- What single word does your brand own?
- How do you communicate this position in everything you do?
- What piece of information helped you move in that direction?
- Is it possible what you think is only true in your mind but not in the mind of your customers?
- What is the promise of your brand that is at the essence of the value you sell?
- Can you make your target audience even narrower so customers will care even more?
- How do new customers learn about what you have to offer?
- When is the last time you said thank you to your customers without asking for something in return?
- What is the most effective marketing activity you do and how do you know this is true?
- Does your brand blend into the category or stand apart from all others?
- Do you do something your competitors doesn’t do, but you haven’t communicated it?
- Are you providing helpful information and ideas to customers that make them better without expecting something in return right away?
- What does your brand do that your competitors are afraid of doing?
- Are customers thanking you because you are helping them do be more effective at their jobs?
- When was the last time your brand did something with a non-profit and didn’t seek to publicize it?
- Are your employees sharing your brand story because they believe in it and because they want to?
- Do you consistently do post mortems on sponsorships, promotional activities and events to see if you met your goals?
- Are you challenging your best selling products from within, so you understand your weaknesses before your competitor does it?
- Do you seek out learning opportunities for management outside of your industry so that you can find new ideas and insights that aren’t part of how your competitors go to market?
- Do you challenge your marketing team to tell your brand story in a new medium that is of growing importance to your audience?
Twenty Questions
What are the hard questions your team is asking about your business? Does it make someone uncomfortable, feel challenged – even threatened? Asking questions is a healthy sign and one that needs encouragement.
Great marketing is easy to see. It isn’t a series of declarative statements describing the present. It is a never ending set of questions that keeps coming at you day after day.
Work environments that are built on trust, get to enjoy challenging questions. Environments based on fear, don’t get the benefit of questions that challenges everything.
When you bring in someone from the outside to ask hard questions, it can help you reset your navigation for your brand. Most companies fail miserably at asking challenging questions. Instead, they make statements to declare their beliefs.
What story you tell is inconsequential. What story your customer is telling, now that matters. Questions help you understand your brand from a customer’s perspective.
Marketers should put questions into their coffee each morning and skip the sugar.
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Need someone to ask a few hard questions about your marketing? I have a suitcase full of question marks. Contact me.
Photo credit: By DuMont Television/Rosen Studios, New York-photographer. Uploaded by We hope at en.wikipedia (eBay item photo front photo back) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
