Visibility is key to growing market shares. Without possessing sufficient visibility, no product, service or business can retain consumers consciousness for long. Consumers’ minds are bogged by the challenges of their own; piling extra baggage on those challenges is a subconscious ‘no-no’ for the majority of those who fall within your target market. Therefore, you stand a higher probability of being screened out, ignored and blacked-out except you make ‘good sense’. That means relevance.
Better visibility often leads to expansion of business, which will mean more money for research, improvement, and dealer support. In sum, it increases market power. However, creating desired effect through visibility requires hard work. Why? Because being visible for visibility sake pushes the business into a wider pool of public sentiment. If enough work has been put into the business product, that sentiment would be positive, and sales could spring northward. But if it is otherwise, it is like nailing the product to a cross for unfavourable judgement calls.
Relevance is key to inducing favourable public sentiment, sought for when communicating a product, service or an idea. This is why a share of voice only becomes a share of mind when that ‘voice’ is speaking values that resonate with the receiving audience. The thing is, you don’t sell snow to the Bantus. They won’t even know what to do with it in the first place.
If a business is going to grow, the relevance of its key values and the way it communicates that value in the product class it wishes to dominate is what determines its attractiveness. Judgements are first made based on perceived value-fit before acceptance is given when performances are juxtaposed. Performance, therefore, isn’t a subject a consumer feels interested in until what he or she is seeing or hearing via the business ads gains relevance.
Obviously, planning is key to inducing desired consumer interests. It must start from the inside. The business must ask itself: how do we want to be seen? What will the market be missing if we are not in existence at all?
When serious thoughts are given to these two critical questions, the possibility for effectual positioning emerges. This means when a business does not take time to understand itself, its environment, its market, and what void would be created if it wasn’t in the market, then such business can’t make ‘good sense’ when pushing itself forward or pulling the consumers along its expensive or not so expensive creatives. This is the reason why planning must precede exposure (visibility and audibility). This planning must be spearheaded by top management. It begins with:
- Who Are We (The Business)? Apple made good gadgets but it never made ‘good sense’ until it discovered its hollowness. The business put itself in a tight place by competing head-on with IBM and Microsoft. Until it discovered it didn’t want to be seen as a business that made gadgets but one that helps people ‘shape and change their world’, it never left that murky, bloody, red ocean. Self-discovery is critical for effective positioning for better visibility. After all, If you don’t know yourself how are you going to answer when asked ‘who are you?’
- Who Are We Targeting? Knowing who to target therefore set the platform for qualitative understanding of the behaviors peculiar to the target. No business can sell to everyone, however great the product. Having sufficient grip on the audience base, their peculiar situations, their locations, their experiences and desire, will help in developing a fitting positioning strategy that will be leveraged in communicating the business.
- Are We Talking to the People We Are Selling To? Sometimes users are not buyers, and buyers sometimes are not the ones laden with the choice. It is therefore very important to locate the ‘locus of power’ in purchase decisions and communicate appropriately.
- How Do We Want to Be Seen? In the end, knowing who you are, who you are going to be talking to, and who you should be talking, only precede how you want to be seen. Since you now understand everything and everyone, package yourself to make a difference – and please make that difference with a bold statement, be like one of the noodles marketers, “the difference is in the taste”.
