Brand Positioning is Easy

Facilitating a one-day brand-positioning workshop seems to flow easily for me and it often seems effortless to the workshop participants. But don’t confuse this with an easy task.  Just because something appears to be effortless doesn’t mean it requires little to no skill. It often requires quite the opposite. Some clients recognize this while others think things must have turned out so well because of the particular alignment of the stars on that day.

I have conducted more than 250 different brand strategy consensus-building sessions for well over 100 organizations. Each session lasts seven to eight hours. This translates to 1,750+ hours facilitating brand strategy consensus. Add to this six years of formal business and marketing education, reading hundreds of marketing books, thousands of hours researching and writing Brand Aid, dozens of case studies used to teach brand management and marketing MBA courses, formal training in group facilitation and ideation techniques and eighteen years spent building and managing brand management and marketing functions for two different companies.

Similarly, a concert pianist might make a very complicated concerto seem effortless, a skilled artist might paint a high quality portrait in relatively short order and a master chef might create an astounding meal from scratch without any recipe.

Regardless of the specialty or profession … Education counts. Experience counts. Practice counts.

I have heard some people say, “Anybody can do marketing,” while I have heard others say, “Anybody can facilitate a brand positioning workshop.” Consider this - successfully positioning a brand just might not be as easy as it looks.