In marketing, voice is meant to connect with your audience and offer relevance. To do that, voice requires several elements: image, vision, and positioning. When you get started defining your voice, ask yourself these questions:
- Why does this company exist?
- What image or personality has it formed or is it trying to form?
- What is the company point-of-view in terms of the product, the market, and the world?
- Where is the industry going?
- Where is the company going?
- Where is it taking its customers?
IMAGE: Image isn’t just for Hollywood celebrities and luxury automobiles. Your customers (and prospects) have a perception of your company (right or wrong), and each move the company makes helps to define that image (whether planned or unplanned). Making choices that support and illustrate the image you want the company to have is the key to managing customer perceptions. First you have to know what image you want the company to project. Is the company visionary, creative, cool, edgy, pragmatic, safe, for the price-sensitive, for the masses or for the elite?
Managing your image is a daily activity. Image is created by the choices made across the company, not by advertising agencies through the campaigns they create. If you choose not to define your image, your customers, competitors, or partners will do it for you. Who do you want in charge?
VISION: You don’t have to develop an image as a visionary to express a vision for your company, products, or industry. Vision is the ability to define business, product, industry trends, or the future in terms of customers or the marketplace, before they have taken shape. Further, it is easier for customers to follow you, if you give them some sense that you know where you and your industry are going. There is also a much stronger trust between the company and the customer, if the customer believes you are the company that can take them forward.
Many people feel that vision is reserved for high tech companies who have to show that they understand industry trends, have deep technical chops, and can take their products forward, leapfrogging the competition. Vision is about more than technology, though. Does a clothing designer have vision? (Tom Ford for Gucci) How about high-performance cooking equipment? (Viking) What about snowboarding? (Volcom) Each of these companies’ vision not only acquires new customers every day it keeps their current customers coming back for more.
POSITIONING: Your image and your vision define your company and its position in the industry in which it lives, and relative to competitors or alternatives. Positioning has an even more influential role. It allows you to define the market on YOUR terms. There are several paths you can take to definite your market. You can name the market by creating a new term (personal digital assistant), or segment the market to create a new niche (nighttime medicine). You can reposition your competitors, defining their offering more narrowly. You can pour so much focus and passion into differentiating value that it appears there are no competitors in your space, or that your competitors will be unable to catch up.
If you choose not to define the market on your terms, then you are forced to work within some other company’s framework. The market will see you as a follower. Not only will it be difficult to break out and be heard, it will be even more difficult to ever lead with an intriguing voice, vision, or image.
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