Unique Positioning in One Sentence

Boosting awareness for a business, not-for-profit organization or association doesn’t start or end with a mission statement. In fact, mission statements are a waste of time in today’s world because they are singularly inward-looking and useless.

Awareness comes from a single distinctive positioning message that stimulates a conversation, and a desire to know more. Let me share a case history:

Several years ago, I was asked to help “rebrand” the national 4-H, the legendary youth development organization. For starters, it’s unrealistic to use the word, rebrand, even though that’s popular jargon. 4-H simply lacked a clear, credible positioning that would provide the chance to break through competitive clutter, and recalibrate the 4-H image to have greater influence to attract funding, members, and media.

4-H needed one compelling plain language sentence that described the value of the organization to all of its audiences. I called it a conversation-starter because it not only captured interest in 4-H but created a desire to know more.

I believed the solution could be found by talking with the youth of 4-H around America. The 4-H organization had previously spent a fortune on market research and advertising yet had never … NEVER … interviewed their number one and most important audience—the youth who belong to 4-H—to determine how they might describe the 4-H experience. Everything to that point had been from the perspective of adults, not youth. Grown-ups trying to figure out how to capture the attention of kids seldom works, as any parent knows.

My strategy was to find a way to describe the unique soul of 4-H in words that were clear and adjective-free and left no one out. In all of 4-H’s branding efforts in the past, no one had ever gone out and interviewed the young people of the organization in such a detailed manner.

As I traveled from state to state chatting with groups of 4-H youth and listening to how they described the 4-H adventure, I heard the same words being used by many youths, whether they were in Madison, Georgia, or Davis, California. I call these words an organization’s common-thread words.
4-H youth were using common-thread words like “community” and “young people.” They said they were “learning” by working together in a mentoring environment with adults. What were they learning? I asked. “Leadership, citizenship, and life skills,” they answered.

During my interviews I found it interesting that 4-H members often referred to their peers as “young people” as we discussed ways to describe 4-H to an outside audience. The adult leaders of the 4-H organization, by contrast, usually referred to the young people as “kids.”

I listened to the youth of 4-H, and they told me, “4-H is a community of young people across America who are learning leadership, citizenship, and life skills.”

The youth had defined one of the strongest positioning messages I had ever heard, and they had used distinctive words from their perspective, not from the viewpoint of adults talking about “kids.”

The new positioning message said it all about America’s oldest youth-development organization, and it said it in clear and simple language. It was an appealing message upon which to build a strategic communications campaign. Most of all, the message centered, for the first time ever, on the value of 4-H to young people. Previous attempts at messages had centered around the organization, which at the end of the day, no one really cared about.

Before long the entire organization was using the positioning message. It spread like wildfire. A young 4-H girl stood at a podium before the Governor of Indiana and 300 people to dedicate remodeled 4-H buildings at the Indiana State Fair, and she began by saying, “4-H is a community of young people across America who are learning leadership, citizenship, and life skills.”

4-H youth put it on T-shirts, Web sites and blogs. County agents use it on their e-mail signature lines. It is being used everywhere and at most levels of the organization. And the result is that wider audiences are becoming aware of the scope and impact of 4-H today in helping America’s young people.

The 4-H organization, like countless other groups, had been caught up in a recent trend to improve and boost its brand when what it really needed was a distinctive way to describe itself in a single sentence.

Can you describe your business, organization, or product in a single sentence? Can you explain your endeavor in a few words that connects credibly with audiences that are important to you, including the news media? Is your organization speaking with a consistent “voice” that clearly and simply resonates favorably with audiences?

So many organizations hire branding firms that suggest all their problems will be solved with a new logo, slogan, and letterhead. That might help but it’s not the complete solution. Reciting a new slogan will never impress journalists, attract visitors to a Web site or blog, or get meaningful media coverage.

A clear and compelling positioning message is essential because it sets you apart from your competitors. And here’s a tip: To sharpen your appeal, narrow your position. We cannot be all things to all people. To be successful, we must focus on one thing and be the best at it.

One thing, you say? Yes. Your organization might do many other things, but be recognized for excelling at one thing. Get people talking about that, and you will win competitively.

Filed Under: Competitive Positioning • Featured

Tags: 4-h • Competitive Positioning • positioning message