This is part 2 of the Marketing basics series. After discussing the 4 P’s of Marketing in part 1, I thought it would be useful to talk about brand positioning. In particular, the basic T-C-B model is a good, simple framework to organize your thought process and approach when creating social media and search engine marketing strategies.
Brand positioning is an enormous topic in itself. Traditionally, companies tried to create a brand image for their companies through broadcasting marketing messages to their audiences through advertisements on TV, radio, print, etc. With the advent of social media, online marketing and engagement focused communications, it is suicide to sound like a traditional broadcast ad when engaging with your audience.
Traditional messaging approaches and the notion that you can define your brand for your audience do not carry over to online marketing. So it is important to understand your company’s brand positioning.
Even though you can’t tell your audience how to perceive your brand, your communications and actions do influence how they perceive it. What you say and what you do must be consistent with your desired brand image.
What is the T-C-B model?
I was first exposed to the T-C-B model while reading a Marketing book by Rossiter and Bellman. T stands for Target, C stands for Category and B stands for Benefit.
Target
It is important to understand who is your target audience. With social media, your target audience may be just one person or a small, special interest group you engage with. Whichever the case, you need to understand them on a deeper, more personal level than traditional marketing.
Category
It is also important to understand what category need your audience will get from your product, service or interaction with you. By category, I mean the type of product. For example, the iPhone’s category is a mobile phone. The iPod’s category is a MP3 player. The iPad’s category is…I’m still trying to figure out that one… If you cannot quickly communicate to your audience what your product does, why they need it or why they should care about your company, they will not pay attention.
Benefit
As touched upon in part 1 of this series, the benefit of a product to its consumers is the value your audience will receive from your product. If you understand who your audience is and what category need they desire, then the key benefit is the “thing” that will satisfy that need.
Try considering T-C-B before sending that next tweet. Who are you engaging with? What is it you’re talking about? What value will your followers get?
Victor Chan
eMarketing Strategist
Tags: benefit, brand, brand positioning, category need, digital strategy, engagement, internet marketing, marketing basics, online marketing, target audience
Toan Dang
February 11th, 2010
Thanks for the reminder on how I should be structuring my tweets and other social media outputs. One thing I would like to add is that I feel the structures of brand positioning in the social media world have changed.
For one, people don’t necessarily connect with brands on social media but rather people. They may fan your Facebook page or like your profile, but at the end of the day, they communicate with real people. So it has really come down to personal branding. Engage your audience by providing value based on their interests but also remember to humanize your brand and put a face behind it.
The value of brand positioning online has also been greatly tied to the experience that someone has in dealing with you online. It doesn’t just involve your website and profiles anymore. The way you interact with your audience, targeted or not, impacts your branding as well.
Lastly, the people on the internet have a penchant for weeding out what they doesn’t provide value to them. They “vote with a click of a mouse.” Branding is important but content is even moreso. Gary Vaynerchuk succinctly said it, “if content is not king in your world, NOTHING can help you.”
Victor
February 11th, 2010
Hi Toan,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
I agree that the traditional definition of brand positioning structures have changed, but frameworks such as the one discussed here can be modified to guide corporate interactions online.
The people in a company have always contributed to how customers perceived the company’s brand. Each touch point customers have with a company, for example, a sales representative, a checkout clerk or a person answering customer service calls, all contribute to the experience customers have with the company.
Social media and online interactions have made these touch point more accessible, personalized and multi-dimensional, but each interaction still contributes to the perceived corporate brand. The words a company says, the text that they write, the videos that they produce and even the stories they choose to bookmark, all represent the company and influence how they are perceived.
Open question: Wouldn’t you agree that the content companies produce online is really its brand?
Victor