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Our Latest Sparks
5 Reasons You Should Never, Ever Copy The Positioning Of A Market Leader
It’s easy to look at the success of a market leader in your category and consider “borrowing” some of their approach. But as a smaller, challenger brand this is the last thing you should ever do.
How to Maximize Growth Within the Positioning Hourglass
To maximize growth as your business evolves you may need to speed up, or slow way down through the positioning hourglass.
10 Point Checklist to Clearly Communicate Your Positioning
Use our 10 point diagnostic to ensure your positioning crosses the bridge from strategic-concept to communicated-reality.
Why AI has become a leading cause of positioning blur
If you obscure your brand's value with talk of AI just on its own you’re more likely to blend in than to stand out.
Find out exactly where your brand can win with SmokeLadder
How you can use our app SmokeLadder to analyze your positioning and find places to win in the market.
11 Tips (Plus Graphics) On How To Strengthen Your Brand Positioning Strategy
With a topic as complex and nuanced as your brand positioning strategy we need good visuals to avoid getting lost.
How To Use Brand Positioning (Not AI) To Avoid Becoming Perfectly Average
As best practice trends and generative AI increase the competitive noise, it's critical to differentiate using brand positioning strategy.
Which Key Messaging Strategy Is Right For Your Brand: Value Or Differentiation?
There’s a well discussed idea in branding that key messages should focus on the customer benefits of an offering rather than its features. But like any good rule, there are always exceptions.
How To Write Key Messages That Use Your Customer’s Own Words
The ultimate goal for your key messages is to align your brand’s unique value with the needs of your customers. And do it in a way customers can easily understand.
Branding Research: How To Do It And What Business Leaders Believe About Using It
How to use branding research to gain a deep understanding of your customers and market position.
How To Start Your Demand Generation Marketing Using Brand Positioning
A simple 3 step guide on how to start demand generation marketing by leveraging your brand positioning.
Why Small Brand Changes Can Create Angry Customers (See, Wordle)
How should your brand manage changes to make sure it doesn't cause frustration with customers? The online game Wordle provides a good lesson in that delicate balance.
Building A Brand
5 Ways To Build An Authentic Brand (Even If You’re Small) Like Fire Department Coffee
When your brand is young and growing, it’s easy to feel limited by what you don’t have — budget, people, resources. Instead, by leaning into the assets you do have, you can tell an authentic story and build trust with customers all without a massive team or bank account.
How To Launch A Brand With A Big Impact Like Canoo (The Electric Car Subscription Company)
Every brand starts at zero when it comes to their audience.
What Is A Brand? The Brand Relationship Model Helps You Visualize It And Make It Stronger.
If you don’t have a clear way to think about your brand, it’s difficult to build and improve on it.
Data-Driven Branding
How To Tell A Compelling Brand Story With Data Like Zipline (The Medical Drone Company)
The better your brand is at storytelling, the easier it will be to build trust with a new audience.
How To Get Real Customer Data Within Hours (Not Weeks or Months) That Will Improve Your Brand and Marketing Messages
Customer research is critical for every business. The key is to find ways to get it quickly and put it into action.
Brand Vs. Marketing in 2021 – The Big Shift Around Your Relationship With Customers
The words we search for on Google can provide an excellent peek into how we think about concepts.
COVID-19’s Impact On Brand And Marketing
Analysis And Examples Of All Fortune 100 Companies’ Brand Messaging For COVID-19
What messages are the biggest brands putting out around the COVID-19 crisis? And what can other brands learn from these examples?
Video Calls Are Giving People (And Brands) A Crash Course In The Value Of Authenticity
At a time when we’ve never been farther apart physically, video calls have managed to bring us closer together.
We Analyzed Emails From 97 Brands In Response To COVID-19. This Is What We Learned.
Every business is facing the same question: How should brands communicate during a crisis like this?
Marketing Messages
How To Write Key Messages That Use Your Customer’s Own Words
The ultimate goal for your key messages is to align your brand’s unique value with the needs of your customers. And do it in a way customers can easily understand.
5 Quick Questions To Audit And Upgrade Your Key Marketing Messages
There’s a reason why writing effective marketing messages is so hard. Within the span of a couple short sentences your messages have to summarize the entire essence of what your brand provides.
Features Vs Benefits: How To Increase The Impact Of Your Marketing Messages
Don’t just describe the features of what you provide, talk about the benefits.
Content Strategy
5 Elements Your Website Homepage Needs For Customers To Trust Your Brand
A new customer arrives on your website’s homepage for the first time...and the clock is ticking.
Two Key Ideas That Will Make Your Marketing Ads More Effective
If you don’t put care into your ads, you’ll burn through budgets without much to show for it.
How To Create Clear, Consistent Content With Brand Archetypes
One of the hardest parts of creating content for a business is developing a consistent style.
Brand Positioning
Competitive Positioning: How To Make Your Brand Stand Out In A Sea Of Sameness
Brands that take a safety-in-numbers approach may avoid the problem of being dismissed by customers, but it’s likely to lead to an even worse outcome — being totally forgettable.
How To Find Your Brand’s Position With A Competitive Landscape Map
The right visual can be a huge asset to quickly convey information about your brand's position.
How To Find The Peaks, Pits, and Potholes In Your Brand
To create a brand that’s effective, memorable, and sustainable you have to make trade-offs.
Brand Visual Identity
4 Research Insights On How To Tell Better Stories With Brand Imagery
Your brand’s ability to use images effectively has a big impact on a customer’s decision to engage with you.
Why Your Brand’s Logo Is The Last Thing You Should Worry About
The phrase “your brand is not your logo” has been around for years. But it doesn’t go far enough.
Are Your Brand Colors Ready For An Upgrade?
Your brand colors can be a real asset to build trust with your target audience.
Tone of Voice
The Benefits Of Talking To Your Customers Like Real Human Beings
Creating marketing messages robs people of their ability to speak like human beings.
How Your Brand Can Benefit From Having A Sense Of Humor
Humor has the magical ability to ease difficult situations and extract more joy out of good ones.
Two Easy Exercises That Will Strengthen Your Brand’s Tone of Voice
A key part of building trust with your brand’s audience is using a clear, consistent tone of voice with everything you write.
Customer Insights
Use 5 And-Then-Whats To Focus Your Marketing On Your Customers’ Highest Level Needs
The better you are at understanding what your customers want to accomplish in their lives, the better you’ll be at marketing. The 5 And-Then-Whats tool is designed to help you understand the needs of your customers on multiple levels.
Find Out What Your Target Customers Did Before They Found Your Brand
How did your customers solve the needs you address before they found your business?
Why The Words “For Customers” Make Good Marketing Messages Great
When it comes to messaging, the biggest mistake companies make is to focus too much on themselves.
Big Picture Strategy
How To Write Brand Core Values That Your Team Remembers And Rallies Around
Whether your brand needs to create Core Values from scratch or give an existing set a refresh, here’s a 3-step exercise to craft a set of values your team can embrace, remember, and rally around.
How To Make Sense (And Use) Of Your Brand’s Core Purpose, Vision, Mission, and Values
Developing strategic statements and summaries for the direction of your brand is an essential process for every business.
Two Reasons Why Your Brand’s Core Purpose Should Focus On Being World-Class
When you look at the idea of “world-class” from the right angle it can become a powerful guide for your business.
Brand Leadership
5 Questions On Building A Brand With Entrepreneur Of The Year & Drift CEO David Cancel
The marketing technology company, Drift, can teach us a lot on how to use your brand to propel fast growth.
Infographic: What CEOs Care About (And How Their Brand Can Help Them)
Insights and stats on what CEOs and Founders think about most when building a brand.
Timeless Leadership Principles That My Dad Instilled In Me
The actions my Dad modeled drove home many important lessons for me on how to lead a business.
Implementing Your Brand
Actionable Strategies: 8 Ways To Implement Your Brand
For your brand to be effective it needs to be central to how your entire business operates.
Why Brand Strategy Is Critical For Aligning Remote Teams
Remote work creates savings opportunities for businesses and more freedom for employees, but it has some big challenges too.
4 Signals That Your Brand Is In Poor Health
When your brand is healthy, your offerings, operations, and communications all resonate with your customers.
Brand Teardowns
Marketing Insights Pulled From 5 Multi-Billion Dollar Brands
When developing a brand, it’s not always easy to know what’s working and what isn’t.
What Can the Anki Vector Robot Do For You? | 10X Marketing Teardown
Does this little home robot provide enough value to actually get you to buy him?
Is Camping Ready For Disruption? A 10X Teardown of Tentrr
The 10X Rule states that in order for customers to switch from a current behavior, they need a new option that’s 10X better.
Strategy Think Pieces
One Simple Question To See If You Have A Strong Brand Strategy
For your brand to establish a unique position and rise above the noise, your strategy needs to embrace legit trade-offs.
7 Quick Ways To Get Unstuck From A Marketing Mental Block
You’re at your desk. You’re deep into a problem. You’ve stared at it for hours. And now you’re stuck.
How to Make Your Product Better Than Doing Nothing
With all the different flavors of competition your business is up against, there’s a sneaky one that’s easy to overlook.
