In this episode you’ll hear:

• The 10 solid reasons why you might consider repositioning your brand.
• Why I feel the pandemic is NOT to blame for the need to reposition your brand – and how it only exposed the need that’s probably been there for years.
• How to get my help to reposition your brilliance.

If you’re inspired by this episode, I’d love to hear your biggest Aha! moments. Take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your social media and tag me, @christieturley!

Growth strategist Christie Turley has sparked innovation in a wide variety of multimillion-dollar companies around the world. From supporting international campaigns to catering to conscious enterprises, her clients all seek the same thing: a breakthrough. And Christie delivers. Her superpower is crafting the brand positioning that leads to massive results, like one client who grew from zero to $15 million in under a year. She started her digital marketing career over two decades ago and launched her company, Limelight Alchemy, when she was 24 at the birth of the internet. Since then, she’s helped transform thousands of businesses and sold $3 billion dollars in products and services (that’s Billion with a “B”).

A sought-after expert speaker, Christie Turley has shared the stage with Reid Tracy, CEO of Hay House, bestselling author Mastin Kipp and marketing legend Dan Kennedy. She been asked to sit on the boards of multimillion-dollar companies as well as speak at business conferences, private mastermind events and digital conferences across the globe. She is the author of The Intuition Led Business and the host of the The Intuition-Led Business Podcast. She lives in the Rocky Mountains with her husband of 18 years and their two children.

LINKS:

Reposition Your Brilliance Workshop + Consulting

These Sparkplugs Will Inspire Creativity 

Transcript:

Christie:
Welcome to the mind muse podcast. I’m your host Christie Turley. And today we’re going to be talking about the top 10 Reasons to Reposition Your Brand.

Now first, let me talk about why I chose this subject for today. So if you haven’t noticed, people’s marketing, maybe your own—it’s floundering. It’s not working as well as it once did. And you could chalk this up to the pandemic and all of the different things that have happened in 2020. And you might be wondering, maybe this will all blow over soon. Maybe things will be back to what they were before. And, maybe you’re wondering, “Do I just wait? Do I make any changes now? Or just wait and see?” And they’re actually, I’m here to tell you or ask you to consider that there might be something else going on that’s much, much deeper.

And really the pandemic could have given you the ability to see what was actually already going on with your business. It just uncovered the problem a lot more quickly and a lot more abruptly, than it would have been uncovered otherwise. And so you’re now noticing it because there’s fewer activities to tend to—sports and all your kids’ activities or extracurricular activities or fewer date nights or fewer social engagements, less traveling;

you’re not as busy as you were. And so it’s giving you a lot of time to think and reflect and wonder. And it’s to the point where possibly sales and leads that were coming in have dipped below your threshold of being comfortable. And so it’s- it has you rethinking some things. And you know one of the things that I invite you to look at is repositioning.

So repositioning is an activity. It’s a marketing activity that you can do without having to add more dollars to your advertising budget. In fact, it can make any investment that you’re currently making in advertising that much more effective. It’s actually easier to triple your conversion rate than it is to triple your traffic. So repositioning is an activity that we often do when clients come to us and want to have more sales, have more leads.

It doesn’t matter if the economy is in a downtrend or an uptrend. It doesn’t matter. A lot of times what happens when you’re scaling is you must look at repositioning anytime you want to grow. You might need to look at repositioning. And I would say in 80% of the cases of clients that we’ve brought on, whether or not they actually come to us primarily for repositioning and 80% of the activities we end up repositioning them because it helps their marketing to be more effective and their message to shine more brightly.

So I’m going to go through the top 10 reasons and any of these reasons would be a good enough reason for you to reposition your brand. Now, if you’re not familiar with what positioning means, positioning is the position that you own and the mind of your prospects and customers. So when you reposition, you are reframing the perception or how you want to be perceived by them. And it can take the form of repositioning a message, what you’re actually saying to people, how you’re saying it.

It can take the form of visuals of many different ways. You know, when people think of a brand, they tend to think it’s a logo. No, no, no, no! A brand is the entire experience that someone has when they’re working with your company. And you as an individual also have a personal brand. So it’s whether or not you’re being intentional with that brand or not. So let’s talk about what these reasons are and ask yourself if any one of these reasons might be good enough reason for you to also look at repositioning.

And if that’s the case, I would love to help you with that. And I’ll talk about an opportunity that I have later on that I can assist you in that process. So the first reason might be, and this is not necessarily in a particular order of importance. It’s just how I chose to present this information. So the first reason might be that your organization, your company, you yourself have acquired or discovered a proprietary advantage—a very powerful advantage that must now be worked into your brand positioning.

So as your company has evolved, you may have had some epiphanies. You may have developed and formalized a process or an unfair advantage, so to speak. And something that’s a very proprietary, maybe it’s even patented or trademarked. So this would call for a repositioning. So you can work that in. It’s not enough to just slap a blank band-aid on something, or create a flyer and say, “Hey, here’s our new advantage!” No, no, no, no, no. It must be put into every aspect of your brand so that it really is clear and rings true to people when they come and they visit you on your website, or they see you speak or see any other extension of your brand.

The next reason would be a new target market. So sometimes going after a new target market would be very, very attractive. So a product would need to be repositioned to more directly appeal to that newly defined market. So if in the last few years or even the last few months, if you’ve started to market yourself to a brand new market, then you definitely need to take a look at your positioning and possibly even reposition a new division of your company. It might make sense to do that.

The question is, all these questions that come up, it really would help to be talking to a professional to help guide you. It might not require something as drastic as that, or a different website or micro-site, it might be just as simple as reworking your messaging. So that’s where a professional can help you determine the best path. All you need to be worried about right now is whether or not it’s a good idea to reposition. So another reason to reposition would be because your organization is significantly altering its strategic direction. So I remember one client came to us.

And actually they came to as a couple of times. The first time they weren’t ready. A couple of years later, they came back and they said, “You know what? We’ve had declining membership. We actually had declining membership even before we talked to you the first time, and it has continued. And we can’t continue down this path! And we feel that we are outdated in our industry.” And this might not be the case for you. Maybe you are very up-to-date. But this represented to them, a very significant departure in their strategic direction. And in past board meetings, they had many conversations about how they need to steer.

And in this case, they were a bigger ship, so to speak, as opposed to a rowboat, right? So a significant strategic direction change would take some time, maybe even a few years. And so they wanted to start the process with that. And this organization, maybe well-known to you, maybe not, but they cater to professional speakers and authors and consultants, national speakers association. They had 3000 plus members at the time. And so we came in to help them appear younger and give them a fresher, more innovative feel to their members and to highlight new experiences.

And to really shift the perspective in the minds of the members, from this, maybe a dinosaur type feeling of being a 40 year old organization and picking up more of the trends that were going on in the 2010s and start integrating that into their events and into their membership materials on their website and their messaging, and this called for positioning events in a certain way to increase attendance. And I’m happy to say, that their membership did increase!

Their event attendance did increase! Instead of declining by 10% every month with their membership, they started increasing every month by 10%. And their event attendance, including their big national convention increased by over 33%, which was huge for them. So this definitely works. So that is another reason, a significant strategic direction shift. Now, the next reason is your organization is entering new businesses and the current positioning is no longer appropriate.

So if you are starting a new division or another business, or like I said, another market even, if there’s any line of new business, maybe it’s a product line extension for you. Anything that represents entering a new space or a new industry or new business, then looking at your current positioning and shifting it may be very appropriate. So here’s another reason. And this might be something that would appeal more to entrepreneurs or those who have a personality led brand.

But you may see that you’re starting to hold yourself back! There might be some things you’ve been wanting to say! And you have been putting some projects or messaging on the back burner. Maybe you feel like you’ve evolved. And there’s other aspects to your personality and to your business that you wish other people knew. Maybe you’re sick and tired of being pigeon-holed in a certain space. And you feel like there’s more for you to share. Let me tell you something from first-hand experience and also second-hand experience working with other entrepreneurs.

That’s your Intuition talking! Okay? If there’s something that you’ve been holding back on or you’ve put on the back burner and said later on, or you’re just feeling something bubble up inside that you really want to start to share. That is a sign that you could use some time to reflect and speak with an expert on repositioning. And see if some of these ideas for messaging and other aspects of your personality can be worked into your brand positioning, because it’s gonna make you stronger! It’s gonna make you a clear choice when people are looking at you and your business, you’re going to stand apart more as you start to put on more of what is you.

It’s like putting on an accessory with your outfit. You know? It enhances you and it makes you more multi-dimensional. So when you hold back on these things that truly make you-you, and truly humanize your personal brand and even your company brand, then you’re- if you hold back on that, then you’re really doing yourself a disservice, and you’re doing a disservice to your potential customers, because they won’t be able to see that aspect of you and fall in love with you even more and have you look even more attractive to them.

So it’s like a dessert without the cherry on top. So really think about that! Really think if there’s anything that you’ve been holding back on, or projects that you’ve put on the back burner. And they’re just kind of like whispers that you’ve been listening to for the last few years, but you’ve said, “Oh, I don’t have time for that.” You know, maybe it really is time now. It really is time now! Okay, the next reason is if you’ve drifted, since you first started your company. So if you’ve evolved to the point where the positioning and the original intent of when you set up your business, when you started, and you’ve obviously added new products, new services, new messages, and almost like layered them on top of one another as the years went by, it could start looking kind of like a mess because it is layered.

And there’s no style or structure to it. It’s just kind of been like worked in. And now it’s time to step back and look at all these things that have been worked in, pull them apart and then put them back together in a more elegant way. And so this is what’s called positioning drift. It’s when your positioning is no longer, very clear, or maybe you haven’t given it enough support, or it’s been carelessly managed. Think about any team members that have been on your staff or even contractors.

And they’ve mixed up your message a bit. They’ve mixed up your positioning a bit. And little by little, degree by degree, it’s gotten a little off track. It’s gotten a little bit off of the True North. And in my work, I call this your 42 degrees. 42 degrees is where light refracts to create a beautiful rainbow. And anyone degree off of that prevents the rainbow from appearing in its boldest and most beautiful way. So sometimes you need to take a step back and you need to look at everything and then reposition it and reframe it and re-imagine it.

And then, and then launch it again, so that it’s much more clear to your potential audience, what it is that you stand for, what it is that you offer. And It helps to transform and shift their thinking in some way. And think about how much has changed even in the last few months in the marketplace. A lot of change has happened in the customer marketplace and I am betting a lot has changed in your business too. So this is really easy when you’re- even if you’re not thinking, everything that’s happened in 2020, this positioning drift happens in mature businesses and established businesses.

So the next reason is if you’re under-positioned or you’re over positioned. So being under-positioned means that you’re too vague or you’re too weak in any of your messaging or how your product and service is being portrayed. Being overly positioned means that your positioning is too narrowly defined. So either way, this could be a huge problem and you could really, really benefit from a repositioning exercise. So the next one, this one’s pretty self-explanatory.

It’s if your brand has a bad or a confusing or non-existent image. It’s interesting that when you’ve been in business for as long as you have, you can start not seeing—almost like selective hearing or selective singing and some things that you’ve just left on your website for a while. And you don’t notice it until a potential client points it out to you and you’re like, “Oh dear, I haven’t updated that in a long time.” Or it’s kind of like imagine if someone came up to you and they’re beautiful, beautiful, lovely—let’s go with woman.

Maybe they come up to talk to you at an event. Okay? And she’s very dynamic, very charismatic, very beautiful, very smart. And as she turns around to leave to go talk to someone else, you notice the back of her head. Well the back of her head, she has this 80s, 90s, Jazzercised style scrunchie. And you’re “Wow!” Like my—and this is all appearances, right? But your opinion or your experience changed quite a bit when she turned around and you saw that.

And this is very similar to, in our own business. You start to get a little bit blind. There’s things in your blind spot that you don’t realize that other people notice. And you know, you’re just being you. And maybe that lady, she just got ready in the morning and she grabbed the rubber band that was in her drawer, not thinking that she was going to a networking event. And she put her hair back and she didn’t give it a second thought. The same thing happens in your business with your positioning and with your marketing.

There are definitely skeletons in the closet and spiders under the rug that you have no idea that are there. So it takes a very detailed eye and also a very skilled ear to hear any dissonance in your message or your visuals. So that could be another huge reason to look at repositioning. Now the 9th reason is changes in your environment, in the macro global environment. And we all know this way too well, right?

And this could be economic changes, this could be, like all of the things that have happened in 2020, this could be technology advances, this could be even governmental legislative changes and regulations! And it might require you to look at repositioning a product, or a service, or your message, or anything in between. So that’s another thing. Those are things that happened that are totally beyond our control, but they necessitate a repositioning exercise. And then the 10th reason, which I have seen so much, even before 2020.

Like, so many, seven figure entrepreneurs that you would otherwise think have this wonderful beach-front-laptop-lifestyle. And you peek behind the curtain, and it’s a little bit like wizard of Oz with, “Don’t look behind the curtain. The great Oz!” Is nothing but a man! Right? A man behind the curtain. And I’ve seen a lot of these entrepreneurs come to me and even some larger companies as well, where they had a poor product launch or their sales reached a plateau, or worse, their store sales started to decline and they’re in a free fall.

And they don’t know why they can’t figure it out. And it’s like the harder they try to figure it out, the more confused they get. Or, they think they chalk it up to, well, this other thing probably that’s what it was. You know, this partner didn’t pull through with their commitment for promotion or, there was some other exterior events that happened- external event that happened. And I mean, disappointing results are just that, I mean, it’s sad. Even if you’ve put on the same show that you did before and you know, it should have kept working the same way or you have a campaign that’s been running on Facebook forever and all of a sudden it stops working.

It’s horrible! It’s a horrible feeling. And especially if you have your eggs in mostly one basket. So, repositioning, I mean, there could be a new competitors that have cropped up, that have better positioning. I mean, I saw this with one client, they did a launch, like they always did a launch. And that year they had so many people asking them, “Well, how does your program compare with this other program?” And then it wasn’t just one other program. It was like three or four other programs. And they never had comments like that before. And that launch didn’t do as well. And that caught them off guard!

You know, obviously there were some newer competitors that have cropped up and it necessitated them to look even deeper at their brand voice, and the messaging, and what they were actually putting out there and saying, and differentiating because they were tremendously different. Tremendously! And really f they had positioned themselves better, I mean, when we started working with them, they were already almost done with their launch. So looking at that, they could have worked in some other angles to their positioning, which they had all along! They just never really had to say it because things were easy before.

And now all of a sudden thing’s got a little tougher and the market got a little more sophisticated. So that’s, I’ll end with that. Now, if you’re thinking to yourself just now, “Hey, you know, I think I do need to reposition,” I’d love to help you! and I have an opportunity coming up—a workshop called Reposition Your Brilliance. And this is for anyone who is an entrepreneur, whether you have a personal brand or not, anyone that has been in business for a few years and has had some good traction, and has an existing client base, and existing products and services to work with.

I’d love to work with you! And you can learn more about that—That’s a combination of a workshop and consulting. So, and then I’ll leave you with my final thoughts. So you can actually visit ChristieTurley.com/Reposition. And that’s where you can find more information on that upcoming workshop and then consulting where I can work with you to help reposition your brand. So my final thought is this, Dr. Wayne Dyer said, “If you ignore inspiration’s powerful attraction, the result is personal discomfort or a sense of disconnection from yourself.”

So this means to me, if you feel that stirring, that repositioning might be right for you. Don’t second guess it! Don’t second guess your feelings or your thoughts. If you do, you’ll only get more uncomfortable as time goes by. And the feeling won’t just blow over after the whole 2020 global situation is more under control and behind us. Now is the time. Now is the time to reposition your brilliance for the future.