People

Brand Positioning Guest Lecture at INSEAD

Brand positioning is an often misinterpreted as a ‘tool’ of brand management to influence people’s perception of a brand. In reality, brand positioning is merely a result of consistently executing on a crisp brand strategy, driven by informed, single-minded messaging. As part of the ‘Brand Management. elective for MBA and executive MBA students at INSEAD (led by Joerg Niessing, Affiliate Professor of Marketing), I’ve had the absolute pleasure of holding a recurring guest lecture to de-mystify brand positioning.

The story starts with a brief grounding in hard truths, and a primer on brand strategy. Because disciplined, consistent execution on the brand strategy is what ultimately defines how a brand is positioned in the market, and in consumer’s hearts and minds. Using the example for how eBay has refined it’s global brand strategy, the lecture structures and illuminates three main building blocks for strategy development and implementation:

A brand assessment, covering consumer insights, competitive insights, brand health monitor insights, strategic (corporate) considerations, as well as a factor analysis to understand what’s driving current brand- and category behaviors.
Brand equity modeling, including perception-, driver- and pathway-analysis in order to understand attribute gaps and opportunities, funnel throughput drivers and barriers, and attribute relationship strengths and linkage to NPS.
Strategy development, consisting of a (qualitative or quantitative) positioning concept test, quantitative concept qualification research, and a framework definition and -population work stream.

#artsci at Miami Art School

One of the most critical relationships in marketing and brand building is the one between ‘creative’ and ‘methodical’ people. Sometimes this is a client—agency relationship, sometimes it is an internal cross-functional relationship. But in most cases, it is a moment where often fundamentally different types of humans shake hands to collaborate on the same project. Manolo Garcia, the Director of Miami Ad School in San Francisco, invited me to illuminate how innovation happens at the intersection of art and science, and how creative people and engineers can collaborate best to make great s#!t.

The #ArtSci approach illustrates how art and science amalgamate and create innovation in disciplines like cooking, architecture, visual arts, and marketing. Short of finding the exceedingly rare breed of creative scientists like Albert Einstein, the approach demonstrates 1) how both scientific and creative people can inspire each other through empathy and shared vocabularies, 2) how successful teams integrate artists and scientists rather than isolating them from each other, and 3) how most of today’s complex problems can only be solved in #artsci ways.