitch

 

With all the positioning and messaging ideas you’ve now documented, take some time to draft your elevator pitch. It’s called an elevator pitch because your message has to: 

• Make sense to strangers – those who don’t know your company
• Be short, ~30-60 words – enough time to go up 10 floors in an elevator
• Convey your brand – explain what your company does with a tone that gives the person an idea of what it’s like to work with you
• Be memorable – inspire the person to visit your website when they get to their desk to find out more

As you begin, specifically write down your “What” from your positioning statement and your three brand tone words. Then begin drafting your elevator pitch to convey your “What” in your brand tone. 

Here are some examples:

• We use a multidisciplinary engineering approach and proven expertise to design and build exact, on-time, and on-budget test systems for aerospace, defense, or energy applications.
• We transition products from traditional to touch. As a complete touch solution provider, we design, develop, and deploy plug-in ready, touch-based devices with an embedded UI, tested and proven to fit the exact needs of your product.
• We are in business to engineer better infrastructure solutions. As a company working with stakeholders in every setting – from the cable to the connected enterprise network – we are charting the course toward a stronger, more informed future for businesses in our connected world.

Next, say your pitch out loud. Would you actually say these words? Is it quick enough? If not, adjust the pitch until you like your it sounds and it's 60 words or less (the closer to 30 words, the better).

 

Develop Segment Messaging

 

With your brand positioning and messaging defined and finalized, you’ll want to next create segment messaging to strategically position products, services or industry verticals. Segment messages can be for a product/product family, industry, application, partner, and/or any subset of your audience that has specific needs.

Once you have selected three segments to create messaging around, pull in subject matter experts (SMEs). You may also need to interview more customers for your segment messaging.

Questions to explore segment messaging include:

• What questions do you hear most often about this segment?
• What are customers biggest pain points in this segment?
• How do you solve problems in this segment?
• If customers aren’t using you, what are they doing to solve their problems?
• How are your solutions/approach different?
• What’s the process like to work with you, rather than a competitor?

For each segment, create a 60-word pitch along with a headline message and supporting bullets for each division. Segment messaging should translate your company position to a target audience.

To see real-world examples of segment pitches, download the complete guide.

Promote Your Brand Consistently

 

Once you have developed your brand position and used the positioning language to develop your brand messaging, you should be ready to use your messaging. But how should you start?

 

You will get tired of your message decades before your audience. You will sit in a planning meeting at the end of this year or next, and think – we should do something different. Resist the urge to make a change because you’ve used the same words to describe your company in a news release, blog post, and slide deck.

 

You inherently know that “Intel” brands a computer with a reliable, reputable core processor, and it’s not because the company tired of its message after six or 12 months. It’s because they pushed forward with the message, including it in most of their marketing materials starting in 1991. Stay the course with your messaging, too!

 

Get Engineers to Trust You with a Corporate Slide Deck 

Once your message is set, you’ll need content to share and deliver the story of your company. A great way to do this is to have a well-designed corporate slide deck. A corporate slide deck can be disseminated through your company so that multiple teams can give presentations that have the same look, feel, and message. Your corporate slide deck can stand alone, or be used as an intro set of slides before a presenter proceeds into more sales- or application-specific information.

Sales teams often give presentations, ideally to prospects who have engaged with content on your site and are increasingly interested in your company. The content they encountered on your site was likely planned and designed with much thought. Now, they’re about to interact with your brand for 30 minutes in the form of your sales team and pitch deck. 

Learn how to develop your corporate slide deck. 

 

Write Your “About” Webpage Copy

 

After your elevator pitch, your “About” paragraph will be the first of much content to flow out from your messaging. Your “About” content covers the main elements of your positioning statement:

• Who you serve
• Where your customers are
• Why they need help
• What you do to solve their problems
• How you work

It should also include your differentiators. This, and all other content you create should carry a consistent voice. Here are a few examples of About page content:

• Tesla was founded in 2003 by a group of engineers in Silicon Valley who wanted to prove that electric cars could be better than gasoline-powered cars. With instant torque, incredible power, and zero emissions, Tesla’s products would be cars without compromise. Each new generation would be increasingly affordable, helping the company work towards its mission: to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
• [Company] creates technology that combines the best of century-old innovation with imaginative modern engineering. We live in the world of engineering, bound by the laws of physics but spared from the constraints of a specific industry. At [company], we begin by looking at current technology that’s accepted and proven, but insufficient. In energy. In aerospace. In devices we use in our daily lives. And we ask: Why has it always been done this way? Can we make it better? How could something new cause a paradigm shift improvement?
• (Intel) You may know us for our processors. But we do so much more. Intel invents at the boundaries of technology to make amazing experiences possible for business and society, and for every person on Earth. Harnessing the capability of the cloud, the ubiquity of the Internet of Things, the latest advances in memory and programmable solutions, and the promise of always-on 5G connectivity, Intel is disrupting industries and solving global challenges. Leading on policy, diversity, inclusion, education and sustainability, we create value for our stockholders, customers and society.

Say your About paragraph aloud or read it to a colleague. Can they repeat back to you the critical elements of your business? Do they have an idea of what it’s like to work there? If not, adjust the paragraph until you’re happy with it.

Learn More

 

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