Looking like a leader
In a recent exercise I took the marketing management of a major food producer through, we looked at advertisements across the food industry. We asked them to cut out ads from the industry’s trade publications and put them into three piles: the first was for companies that had no particular visual and verbal brand. The second, for companies with a visual and verbal brand that wasn’t really great. The third, for companies with high-impact visual and verbal brands. It turned out that their key competitors were in the third pile. But the company itself was in the second pile. Its managers realized that there was only one choice if they were to be seen as a market leader – they had to get into the high-impact pile. The interesting thing was that the companies picked out for this pile shared a few things – and I’d like to share those with you:
1) They didn’t use words such as ‘innovation’, ‘partner’ or ‘leading’.
2) They didn’t crowd the page with messages – instead, they were highly visual in their approach
3) They used at least a full page, often two, to get their simple, but powerful message across
The key learning is that you can write mission statements that say you lead the world. You can mention countless times how your company is the leader in your industry. But, unless you really, actually, look like a leader when you communicate, you won’t be perceived as such.
