Looking Out:  Turning to External Partners to Refocus Your Brand

Within companies large and small, there is a common point of dissonance. This is the point at which the product or service meets the sales team, the stakeholders, and the red tape. This is the point at which brands become unclear in their promise and value.

Despite their best intentions, companies often get wrapped up in their own understanding of their brand. The intimacy that grows out of a close relationship with a product or service through development, deployment, sales and support tends to skew perspectives to reflect personal perception rather than address actual customer needs.

Have no fear!

There are ways to help to focus – or refocus – your efforts. One of those is to step back and look outside your own organization for expertise and guidance.

I can imagine what you’re thinking right now:
“No one knows more about my business than me.”
“Our team is well-paid and capable, so why should we look to someone else?”

The culprit here isn’t you or your team. It’s intimacy within your business. 

In smaller companies, team members wear many hats and know their products inside and out. They tend to get caught up in nuts and bolts when their customers care more about how they’ll look behind the wheel.

Larger organizations arrive at a similar dilemma, but from the opposite direction. The more people that are involved in decisions and executions, the more voices you find fighting to be heard. Departmental goals often obscure the big picture. Marketing and positioning efforts are diluted with volumes of detail rather than clear, concise, on-target messaging.

In either case, proximity to the business or a particular part of it keeps people from seeing the forest for the trees. This is where an outside perspective can help adjust your focus.

A good external partner should sharpen your focus, not change it. That partner should extract from you what drives the passion behind your business, and they should align that passion with tactics and strategy to create distinction for your business in the minds of your audience.

Looking outside your own business to refocus your brand will provide you with a tremendous amount of insight- insight about your competitors, your target audience and your internal resources. On top of all that, you’ll discover a renewed connection with your brand and the team that supports it.

Jesse McGowan is Account Director at Atomicdust and works with clients to develop marketing strategy.