Audit Your Message Strategy by Answering Three Questions

Every couple of years, your company probably goes through a positioning process. You might think the process is complete once a message strategy has been developed that accurately and compellingly describes the company's unique ability to satisfy customers' problems and needs. Well, this is certainly a step in the right direction, but now what the company needs to do is add a yearly audit to this process.

A message strategy audit determines the effectiveness of your positioning strategy and whether you need to change or tweak it. The audit assesses your situation by answering these three basic questions:

1. Is your marketing claim important to the target market?
2. Is it unique?
3. Is it consistently executed?

It's a good idea to audit your message strategy every 12 months. By doing so, you'll stay on top of your competitors' marketing, and have confidence that you are delivering the right message to the market. There's a lot of information you'll need to gather to answer each question accurately. Before getting into the details of what you need and why, here's a quick summary of the audit process.

The Quick Answers to the Questions

Answer the first question by developing a list of key customer problems, ranking them one through five. Then determine if your positioning statement addresses one of the top problems from a benefits angle. If it does, you are making a claim that is important to your target market. If it doesn't address one of the top problems, you need to change your positioning statement.

A unique claim means that you are the only one making it. Test for uniqueness by analyzing competitors' advertisements and web sites to determine how they are positioned. Then create a perceptual map that will show you whether your claim is unique or not. If you are making an important claim, but one that's not unique, you may want to consider changing your message strategy.

The key to successful positioning is to consistently execute your message strategy in all your marketing communications, and then repeat it, over and over. Check for consistency by first evaluating advertisements, then your web site, and finally, press releases. The primary benefit should stand out in each medium. There are many reasons for inconsistent message strategy delivery. The audit identifies the causes and recommends ways to deliver your message more consistently.

One outcome of the audit is that you are able to decide if there's a need to implement a standard process for positioning. Some of the steps in the process become obvious when you audit your message strategy. Let's take a closer look at how to do the audit.

Your Product Is Only as Important as the Problem It Solves

Your prospects are overwhelmed by communication in today's fast-paced, high-tech world. They get so many marketing messages—somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 per day—that they have become experts at filtering these messages out. You need to become an expert at cutting through the filter with a message that is relevant, important, and unmistakably yours.

A list of product features just won't “cut it” (be effective). Your passport through the filter is a benefit statement that addresses the primary concern that keeps your prospect awake at 2 A.M. Your target audience will listen when you demonstrate that you understand their problem and clearly communicate the benefit your product offers to solve it. Give your target audience a break and show that you really understand what's keeping them awake at night. Your single-mindedness will be rewarded.

Once you've developed a list of key problems, you need to rank them. If you ask customers to rank these problems when you survey them, they can do so pretty quickly, but be alert for repetition (the same problem described in different words) and broad generalizations.

The act of ranking the list of customers' problems gives you a gauge to measure your positioning statement. The test is simple: does the statement address the target audience's most pressing problem? If it doesn't, you may need to go back to the drawing board.

Give the Prospect a Break—Differentiate

In their 1993 marketing classic, Positioning. The Battle for Your Mind, Al Reis and Jack Trout wrote, "too many companies embark on marketing and advertising as if the competitor's position did not exist. They advertise their products in a vacuum and are disappointed when their messages fail to get through."

The goal of positioning is to help the target market associate a significant benefit with your product or company. Failure to differentiate creates market confusion, and this inevitably leads to longer sales cycles. Yet few companies successfully differentiate, generally because they either don't know how to evaluate and determine competitors' product positioning, or they simply don't think it's important.

Are You Making a Unique Claim?

It's pretty easy to learn how competitors are positioning themselves, because they do it in public. So start reading and analyzing your competitors' print advertisements, marketing collateral, and web sites, with an eye to deducing the positioning behind their messages. You'll probably find that a lot of the marketing communications put out by your competitors aren't backed by a real position. Often, these messages are just a “brain dump” (a lot of factual information) of product features. They lack the heart and soul of good positioning—a meaningful benefit statement, a reason the audience should care about their product.

A positioning statement frequently appears in the first or last paragraph (or both) of an advertisement, or in a prominent place on the home page of the web site. A good positioning statement should be a focused benefit idea or concept underpinning the executional theme of the advertisement, home page, brochure, etc. For each competitor, analyze as much of the marketing material as possible, including direct mail and e-mail marketing pieces, brochures, and press announcements.

Once you have determined the competitors' positioning, organize the ideas or themes in a table according to the conveyed benefit statement. Some competitors are likely to have similar or identical positioning statements. Other competitors may publish many claims, making it harder to determine how they are positioned, if at all. It is common—and a mistake—for companies to make two or more benefit claims of equal importance. Check those too. Figure 1 shows a real-world example of how the following mid-market enterprise accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software companies were positioned in late 2005.

Benefit	Lawson	MBS	Best	SAP	Oracle	SSA
Understands the needs of small and medium businesses.			X
Understands business fundamentals.				X
Is flexible and adaptable.		X	X	X
Is affordable.		X			X
Delivers value to the customer.	X				X
Supports rapid implementation and return on investment (ROI).						X

Figure 1. Positioning of mid-market enterprise accounting and ERP software companies in 2005.