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How to Position Your Brand to Move Your Business with Kathy Guzmán Galloway, The Clarity Wizard: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Sep 17, 2024

Welcome back to Marketing Smarts! From brand-building and marketing veterans Anne Candido and April Martini (that’s us) comes a podcast committed to cutting through all the confusing marketing BS so you can actually understand how to take action and change your business today. We deep-dive into topics most would gloss-over, infusing real-world examples from our combined 35+ years of corporate and agency experience. We tell it how it is so whether you are just starting out or have been in business awhile, you have the Marketing Smarts to immediately impact your business.

In this episode, we’re talking brand positioning with Kathy Guzmán Galloway. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re exercising your Marketing Smarts!

  • Episode Summary & Player
  • Show Notes
  • Marketing Smarts Summary
  • Transcript

Marketing Smarts: How to Position Your Brand to Move Your Business with Kathy Guzmán Galloway, The Clarity Wizard

Brand positioning can be a key strategic generator of business. In fact, it’s what we’ve built our business around at ForthRight People. But what exactly is your brand positioning? It comes down to what your brand is, why is it different, and why do customers want you. We wanted you to learn from a true “wizard” when it comes to brand positioning, so we welcomed on Kathy Guzmán Galloway. She’s The Clarity Wizard, who helps brand owners gain clarity with brand positioning. Make sure to grab her brand positioning templates at TheClarityWizard.com/Podcast. This episode covers everything from brand positioning to differentiation. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

  • What drives a strong brand promise?
  • How do you stick to your brand promise?
  • What are some examples of a good brand promise?
  • How do you figure out your brand positioning?
  • What are Anne’s thoughts on Tide’s brand positioning?
  • How do you do continuous consumer learning?
  • What should you do if your brand positioning is wrong?
  • How did Kathy recover from her ATV injury?

And as always, if you need help in building your Marketing Smarts, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

What is Marketing Smarts?

From brand-building and marketing veterans Anne Candido and April Martini comes a podcast committed to cutting through all the confusing marketing BS so you can actually understand how to take action and change your business today. They deep-dive into topics most would gloss-over, infusing real-world examples from their combined 35+ years of corporate and agency experience. They tell it how it is so whether you are just starting out or have been in business awhile, you have the Marketing Smarts to immediately impact your business.

How do I exercise my Marketing Smarts?

Thanks for listening to Marketing Smarts. Get in touch here to become a savvier marketer. 

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Anne Candido 0:00
This is Marketing Smarts, a podcast committed to helping you become a savvier marketing leader, no matter your level. In each episode, we’ll dive into a relevant topic or challenge that marketing leaders are currently facing. We’ll also give you practical tools and applications that will help you put what you learn into practice today. Now let’s get to it! Welcome to Marketing Smarts. I am Anne Candido and I am April martini, and today, we’re going to talk about how to position your brand, to move your business. So many considers to be a fluffy topic, but it is anything but that. And I hate when people say that, yeah, I know it’s our business, right? In fact, brand positioning can be a key strategic generator of business, and is, in fact, what we build our business around. At forthright people, our tagline is even solving business challenges through brands. So we know that there’s a connection. It’s a very powerful connection, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And guess what? Guys like our clients are almost exclusively B to B, service oriented businesses and nonprofits. So if you think brand is just b to c. Think again.

April Martini 1:02
Yeah. And before we jump into this episode, we want to back up and make sure we’re clear here, because the talk of brand versus business can sometimes get confusing for folks, and many times people consider them to be one in the same, but they are absolutely not, which we will talk a ton about during this episode, but just to set it up so your brand positioning is your presence, and it’s defined by three questions that you hear Anne and I talk about all of the time, which is, who am I? How am I different? And why do you want me? And then these are knitted together into a visual and verbal toolkit that represents your brand, and in essence, ends up defining your presence. And then this is all leverage to direct how you show up through all of your communication channels. How successful you are here determines how successful you’ll be in delivering the KPIs of your business. And we have tons of episodes on brand specific topics. So if you need a refresher on any of those things, we just invite you to go back and you know, Google on our website and look up all those episodes, because there’s tons, right?

Anne Candido 2:03
And since this is kind of like a 401 or 501 topic, we have a very special guest who’s going to help us with this topic, and her name is Kathy Guzman Galloway of The Clarity Wizard. Kathy, it’s so great to have you. Would you like to introduce yourself? I

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 2:19
would love to first of all, thank you so much for having me. I’m Kathy Guzman Galloway. I am the CEO and Head Wizard at The Clarity Wizard, and we are brand positioning experts. We help brands increase brand love and decrease risk with optimizing their brand positioning. And I’m so happy to talk to your audience today.

Anne Candido 2:41
Oh, I love it. Okay, yeah, this is going to be a fantastic conversation, and I’m sure Cathy’s going to get into our background, but we have similar backgrounds, so obviously the odd man out. Yes, April gets to be the odd man out, which usually happens when we have a lot of our creative agency folks. I’ve been looking forward to the thing here that little while. Yeah, and I’m usually odd man out. So let’s get started about how to position your brand to move your business. So Kathy, I’d like to really just start on and just hit right into this brand positioning piece, which we’ve called, you know what people come and call the brand promise, or within the articulation of the brand story, we call it your reason why you exist, or your purpose. But this is really the Who am I portion of the brand identity questions we just referenced. So I’d love to have a conversation about what you think drives a strong brand promise. How do you know it’s that it’s strong enough or that it isn’t strong enough? And just really kind of share your thoughts here with us?

April Martini 3:34
Yeah, I

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 3:35
love the brand promise in particular as part of brand positioning, because it is the heavy lifter of brand positioning. The brand promise is what is at the core of brand positioning. It does say, who am I? Who am I as a brand? What? What am I offering to the world? And the power of the promise statement is that it if done well, it is very succinct, and because of the building blocks to the brand promise, it is compelling and easy to understand, and does a lot of heavy lifting in one brief sentence or phrase, really and that that is powerful, but it’s also really hard to Get to it, it’s really hard to get to the really strong version of what a brand promise is. And I know we can talk a little bit more about what that looks like, but I would encourage the audience not to shy away from the work, because if and when you’re able to lock into what the real brand promises for your brand, everything else becomes so much easier. You just kind of get it intuitively in your gut, and you’re able to kind of repeat it off the top of your of your head and and it tells people exactly what what it is that you’re bringing to the table. So it’s just really powerful that

April Martini 4:54
way. Yeah, and I want to reiterate the point there about making sure that you don’t shy away and you take. The time to really get this right. Because I think, as you said, Kathy, it is so fundamental and foundational to everything else you do moving forward. But I think initially, well, I hate to say it like this, but initially, I think people think they hit it clients think they hit it right and there, there isn’t the desire, time, investment, focus, to go deep enough to really get at what is that core essence of that? We call it emotional connection, right with the folks that you’re trying to attract. So I would love if maybe you could give us to Anne’s question at the beginning, like, what makes a good one and what makes a not good one, if there’s like, an example you could take us through, or the process that you work through, so that it’s a little bit more tangible. Tangible? Yeah, thank you, man, I don’t have my words today either little more tangible for folks,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 5:54
absolutely, no, I, I love examples in that they really do a good job of creating that mind map for for someone who, particularly if brand positioning and brand promise is kind of new to you, one of the ones that I love to use, actually, Anne and I talked about a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago now, is tide. The tide is always that classic example

April Martini 6:18
of all. Here we go. Is this. This

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 6:22
is this? This is a recurring topic. I’m guessing the tide comes up a lot, but there’s a lot of love for tide. Yet I work,

Anne Candido 6:27
I worked on the brand for 10 years,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 6:30
right? There’s this lot of what we were talking about. I thought was really helpful, even in how I talk about that example, I think in hearing you build on it’s all it’s all started. And we love for you to add to add to that, which is, I talk about tide a because everyone knows tide. Everybody knows tide, unless you just got to planet earth, then you don’t know tide. And everyone’s, I think we all intuitively know what the brand promise. You just didn’t know that. That’s what that was, which is true for a lot of brands. Ultimately, the sign of a good brand promises that your consumer can repeat it back to you, not that you’re looking for them to repeat a tagline or specific copy. That’s not really the point. The point is that they are able to very quickly articulate to you why this brand means what it does to them. And so for time, the thing we always hear people talk about all the time, and obviously they’re they’re still leaning into it as a tagline is, if it’s got to be clean, it’s got to be tied. And so what we’ve always known as consumers, at least I’ve always experienced as a consumer, about tide, is that I don’t need to question, if I buy a tide product, whether or not that thing was designed in order to get my clothes clean in whatever it is I needed, and I use it as an example to talk about how the brand promise gets executed across product lines or segments, and the difference between liquid tide and a tide pen and Tide Pods, and that whether they are used by The same person at different occasions, or they’re used by three extremely different people. They’re all getting to the same promise, which is, no matter how you engage with us, your clothes are going to be cleaned but and with your experience on it, this is where my my own podcasting experience as a host, comes into play. I’m going to turn the tables on you, and

Anne Candido 8:21
we love that.

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 8:22
I love when this happens. So Anne, I’d love to hear your thoughts about the tide positioning and kind of some of the insights that you were sharing with me that I think add a lot of color to that thinking. And really importantly, what I loved about what we were talking about is how it illustrates the need not only to get to your promise first, but then also being acutely aware of not only how the consumer evolves, but how business opportunity has to evolve, and how you start to really look at, okay, now that I’ve locked this down, where do I go next? What is the next opportunity for us? So I’ve stole a little bit of what you share with me, but why don’t we talk about that? Well,

Anne Candido 9:05
how much time we got? Oh, gee, I’m going to try to condense all this

April Martini 9:10
experience. And I was not briefed ahead of time that tide was going to be a major portion of today. So surprise to April over here.

Anne Candido 9:20
No. So this is what I’ll say. I’ll get on my my Tide box, not my soapbox, but my Tide box. So it’s my, you know, little inside tide joke, but I and thank you for asking me that question, Kathy, because I think it’s a really important distinction, because to April’s pointed to your point early, a lot of people will just kind of state a functionality of the brand, yeah, as a promise. And really, that’s where it starts. And it starts with, what can you do? Really, really, really, well, better than anything or anybody else, and really be able to own that in a way that is uniquely yours? And for tide, it’s, it is the best detergent out there. So and we, it’s made, and it’s and it’s our indeed. And. And it’s produced to be the best it’s it gets out stains, right? That is what that that brand is meant to do. And it’s premium in the in the way that is positioned and priced, and because it does it so well, and so it can, it can actually demand that value, because it performs as well as it does. Now, other brands perform really well too. So what is it then that Ty can then uniquely own in a way that those other brands can’t? And for them, it is this generated emotional connection of being a brand that everybody can use, no matter what your life circumstances. And so your point is like, okay, so how does then the business evolve around that? Well, the business evolves around, how do I take this concept of being like, the best performing laundry detergent, a really, really, like, fantastic. I could get out a gazillion stains laundry detergent and make that mean something to people who want something that’s just a beyond, okay, fine. You get like, you know, coffee out of my blouse, right? So the thing that then starts to construct, in a way that kind of elevates that brand promise is the way that it improves life for people. So for example, like when we were having this conversation, and we talked about, you know, moms, and we talked about moms and their kids and their their jerseys and their uniforms, and you just don’t want your kid to be showing up to a baseball game, for example, in dirty, white pants. It just doesn’t, it doesn’t carry that, that swagger of you know where the top team are going to win. And so there’s this element of pride associated with making sure your kids look good. We tap into that. There’s an element with like, Todd pods when you’re talking about especially a younger generation that’s learning how to do laundry, of making it very simple, very easy to do laundry. So Tide Pods is generated in order to be able to drive that convenience factor that’s very, very important. So it’s really understanding what’s important to the consumer, and how do you dial that in and make that connection in a way that is emotionally uplifting, that improves life. Because, as we talked about, and I’ve said this multiple times on this podcast, if you ask 10 people, what’s the best performing laundry detergent out there, nine out of 10 will tell you tied. Only four will buy it so it doesn’t like they don’t know it’s the best, but they need something more, especially if they’re going to pay a premium in order to be able to generate a justification for that purpose of buying and investing in a laundry detergent like that. And that’s all in tied to that emotional integrity of the brand, and what that brand is doing for me, besides just getting my clothes clean,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 12:38
I love that so much. After we talked about it first, I talked about it a couple of times with with other friends that are in the in the same industry. And I think there’s two things about that that are important for the listeners to kind of Bullseye into. One is the architecture of brand positioning, I’m sorry, of brand promise. And then two is this idea of the emotion of it when I talk about the architecture. I think when I teach or work on a brand positioning statement, the thing people are most stressed about is cutting words and becoming concise. Uh huh. It’s such a painful thing, because as an owner of a brand, particularly, I want to tell you all the things it’s and also problem that I talk about. It’s like, Oh, I do all of this and also, and also, and also. Well, yes, that’s good and great. However, you gotta shorten it. And this phrase, which I will admit and make very clear, is a tagline. And taglines are not brand promises, although sometimes they can be, but that is not how you write them. It’s the

Anne Candido 13:46
creative execution of the brand promise, right? Yeah, exactly. That’s

April Martini 13:49
exactly, right. I

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 13:50
mean, the creative execution is really about how the consumer talks, whereas brand positioning is how we talk about the brands that we own in our business, right? But the phrase, if it’s got to be clean, it’s got to be tied. I think what, what that phrase does is carry a lot of information in very few words, and it’s information that we need to know as a business, so that when you get into creative execution, those experts are able to pick at the thing that’s going to make the most impact if it’s gotta be clean, actually, carries a lot of things, right? If it’s gotta be clean means what? What if my kid has to go to this soccer game, I can’t mess around with this. He can’t show up with a gigantic stain, like it has to be clean. This is what I love about the tide pen commercials. They did such a good job of really leaning into if this thing has to be done, I’m at a job interview, the stain is talking to the person interviewing me. That is not okay. It cannot be dirty in this moment. So the architecture of the brand promise has to include this compelling reason for why I need it. It doesn’t have to spell it out. You don’t have to say, Well, if you. Have a job interview, you must use tide. What that? That doesn’t make sense, but the in the intention behind it is there. That’s the architecture. The second point I want to touch on, what you’re saying, is the side of the emotion. There was a time many years ago when tide didn’t have to lean that hard into emotion. Actually, most brands didn’t, because there’s it was not a hyper competitive market. There weren’t that many brands for you to compete with. All I need to do is say, Listen, I’m P&G, and I’ve got literally $100 billion worth of research in here that is going to prove to you that this thing is going to clean and I’m done. I’ve won great. We are not in that world anymore. So those brands that are legacy brands, you’ve been around for a long time, you started brand positioning, anchored in a function, and it still has a lot of equity for your brand. That’s great, but you have to evolve past that. You have to get to get to the place where you’re saying, Okay, well, so what? Yeah, the brand, the product is clean. Your clothes are clean. You feel good about that. But so what? What does that mean in my life? And why does it matter? And why should I be the one to deliver that for you over someone else? If you are a smaller brand and you are relatively new, I’m talking under 10 years. Um, there’s no room for you to be function. Even even those, there’s a whole new category of like functional drinks. They’re actually not into function. They’re actually all emotional based, if you really look at what they’re offering, what they’re selling, Celsius, being one of those brands, I was just

April Martini 16:37
gonna bring that one up. Yeah, that’s a

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 16:39
great example of they started very heavy on the function because they were competing in a heavily function based space, energy, energy. All I need is to be like high, highest levels, and now even Celsius, you see a lot of their language evolving very quickly. It’s active, it’s lifestyle. It’s a lot about who I am and why I would drink this rather than Red Bull. And so no matter where you are on that spectrum, if you’re not already talking emotion and function, I promise you, you’re behind the ball immediately.

Anne Candido 17:14
Well, I think to build on that too, and then I’d love to hear some of April’s examples too. But just to kind of round out, since we were on the tide example, I think it’s so important to and you brought this up that you become very, very clear about it, because it does become the filter by which you think through everything else, right? So tide does more than just clean, right? It does provide vibrant colors. It smells good. I mean, it has other benefits, but it’s not those things are not talked about in isolation outside of clean. So when we’re thinking about how things smell, when we think about what the colors are the clothes, we always think about, what is that signal about clean, and how do we come back to the core message? So everything stays very tight. Now a lot of people will see that, and they’ll be like, Oh, that makes everything so niche. I don’t want to be niche, but no, it doesn’t. What it does is it creates focus, and with that focus, you can filter your messages, and then you become very tangible. And that tangible value leads to being able to stand for something which then creates an emotional connection, which then allows you to command higher prices, which then allows you to bring in more consumers and customers, which allows you to build a legacy brand, which allows you to to just scale and really expand. So the whole point is to go focus in order to mean more to people, as opposed to the other way of like, I’m going to mean everything to everybody. I’m going to try to and then just kind of get diluted. And that’s especially the case for small brands who think like, oh my god, I’m a challenger brand. I’m coming into this this landscape. How am I going to survive? And you’re 1,000% right? Kathy, you, you. You survived by creating that emotional connection that those other brands are not solving for. That’s something you can own. That’s how Dollar Shave Club came in and totally disrupted the whole blade business, but the business had been owned exclusively for by two companies for years, hundreds of years, right? So it is definitely possible, but you have to be intentional about it, and you have to think about it, and then you have to build your business, which is the whole concept of this, this episode from that point, and that’s how these brands are winning. So did you have another couple examples, too? Do you wanted to share April based on your experience? Actually, I

April Martini 19:27
was, instead of example, I was going to go back to the point that you made Kathy about function and building brands on function versus emotional connection and why that’s not okay anymore. And we have a lot of conversations with our clients, and again, like Anne said, I mean, we’re heavily focused in B to B service based and nonprofits, right? So we automatically get a pushback of, I don’t need a brand because I’m in those spaces. But the point I want to make here is what you said about you can’t just go in with a function, right? So when we’re working with our clients, a lot of times it’s like, we’ll be like, Okay, so. How are you different from the competition? Right? And they’ll say we have better quality, or the history of our organization or our people, or our price, which is always one where, like, you know, but those are all table stakes, and those are things that anyone that has existed in your category for any number of years should be able to say, number one, number two. Consumers are smarter and savvier than ever, but we also suffer from a lot of fatigue, and it’s because we are hit with brand messages or messages in general, all day long, all the time. And so we’re not just competing with our category. We’re competing for the attention of these people versus any other product or service that they are sourcing or marketing or anything, yeah, anything,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 20:42
yeah. Actually, I’ll interrupt you quickly to build on that exact point, because it’s actually not even just things you might buy, it’s also everything else that’s happening in society. I mean, how many ads have you been given on social media to become an entrepreneur or to build your own personal brand, or whatever it is that is actually still educating about how we do business, like they get what we’re doing. They know what focus groups are. They understand what concepts is. They get what branding is supposed to be. Like they have this baseline knowledge that you really just can’t trick them anymore. It’s just not a thing, right?

April Martini 21:20
Yeah. So, I mean, I think that that is the part of this whole thing too, is if you weren’t doing it before, now, more than ever, you have to spend the time to get it right, because otherwise you’re just basically throwing money out the window because of all the things you just gave us. Examples, literally,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 21:36
yeah, literally, exactly that. And I love this idea of you were pushing back on the fear of niche and the fear of getting smaller, you could do a whole episode. That’s all we would talk about. Yeah, now more than ever, this idea of niche is something brands are afraid of and concerned with because they want to do whatever possible to maximize the opportunity, but knowing that, I also need to focus and I need to create some efficiencies in what I’m doing. And so that’s a tricky balance. We could talk about that forever, but I could give an example, like Dude Wipes is a great example for just doubling down on a niche that actually their promise and their positioning is so heavily on emotion, there really isn’t any real functional difference between a Dude Wipes and any number, maybe not the leading one, that maybe they have better ingredients or whatever. But there are plenty of great wipes out there. So why the heck is dude wipes winning? And that’s their brand and their positioning leads heavily into a point of view and a perspective which is a very valid way to differentiate. Obviously, they’re doing really well, and they’ve been able to do so in a way that has carved a very unique space for them. It’s really hard to compete with because you’re not competing on function any Kimberly Clark could do 10 dude wipe versions. They just can’t do dude wipes them. They can’t do that brand. Right on the other side of that, I think, is the example I give, is the the lume brand, l, u, M, E, that’s the kind of all over. It used to be the private parts deodorant, and now it’s like the all over deodorant, if you’re familiar with the brand, yes. And the challenge for me with them is that there was never a real strong promise, slash brand identity, that has allowed them to carve a space. And if you go into my local Target, at the very least, there are a ton now of all over body deodorants. You know, I haven’t had a chance to work with the team, but, but as an observer from the outside, that, to me, is what’s missing. There’s certainly a a nice identity. It definitely there. The visual idea of the brand stands out against the category, but there isn’t anything that’s really holding that promise together, the way with dude wipes, it’s really about a voice is what’s holding it together. And you don’t see the same kind of lean in on these sort of dude wipes and poop branded, branded products, the way that you see the competition on the loom side and that, and then that’s, that’s a difficult thing, particularly for a product that is expanding a category like loom, that you’ve kind of established, something that didn’t exist, and now a lot of it is being kind of taken out from right from under you. Is, is tough. I’m sure they’re working through that.

Anne Candido 24:37
Yeah, I think this is a really interesting point, and I want to just take it to one, one more level of this, because I think you know the distinction too, between function and niche and all those sorts of things start to kind of get a little muddy. But what I want to make a distinction about, what you guys are talking about, is that a function is what you do. Like, if I was gonna say what tides function, if I was gonna go back to that, it would be we remove stains, we get clothes clean. Is the impact of what removing stains does. And that’s a really important distinction, because when I can elevate and connect tide to it keeps things clean, I can then innovate underneath that and do all kinds of different things. It may not even look like soap to keep things clean. And it makes sense to people that connectivity makes sense to people because they’re like, Oh yeah, Pfizer, Brandon keeps things clean. So of course, they could make something that cleans my car. They can make something that cleans my furniture. Oh, by the way, we’ve done all those things. So I mean, those are things that you can start tend to basically innovate without having to feel like, Oh, no. Alls I do is remove stains from clothes. And if you think about, you know, a lot of these brands we talk about a lot that have failed. Kodak, for one example, when they talk about, well, we are, we may, don’t, that’s what we make. Well, no, you are supposed to have made a way for people to capture memories, and that’s it. If you actually ahead like focus in on that, the fact that they actually developed a digital camera before anybody else, but didn’t market it because they didn’t want to disrupt the main revenue driver, which was film. They could have seen things in a different way. And so I stress that, because when you think about your business and seeing things in a different way, this is the crux of it, and that’s why, when I said at the very beginning, everybody thinks it’s a fluffy topic, but it’s not. It’s the core of your business, and it also helps to drive differentiation, which April you alluded to. But I really wanted to kind of hone in on this, because that’s the second part of the brand identity. Is, you know, the Who am I, which is not what you do, it’s what your impact is, the why, the purpose, the positioning. And then I want to get into now, like, Well, how am I different? And how do we use this brand positioning and to elevate it into a point of differentiation that we can then own? So Kathy, I’d love to hear a little bit more from you about this and how you’ve taken this and helped businesses really, to construct this? Yeah,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 27:04
I this is actually my favorite part of brand positioning. Is i The phrase I use is, why should they care? Which is the why? Why do they want me? Why? Why should anybody care? And it’s so important because at the end of the day, all of us, regardless of what you are selling or offering. You are asking someone to make a change in their behavior. You’re literally saying, Stop doing something you’re doing right now and do this instead. And if you have tried to floss more lose weight or get your toddler to do anything, you know it’s impossible to get people to change just by asking. I really need to have that self motivation to want to do that. And so why do they care? Is probably the most important part, really, for me, is the most important part. And the way that we start thinking about that is, is about them. Why do you want me? Or why do they care? Means I need to know who they are. And it’s not enough to say, well, I need to know that your clothes get dirty. It’s a blue collar worker, and the mom has a kid in soccer, and they like to be outside all the time. That’s why they want their clothes clean. Well, that’s not enough. Why do they want to be outside? What is it that they’re doing outside? Is this a family activity? Is this because they feel connected to nature? Is this because they don’t have cars and they they have a low income life, and they got to get onto the bus like, literally, why are these people doing the things they’re doing? And what is it about the way they live their life that impacts how they see the category in the product and my brand positioning template, I very specifically separate who is the person and what is the problem? Because those are two very different things we need to think about, and we often lean right to the problem. The problem is my clothes are dirty. The problem is I need my teeth whitened. The problem is that I need my car service. It stopped working. But what do we know about them as a person that might influence how they think about that if I am someone who highly values my car, my car is part of my identity, then when my car is down, that has a very different impact on my life and who I will consider to help me Solve this problem. Then if you’re actually me Kathy who to me, the car just gets me from one place to the other, that’s it. I really don’t care. I don’t even care what kind of oil you put in this thing. I just want to get in and get out as quickly as possible. Both of the solutions will probably do a great job taking care of my car, will probably do a great job of solving the problem, and will probably do a great job of getting me in and out, but how you talk to me versus this other person who cares about the car makes a huge difference. And to Anne’s point about really, if we’re talking CPG, we’re talking about line extensions and innovation, but if we’re talking about B to B, it’s the services that surround your core service. That completely changes if you’re talking to me or to this person, right? And knowing that my I don’t care about my car and I care to be in and out, means great. I’m going to have someone right at the door to check you right in, find out what your problem is, get you into the queue. I’m going to give you some coffee to keep you busy. The TV is going to be on so you have something that you’re watching. I’m going to give you free Wi Fi in case you need to do work. If you are someone who really cares about the car, well, I’m gonna hand walk you in, I’m gonna grab your keys, and I’m gonna talk to you about all the steps that I’m gonna do, and I’m gonna focus a lot more on the experience of you and your car than I am about getting you in and out the door. I cannot do either of those things if I don’t know who these people are. I really can’t. I can’t guess my way through it, because if you get it wrong, then either you’re wasting your time and money on hand holding me through this, or you’re leaving me very disappointed, because now I’m in this place with, like, cold coffee and whatever CNN on TV, and I’m like, I don’t want to do this. I want to know what’s happening with my car. And that’s true regardless of what you’re selling. And so understanding the WHO behind the what the problem is, is the unlock to Well, so what? Why should they care? Or why do you want me?

April Martini 31:13
Yeah, and I think this is one that also, I feel like I’m going to be the emotional connection police through this entire house. But this is one that also, I think the pushback is, well, we know who that person is, but it comes back as you know, female with two kids, 25 to 45 you know, all the demographic things. And to the point you just made, Kathy, it’s not about any of that, because that doesn’t tell me anything about what they’re actually looking for from me. That’s number one. And then number two, I think the other thing, and I’ve talked about this before on the podcast as well, is thinking that those people, once you do identify them, are going to give you the answer of how to sell something, market something to them. And so this is where I think it the promise comes back, and is just so important is that, how many times have we all been in consumer research and somebody says something, and everyone’s like, That’s it, and I’m always on like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s a symptom of the answer. But no consumer is going to be able to tell you, no matter how savvy they are, the answer of why they buy right? Like Anne used the thing before, about nine out of 10 people can tell you that tide’s the best only for buy that right? We are just a study in contradictions as human beings, and so it relies on those of us that do this work as a practice to diagnose what is being said and why, and really get at the crux of what am I looking for out of the experience or the product, or whatever it is, so that I can break through the noise and give you the experience that you’re looking for. And the final thing I will say is how often we as companies and brands try to use our words instead of the consumer words, and we think that that is going to have impact, right? And what ends up happening is you again, with the throwing the money out the window, it just completely misses, because you’re not speaking to the person in a way that they’re actually hearing you. You’re doing your agenda, which is how you end up in the situation you mentioned before Kathy of Oh, and also, and then we also, and you just are trying to push, you know, everything out, instead of taking the information in learning about the people that you’re targeting and then using their words back to them to get them engaged in whatever you’re putting in front of them,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 33:34
this is where A practice of continuous consumer learning is so valuable. It’s very much like self breast exams, right? You need to

April Martini 33:47
be checking your I think we were going to talk about that today, but okay, you

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 33:51
need to be checking yourself on a monthly basis because you’re looking for what’s different. That is literally what continuous consumer learning is about that’s where you need to apply some learning plans to your business every single year, just to keep keep points on what’s happening well, how is the consumer thinking about this differently? Because it’s really hard to say, hey, right now, I’m just going to go and talk to some people and figure out why they’re doing this or that, or why it’s different. You have no basis for which to compare it with, and I want to give an example. I can’t name the brand, but I have a client that I’ve that I worked with last year on their brand positioning. The brand is from the late 1900s or mid 1900s very old, established brand. And what they offer, they offer to parents of kids in elementary schools, and for a long time, it’s a food brand. For a long time, what they’ve been focused and talking about is, Mom wants a healthier option. You know, the kids want to eat Oreos and Doritos, and I want to offer her something better. And they’ve been running with that for, oh, I don’t know, 20 years or so. Now quickly started to realize in the last few years that there are some new competitors in the space that are very easily taking share from them, and they just just wasn’t clear why offering similar things, benefits are the same. We know we have a compelling story. It’s about being a trustworthy brand. It’s about offering solutions she can feel good about we’re checking all the boxes. What’s the problem? Starting to peel the onion with the consumer. What we learned is that there’s a nuance behind I want something better. It’s not just that I’m going to compare sugar grams. It’s also that I want to trust this company. I want to be able to say I’ve looked into this company. I know what they’re offering, and I feel good that they’re doing right by me. And so in the future, I don’t have to keep checking on them. And today, I live in a time where, you know what, I just can’t trust people because, yeah, they sold me this one thing once, but then now they’re growing. They’re going to do a new item, and now I don’t know if that item is still good, they’re trying to sneak things in there. They’re using ingredients I’ve never heard of. It’s not enough that you’re telling me this is low sugar on the front of pack. And that was a big unlock for them, in that their ability to bring trust equity into their positioning was being impacted by the consumers, really significant increase in questioning the trustworthiness of brands, and that was a new problem to solve for that if we hadn’t spent the time going back and saying, No, I know you want something better, but why do you want something? Why don’t you? Why don’t you want this one? This also says this, But why are you not choosing that? It really took time to dig into why she was thinking that way. Because even for her, that’s not top of mind, she wasn’t immediately saying, Oh, it’s because none of them are telling the truth. She’s thinking about, well, this brand does this, and this brand does that, and it required talk and talk and talk with that consumer in different ways to really get to that nugget. And I should say, then, of course, people on the back end, like the three of us, digging through the data and thinking about it with the experience and the strategic knowledge, we have to say, oh, wait a minute, this is what this actually means. And now what shall we do about it? So so really, knowing someone, it’s a little bit elusive. It can be challenging, but it is the unlock to that,

Anne Candido 37:28
yeah, I 1,000% agree with everything that you said, and I’m going into related to b to B’s and service oriented businesses as well, because they get really stuck here, because they believe that the services of which, by which they’re selling, everybody sells, right? I’m gonna miss a SaaS service, or I just do a CRM, or I just, I’m like, and all of those sorts of things. And you’re like, but wait a second, it comes down to what you just said about the two questions about, How am I different? Why do you want me? If you can narrow in that and that, and you can key in on that, that becomes your competitive advantage, right? And it’s all about context. It’s all about that’s what you’re trying to look for. You’re trying to find context that makes you relatable, that allows you to drive a relationship, because almost all B to B, service oriented businesses are built on relationship. Mm, hmm, right. And relationship is built on trust. Trust is based on consistency. So you can kind of see how this thing is starting to kind of create a web or a virtuous cycle of what these attributes need to look like in order to create a business that thrives, especially a B to B, or service oriented business. Because a lot of people think, oh, branding is transactional. It’s kind of like when we when we when a lot of people hear these B to C context, they’re like, Well, yeah, but they’re buying a brand. They go to the store, they get to choose. It’s like, well, the your clients are doing the same thing to you. They might just not be doing it the frequency, which makes it even more important that you’re building relationships, that your relationships are built upon brand, that your brand is driving some level of consistency, that consistency allows you to build trust. The trust allows you to build relationships. And on and on and on and on we go. So I hope everybody is listening to this, and they’re and they’re recognizing it through their own filter and not dismissing the fact that, oh, brand doesn’t matter for me. Brand matters for everybody. It’s just in the way that you’re going to build it. It’s the way you’re going to talk about it. But at the very end of the day, what it does is it generates that pool. And a lot of times we get into the marketing world and we think about all we’re just going to push everything we want to say, right? We’re going to push how great we are. We’re going to push what we think that they should know without really dialing in as to, well, what’s the pool factor? What makes them actually want me? What makes them want to come to me, and in putting that lens on it, you start to unlock, just like you said, some very, very powerful insights that allow you to create a presence and that brand positioning that becomes coveted, that becomes elicited. And that’s really the key here, and that’s why this is so powerful to build your business. Because. So it is. It goes back to what I was saying before as being the key competitive advantage. So I love to kind of talk about, in our last few minutes here, and we’ve kind of knitted some some of the examples together, but I just want to, if we can, without necessarily needing to disclose the businesses or the brands, is talk about how somebody has taken this positioning and actually then driven business from it. So how does this all kind of knit together? So I’d love to see Kathy, you have any more examples you could share with us? Yeah, I’ll

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 40:30
give you another food. I’m a CPG expert, so I have another food example for you, but it certainly nails the point here the brand I, I worked with earlier in the year was a pasta brand, and it’s a better for you pasta brand. And this is a good example of a startup trying to get as many people as possible and going too wide, actually working against you. They because it is a low calorie, low carb pasta alternative. They wanted to position this for anyone who eats pasta, if you eat pasta and you want to have something a little more healthful, this is the product for you. It’s not different than maybe what we’ve heard from banza and some of those other pasta brands, but what they found is that it’s sort of hit or miss, like in sometimes, in some places, fantastic results, in other times, other places just not doing it. And particularly in those places where it wasn’t working, there was a problem of repeat, which I now know in having done a lot of that work is that’s a problem with a lot of pasta alternatives, right? That they they’re just not quite what pasta is meant to be, or what pasta is, I should say, in in learning about this particular brand of this, this product that they were selling, which discovered is that there is a continuum as it is with all good insights. Once you learn it, you’re like, Well, duh, this is so obvious, which is a key. It’s an insight about an insight that usually insights are so obvious, right? So what we learned is that, duh, there is a continuum on which I exist, on how much I’m willing to trade on tastes for something healthier. Again, intuitively, we know this to be true. We’ve seen it in the marketplace. We just didn’t realize that even for those people within healthy healthy buyers looking for healthy solutions, there is a very wide gap in terms of what I’m willing to accept or not, and for this particular brands, the product delivery does not meet the expectations, even though the healthful credentials are through the roof, particularly even compared to bonzas or whole wheat pasta some other pasta products fantastic, Nutritionals, right? Like dream Nutritionals, but the taste is cannot compare. And so we started to really dig into, okay, well, who sits on what segment of this continuum, so that we can find the people that are most likely to love this product. And in doing so, and in finding those people who love this product, I’m actually loop back to, I think, with something M you were saying earlier in the conversation, which is focusing in on those people. I like to refer to them as the people who are the absolute easiest to capture. The client that’s going to be they’re going to see your store from their car and be like, Oh my God, yes, I’m immediately going to buy something from this place. I don’t know all the details, but I’m already compelled to get in there. I don’t have to give you a coupon, I don’t have to retarget you. I don’t even have to have a lot of content on my page, because the the offer and the product is so perfect for you that I am in and out the door that is my ideal target. And what they discovered is the people on their ideal target are the ones who are the most open to taste, trade off and really committed to those health credentials. If I am that person, this product is a slam dunk, and the more that I will target them, message them for what is authentic to them, the actual easier it becomes to attract some of those other people. Because even if I’m not at the end of this continuum, there are some times and some places and in some ways, where actually I might want that. In this case, I might be willing to compromise on something else, and I might want it, and because you have nailed the message in that context so well, I get what you’re offering, and when I fit that occasion, I’m willing to come to you, and I’m willing to do that, but if I’ve diluted my message and tried to broaden it for all of these people in this continuum, the people at the end are going to say, well, this isn’t good enough for me. You have not met my health credentials. And the people on the other side are going to say, well, it just doesn’t look that. Compelling because it doesn’t seem like it’s that. It doesn’t deliver that much on health and also the taste is off. So why am I making these compromises? You win a little bit of everybody, but you don’t get the whole pie. And that’s really the secret of splitting hairs on who my target audience is. Once they did that, and there were some other really compelling insights that were learned that forced some changes on front of pack. Once I did that, they’re just getting that into the marketplace, but even even making the decision and the focus on that changed their sales strategy. It meant that I need to lean more heavily on D to C, where I know I can find this person, rather than trying to pursue incremental doors at Sprouts. Because yes, sprouts shoppers are helpful, but they are not all willing to trade on taste, and so we don’t need more doors on sprouts. What we need is to double down on the doors where it’s working, where those people are, and then instead, go find them in other retail channels, including DTC, and that ultimately is how that focus on knowing who you are serving really opens the door to to winning in the marketplace.

April Martini 46:16
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a really good example, because I think it brought home a lot of the things we’ve been talking about here, everything from making sure that you spend the time to identify the people that you’re meant to target and that really want your product, and that it’s not necessarily niching down, meaning eliminating audience. I mean, it is eliminating your targets, but you’re actually being really intentional about that, and then also making sure to speak their language and really learn about who they are, versus just on paper who they are. And then I think also doing the hard work to develop your brand, which is where we started, right? And so kudos to that brand for recognizing the problem and then not trying to Band Aid fix it like your front of pack thing, I think is so hilarious. And I’m, I was a CPG person forever, right? And so I’d go down the grocery store aisle and I’d be like, Oh, interesting. I know why that Violator is there on this pack now, right? Like, I try to just Band Aid over something, and that’s not actually going to fix it, but I, I do think that when brands take the time, and you don’t have the sales data yet, right? I get that, but when they take the time to make some of those tough calls, it also helps to refocus the whole thing, and actually makes it easier, over time, to make the right decisions. And so we’ve talked about, you know, how tide expands into all these other product forms. As an example, you can do that and make moves that work more quickly when you do that hard work on the front end, versus what that brand could have done is just keep chasing some easy fixes, right? Like handful a consumer says, don’t like the consistency. And instead of saying, Actually, we’re targeting someone who will sacrifice taste, they go back to the drawing board and say, We got to make the consistency better, or people aren’t going to buy it. That’s not the real problem there. The problem is that people who love what pasta, true pasta actually tastes like, are probably not ever going to buy that product consistently. And so really, I think that’s a it hammers home, doing the right work, spending the time to get it right, and then in the future, it makes your pipeline and all those business decisions go much more seamlessly.

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 48:23
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I do want to touch on one thing you, both of you mentioned this idea of of targeting and demographics, and how we like to lean on that a lot. And I have a soapbox of this. You have a tie box, my my consumer targeting soapbox, which is, I absolutely hate throw away descriptions. I refer to them you have a throwaway description of who your consumer is. I’m targeting 30 or 35 year old professional women. What the heck does that mean? It means literally nothing. And this similar to where we were talking about emotion the the world has evolved past demographics for a reason. It was appropriate when I started, 80 years ago, approximately years ago, when I started, we were talking about demographics, and that was appropriate at the time. That was the level of our sophistication. What has happened since millennials? I like to give credit to millennials for this is that millennials came showed up and said, We don’t want to do things the way you all do them. We want to do them this way. The rest of us were like, Hey, wait a minute, that’s actually a great idea. I would like to do that too. I actually don’t want high fructose corn syrup in my drinks. I didn’t realize that. Thank you for educating us. And that quickly became the millennial mindset. And the millennial mindset is we all want to eat better, we all want to work less. We all want to be with our family. Duh. We just never thought that it was appropriate to demand that. And now they’ve shown us that. And so now we all want it, and that has quickly evolved us into a place where what we are really looking for. Are the mindsets, perceptions, behaviors that link people together and make them more likely to do or want something, and in many ways, that has nothing to do with age a 65 year old woman, 12 year old, 25 year old male, have a lot of products in common, a lot of products, we just think, well, this is an older woman, this is a young guy. They we’re not going to target them the same. And that is actually the wrong way to think about it. What we’re really looking for are, what are those psychographics that make these people more likely to want this product? Yes, that bell curve of their age or the demographics will likely lead you one place or the other, but you don’t want to leave those other people out without realizing that they may be as if not more valuable than what you are assuming this age demographic is doing for you. So this is the other compelling reason to go ask more questions, learn more about who is buying this and eliminate that bias of demographics, although I will say my favorite line is demographics don’t matter unless they do. If you want to talk to a pregnant woman, then demographics matter, right? So you need to know when they’re absolutely critical and if they’re not, it’s not about the demographic, it’s about the psychographic, the lifestyle, the mindset.

Anne Candido 51:21
I think that’s right on. And I’m going to also kind of provide a context from a more of a B to B angle too. Because if they if a B to C is looking at it like there’s opportunity amongst all consumers, usually B to B’s will look at it from a market or industry standpoint, they’re like, I’m not going to get my portion of the market, I’m going to get my portion of the industry, and it becomes a lot of revenue chasing. And so what we help our clients do in that context, and actually, we did this for one of our clients who a big part of what they do is they’re a call center for medical facilities, and so they have to fill a bunch of seats in order to be able to serve their clients. But the type of people they need to be a very specific psychographic. And so if you think about that, and you think about the context for which they need to fill a seat, it could be 567, different types of people or personas of people, right? So if you think about that, it starts to kind of lend itself to, well, we’re going to just blanket everybody, and we’re going to hope we’re going to appeal to someone. But instead, if you could think about it in the context of who’s our highest opportunistic person to fill these seats so that we can reach these specific clients, we can start thinking more intentionally about where we want to target, who are you talking to? Yeah, and then we can drive some focus. Because here’s the thing, we could go, I mean, if you have an all the money in the world, and you have all the time in the world, and these big brands do that, we’ve been talking about, Ty can go and talk to 10 different consumers, because they have the time and money to do so most small and medium sized businesses do not. They have to start with a couple of very highly opportunistic clients, or talent acquisition in this case, or whatever your your your scope is that you’re looking through, and they have to be very specific about who they’re talking to in order for those people to realize you are talking to them. Otherwise they don’t know you’re talking to them. And so if you can start there, if you can start by taking, okay, this industry size or this market size, okay, I’m going to drill it down to now, who is my highest opportunistic client person, talent that I’m going after so that I can use my money and my resources efficiently, you start to kind of create that engagement that we’ve been talking about, that emotional engagement we’ve been talking about, that that doesn’t feel like as transactional, yeah, and when that starts to develop, that starts to get develop a vibe, an ethos, a brand that people start to associate with you, and they start to be like, oh, I want them, because they stand and they Have this presence, they have this promise of this it starts to all kind of connect and work together. And that’s what we did for this client, which really, really helped them to really attract a very highly opportunistic person to fill the seat that is a really, really good fit for the role. And so the turnover started dropping. They got better qualified leads initially, so it starts to make a more efficient process. Now, of course, everything downstream from that also needs to be adjusted, the interview process, the you know, rules and and the regulations and the reinforcements, all of those things need to cater to the people that you are actually now hiring or that you are taking on as clients. Because if everything doesn’t drive that consistency, like we were just talking about on the B to T side, it falls apart on the B to B side as well. So you need to make sure that that experience reinforces itself from from nuts to bolts, in order to make sure that your brand is representative of what your promise is. And so I want to just make that that connection to to that. Is that you start focused and then you grow as your opportunity grows. But if you can dial in on where the most opportunistic pieces are initially, and we sometimes, we force this by asking people questions like, Okay, if you can only go after one one client, one consumer, one customer, who would be your biggest opportunity to grow your business? And that’s a very painful question for virtually everybody to answer, and after a lot of back and forth, we can eventually start to get to a profile that feels like an opportunity to start targeting initially, and then all these marketing things that people want to work really, really hard for them, which won’t, if you’re going to be too diluted, start to actually work to their benefits. Are becoming more productive, start to generate the KPIs that they’re looking for. So I think what you said is really, really fantastic, and I think it expands and translates to no matter what kind of business you have. It’s just a scale thing. It’s a it’s a timing thing. And if you can really embrace that it can then have tremendous amount of opportunity.

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 56:03
Yeah, and I’m sure folks listening are like, Oh my God, that sounds like so much work. All of this whole call sounds like so much work. It really is so much work, but it is the kind of work that is, I would say, arguably one of the greatest investments in time that you can make in your business? Oh, absolutely, because of the impact it can have. And it is hard to do, even for experts, right? It takes us time to really listen and listen and process and digest and even trying to write a promise statement or position statement. It takes time. It is by definition. It is by design, because in this particular scenario of what we’re talking about, brand positioning, every word matters. Each word says something, and it doesn’t need to be written in a way that the entire world can understand, but it needs to be written in a way that you intuitively get it as a business owner and your team can get it that there’s no debate or question about this in order for us to execute it. So if it sounds hard, yes, it is, but well worth it, kind of like having kids like extremely hard, very difficult, as someone who just started as a kid and senior as a senior, and I’m seeing the end. It’s brutal. It’s so hard you put all this effort is so you want to get it right. It’s worth the work. Is the point?

Anne Candido 57:25
Yeah, I love that. I think that’s a really great way to kind of segue into our rapid fire questions before we give everybody an opportunity to hear how they can connect with you more. We always just like to jump into these, just so they can see it just a little bit of a different side, potentially. So are you ready for these?

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 57:41
I hope so. Let’s find out.

Anne Candido 57:43
Then,

April Martini 57:44
Alright, first

Anne Candido 57:45
one, what is the scariest thing you’ve ever done?

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 57:48
Oh, that’s easy. When my youngest was one, my oldest was three, and they’re now 15 and 17, my husband and I took our first vacation as parents to Mexico and decided to do an ATV ride like this is going to be great. We get to the tour, and it’s just the guide and the two of us. And we’re, you know, people of color from the United States, we question everything. Everybody’s trying to kill us at some point. And so immediately, our alarm bells that are off, like something’s wrong, something’s not going to go right, but we decide to just run with it. As we’re going through our tour, we come across some militia men with gigantic guns and stuff, and they pull us over, and they’re asking questions, and the two of us are sitting there like I don’t know what’s happening. Thankfully, I speak Spanish. I blew it so I could understand what they were saying. But why is this occurring? Don’t know. Somehow we made it through the guy, the guy who’s our guide, he made us, He gave them whatever they needed, that I don’t know what that is, and they let us through. And so then the rest of the tour went great. We’re at the end of the tour, and I guess my brain had had enough, and we’re on a perfectly straight Street and going straight, there’s no hills, anything, but it was lined with bushes on the side. Something went around my brain, and I accelerated, instead of breaking, went over the side, so the thing flipped over me, and it was hanging above my head, and nothing really happened to me, except for a black and blue in my leg. I don’t even know how I survived, but I did, and since then, I’ve done nothing scary, like until my children go off to college, and I have completed my assignment as Mother, I will not do anything to raise my life again. That was horrible. So I don’t know if that’s what you were expecting, but that was it. My scariest. Well, that’s

April Martini 59:39
the point of these questions. Yeah. Man, wow.

Anne Candido 59:42
That one to you.

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 59:43
Thank you.

Anne Candido 59:46
Next question, one thing you are working on right now?

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 59:51
One thing I am working on. A very good friend of mine has started the first ever black Consumer Research Company. Two where her research firm focuses exclusively on the black consumer in the United States, and I’m partnering with her to help her establish the first ever black database of consumers. So that means when you want to talk to black consumers, you’re getting high quality insights, because we’re pulling from a much broader set of black consumers in the country. And I absolutely love getting a chance to help her with that. And that’s called mahogany insights and mahogany minds. If you want to look up Dawn and do any work with her, she’s fantastic.

Anne Candido 1:00:29
That’s great. Yeah, favorite business book,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 1:00:32
probably the oldie, but goodie, the seven habits that thing has stuck with me over the years. I talk about it with my kids. They get annoyed, and I still find myself using the language like sharpening the saw is one of my favorite things to say and do and reference sharpening the sauce. So seven habits when

April Martini 1:00:54
to get through. But you’re right, it is.

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 1:00:58
Principles are good, the principles are right, yes.

Anne Candido 1:01:01
Oh, that’s fantastic. Kathy, this has been an absolute pleasure. I’d love for you just to let the audience know where, where they can find you. If there’s any last bits of wisdom you want to impart that we didn’t cover, please feel free to do that all the certificate things. Yes,

Kathy Guzmán Galloway 1:01:16
I’ll start by you can find me active on LinkedIn, and I accept all connections, because it, to me, is the public square, and I want to meet all of my neighbors in the business world. So come find me and connect with me. And then you can find the clarity wizard at the clarity wizard com. And if you visit our site, clarity wizard com, forward slash podcast, you’ll actually find some Downloadables. And so the last tidbit I’ll offer that is connected to some of our free downloadables is about using frameworks and templates, and particularly when it comes to brand positioning. 1,000% the hardest part of doing brand positioning when you are not a brand positioning expert, or you did not grow up in the world of marketing and talking brand positioning is making sure you are getting to all of the right points. Oftentimes you will get from a creative agency what reads like a narrative of a brand positioning. And that’s good, great. We get the story, but the brand positioning template forces you to make a choice. Who are you talking to? What is their problem? What are the reasons they should believe you? And by the way, only give me three, and then what is that brand promise that ultimately is going to lead to some emotional benefit? If you can articulate those five six points really succinctly, you won the game without a template. And it doesn’t have to be mine. There are actually many templates out there without a template, you’re sort of just waffling and trying to decide what I should say. The template helps get all of that out of the way, and really forces you to be sharp, strategic and very succinct. So that’s my last tidbit.

Anne Candido 1:02:56
Oh, I love that. So everybody, go check out those templates. I know they’re going to be extremely helpful, and with that, we will say, go and exercise your Marketing Smarts!

April Martini 1:03:04
Still need help in growing your Marketing Smarts? Contact us through our website: ForthRight-People.com We can help you become a savvier marketer through coaching or training you and your team or doing the work on your behalf. Please also help us grow the podcast by rating and reviewing on your player of choice and sharing with at least one person. Now, go show off your Marketing Smarts!