Business Standout

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Question: How do you explore the fundamentals of a client’s business without being uncomfortably intrusive?

Answer: This Business Standout tool was developed to do just that. On the surface is asks some simple but key questions about the brand / business performance, but it naturally leads into much deeper questions about business performance pinpointing areas where a consultant could be of assistance

Key point

The Business Standout tool has been adapted from one of the Mud Valley brand equity tools – BrandForce – because we found that it was an excellent way of exploring the issues behind a new client’s business while providing the client with an immediate deliverable – a first-view assessment of the equity of their brand.

In more detail….

The formal outcome of the Business Standout exercise is a decision as to whether the client:

• needs to do more work to develop a fresh and compelling brand proposition which is delivered consistently and competitively in the market place, or

• whether the proposition and its delivery are already strong, and what is needed now is appropriate and consistent investment in communicating it to the target market

The next step of the process is to understand whether the client’s products / services will even get as far as being considered, based on their target customers’ awareness and appreciation of what they have to offer overall.

The third step is to plot the results of the first two stages against known market share, and to provide a unitary brand equity score.

However, the Business Standout tool actually delivers a great deal more than this.

One of the first things to happen is that the client says “Well, it is different with different customers.” This forces a process of rough segmentation whereby the different segments of the market, however defined by the client, need to be analysed separately.

Secondly, the client will typically provide pertinent explanations of their scoring. This can also be a springboard for us to introduce a batch of our own questions about the state of the client’s business: its sales revenue, its profitability, current growth / decline, external influencers, customer developments, geographic reach, and so on. At the end of a relatively short session, we should have obtained quite a rounded and detailed brief of the issues the client is facing as a basis for our assessing where our best opportunities to help the client lie.

Thirdly, the client may well say “But, of course, this is only my personal opinion. We should really ask a few more people,” so this tool can generate immediate projects.

The Mud Valley BrandForce tool is one of our most popular ones among end-customers, and we have certainly found that it can benefit consultancies as well when we lead our clients through it.

This tool can be bought separately here.

It also makes up part of our broader “Outsider Insider Client Intimacy” training e-package which comprises an e-booklet and nine of our new product / service development tools. To find out more, please click here.

© 2008, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

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