How to find your brand positioning sweet spot For many companies, a brand position is the first step to communicating their value to the market. And for many companies, that’s where they go wrong. Download Between Blue Sky and Bullet Points, PJA’s guide to stronger brand positions. In it you’ll discover: What your brand position must do to help your company succeed How to tell if your brand positioning needs an update Examples of six winning positions that have led to marketing success

1. FINDING YOUR BRAND’S POSITIONING SWEET SPOT
BETWEEN BLUE SKY
AND BULLET POINTS
10 MARKETING STRATEGIES TO ACTIVATE THE ENGAGED BUYER

2. THIS PRESENTATION
IS FOR YOU IF:
You want your marketing to do a better job of supporting your customer’s buying process
You never seem to get on the right RFPs because the market has an outdated or incomplete understanding of what you do
Your current marketing doesn’t speak to your aspirations
as a company
You make business and marketing decisions, but they don’t feel driven from a common foundation that would direct your behaviors more consistently
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3. If any or all of these are true, you may have a positioning problem...
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4. THE NEW POSITIONING IMPERATIVE
It’s not news that today’s buyers are often putting their professional reputation, social standing, or business success at stake when they make a major purchasing decision.
What is new is that these buyers are more engaged than they’ve ever been in the buying process, whether they’re looking at peer reviews or conducting their own research.
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5. THE NEW POSITIONING IMPERATIVE
They’re also unlikely to contact your company until they
have advanced a significant part of the way through the buying process.
Bottom Line: If your positioning...
Doesn’t truly reflect what makes your brand unique relative to what the market needs
Doesn’t deliver marketing experiences that enlighten and guide buyers
Doesn’t make buyers confident about their buying decisions
...they are likely to pass you by.
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6. WHAT’S YOUR
CLAIM TO VALUE?
For many companies, defining a position is the first step in creating a role that reflects their most powerful claim to value in the market. Yet this is exactly where most companies get stuck.
They either:
They aim too high with their position and never claim anything with distinction, or
They aim too low and rely on the product features to tell their story.
A
B
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7. For 25 years PJA has developed successful integrated marketing campaigns for companies from Fortune 500 leaders to emerging startups by focusing on what truly sets them apart in their industries and where they can take their customers.
This presentation highlights what you need to do to stand out today.
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8. CHOOSING A GOOD POSITION MEANS MAKING HARD CHOICES
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9. What does it mean to make a hard choice? And what is good positioning in the age of the Engaged Buyer?
A successful position must do several things:
- Clarify who you are and who you serve in meeting your customer’s needs
- Have enough aspiration to help people see beyond today, but
deliver enough detail to give a position some traction in the market
- Signal the role your brand plays in helping buyers make good decisions
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10. 10
Here is the process we’ve applied for our clients:
Ask the right questions to set the context
Gather external input from analysts, editors, VCs,
customers, etc., combined with internal knowledge
from Sales, IT, Product Marketing and Executives
Gather the right decision-makers
and make some hard choices
WHAT? WHO? WHERE?
PRODUCTS
SERVICES
LEADERSHIP
CUSTOMER
NEEDS
CATEGORY
CULTURE
Test and vet in the market

11. To build a strong position, start by tackling three sets of questions:
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12. What are we solving for?
- What primary problem is a new position going to solve?
- Is it correcting an outdated perception?
- Is it communicating value and benefits in a way you haven’t before?
- Is it laying out a new approach for our company?
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13. Who are we solving for?
Who is the ideal audience to get this message?
Choosing one target audience with the most decision-making power helps you to land on a distinctive tone. You can version the position later if you need to.
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14. Where does the core of our value spring from?
- Is it from your products or the way you support those products for buyers along or with partners?
- Is it based on your ability to push the market forward with innovative vision?
- Or do buyers realize more social, emotional, or professional value by working with you?
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15. KEEP A POSITIONING
SCORECARD
An effective way to organize
your thoughts is use a
positioning scorecard that
allows you to boil down
different internal and external
claims and capabilties into
a powerful claim to value.
DOWNLOAD POSITIONING SCORECARD
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16. ASSEMBLE A GROUP OF DECISION-MAKERS AND
MAKE SOME HARD CHOICES
Using a scorecard like the one on the previous page is a
great way to guide a discussion among your company’s decision-makers.
Ask tough questions as you assemble your positioning building blocks.
- Is there one thing the buyer needs from the category that only you provide?
- Where are you proactive in ways that your competitors are reactive?
- How is your company helping to drive and even define a powerful trend in the greater culture?
Focus in until you see a few areas where a claim to value feels credible and substantive.
Write them out (50 words or less) and hone them until you feel confident they reflect
your company.
Then test and vet the best statement.
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2
3
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17. BRING YOUR
POSITION TO LIFE
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18. Let’s say you’ve defined a great position and you’ve worked hard to define a bold claim in the market.
You’ve tested it with the constituents that mean most to you— customers, editors, analysts, executives, other employees— and refined your thinking to something that you believe will work. Now you’re ready to get it out into the market quickly.
What’s your next step?
Here are a few case studies from PJA clients.
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19. The best way to bring your
position to life is to use it as
the inspiration for some
creative directions. Consider
two or three theme lines
and conceptual digital
sketches that use a few key
deliverables to communicate
and express each theme.
1 FROM POWERFUL POSITION TO
COMPELLING CREATIVE PLATFORM
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WHY TRINITY PHARMA?
WE TURN DATA INTO INSIGHTS SO
FAST THEY’RE STILL MEANINGFUL
CREATIVE DIRECTION 1 CREATIVE DIRECTION 2
CREATIVE DIRECTION 3

20. In our creative platform for
SAVVIS, PJA turned something
physical — IT infrastructure —
on its head, demonstrating that
it could be provided as a service
in a way transformative to
the business.
2 FROM SILENT COMMODITY
TO BUSINESS DRIVER
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TRUST SAVVIS TO DELIVER YOUR IT INFRASTRUCTURE AND
NETWORK AS A SECURE, MANAGED SERVICE THAT RESPONDS
TO YOUR MOST IMPORTANT CUSTOMER, COMPETITIVE, AND
COMPLIANCE CHALLENGES
CREATIVE DIRECTION 1
CREATIVE DIRECTION 2

21. If legacy perceptions
drag down your brand,
consider a manifesto-style
ad or poster to help buyers
understand that you are
not only aware of new
challenges, you already
have solved for them.
3 FROM FAST FOLLOWER
TO SETTING THE DIRECTION
COMPUTER ASSOCIATES CLOUD MANIFESTO AD
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22. Sometimes being ubiquitous can equal being invisible. Demonstrating through positioning that you enable whole industries can open buyers’ eyes to your true business value.
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FROM COMPONENT SUPPLIER
TO CONNECTIVITY LEADER
POWERFUL POSITIONING ALIGNS ALL CREATIVE
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POSITIONING EXTENDED TO SOCIAL AND THOUGHT LEADERSHIP MARKETING

23. So what’s the return on investment on doing all this work?
We’ve seen three major benefits in working with our clients.
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You earn the right to tell your story: the more complex your solution, the more likely you are to earn that right
if you provide a compelling entry point to your story.
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You become part of a conversation that goes way beyond your products, and includes customers, analysts, editors, and other stakeholders.
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You help to make yourself the choice before the choice. In other words, your position is strong enough that your reputation precedes you—in part because you have preceded the competition, in part because you truly engage with the buyer.
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24. Ultimately, we believe that any position you stake out should speak directly to the customers’ world.
That means playing to your buyer’s aspirations as well as their hunger for details. In other words, delivering messages into the space between the blue sky and the bullet points. Build your position with the right elements of both, using the people who really matter in your company, and you’ll ensure that you have relevance in today’s turbulent marketing world.
Remember: If you claim to be too many things,
you’ll be remembered for none.
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25. YOUR NEXT STEP: DOWNLOAD BLUE SKY
TO BULLET POINTS
PJA has developed a process we call the Market Narrative. It provides a road map that can lead you to a working position and powerful brand role in a matter of weeks.
DOWNLOAD CONVERSATION MATRIX
DOWNLOAD 4Cs ANALYSIS

26. OR JUST GET IN TOUCH
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mike O’Toole
President
Mike oversees agency operations in Cambridge and San Francisco, advises
CMOs on brand, positioning, and digital strategy, blogs for Forbes.com and is host
of PJA Radio’s The Unconventionals.
Hugh Kennedy
EVP, Planning + Partner
Hugh works closely with C-level clients at companies such as Red Hat, Boston Scientific and Veracode to understand buyers, define positions, and translate the results into effective integrated marketing programs.
PJA Advertising + Marketing
Greg Straface
VP, Business Development
gstraface@agencypja.com
(617) 234-7371
@agencypja
For nearly 25 years, PJA has developed winning positions for both startup and Fortune 500 companies, focusing on what truly sets them apart and capturing a compelling vision for buyers of where they want to go in their industries and where they can take their customers We regularly hear from CEOs, employees and VCs that “no one has expressed what we do as clearly as you have.”
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