Situation

The bank was launching a new positioning that was primarily aimed at consumer audiences, but it also recognized that it needed to customize that positioning to address its SMB offerings.

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The task

Leading the marketplace discovery work to develop the new positioning for SMBs prompted an early “aha” moment: the corporate positioning would resonate more with SMBs if the positioning was not just in context of small and medium-sized businesses, but one that gave a nod to the unique mindset SMBs have in specific industries.

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For instance, the mindset of a CFO of a medium-sized manufacturer often differed substantially from that of a CFO of a similarly sized professional services firm.

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What I did

In addition to uncovering the insight about SMBs viewing themselves as different according to industry—and wanting to be acknowledged as unique, a modular positioning strategy and messaging framework was developed that incorporated fundamental aspects of the parent company new positioning, but then incorporated unique nods to industry in the overall positioning as well as proof points.

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The architecture was brought to life with a playbook showing how the positioning and messaging should and should not be incorporated into advertising, demand-gen emails and sales enablement materials. And at the heart of the playbook was a “master creative brief” that could be repeatedly used to develop unified communication assets, like videos, banner ads, etc.

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The new positioning approach also led me to propose a new approach to media planning that targeted prospects more tightly than in the past.

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