How companies and their brands present themselves to the world is a subject of never-ending fascination to me. And since our livelihood is centered in helping companies figure this stuff out, I’m always thinking about ideas that help clients create more value. Lately I have been thinking about the principal of composition, commonly associated with a painting, a photograph, a space, and how that might provide insight into our planning strategies for brand expression.
Composition is the artful arrangement of elements and their relationships to each other in space. Of course, the space our clients are interested in most, is the space between the ears of customers. As a marketer, how do you express your value proposition in ways that are properly arranged and balanced in the customer’s mind? If your answer is media planning, I would like to suggest you go a little deeper.
You see, brand expression is not just a message delivered. Like any relationship, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it that’s important, and enables the conversation to be more interesting, engaging and on-going. To have that distinction in your marketing, you must have all the elements of your proposition artfully composed in the minds of customers.
The core elements within the composition of your business proposition most important to customers are purpose, positioning, identity, promise and experience. All these elements must be in harmonies relationship on the canvas of your marketing. Like a painting, how marketers approach these compositional aspects of their value proposition creates the foundation upon which everything else in the painting depends on to connect in the mind’s eye of the customer. There must be an engaging experience of balance, form and harmony. In a world of highly segmented niches and me-too products, how you frame up your promise is of vital importance. You must have a compelling answer to the question “why should the marketplace reward your enterprise with existence?”.
In the haste to meet the urgency of sales and competitive metrics, marketers often lose sight of the long term importance of having a compelling purpose, positioning and identity that is artfully crafted in the minds of customers and confirmed through their experiences.
