Having a unique Point of View is different from a marketing or brand message, and can benefit your customers and your business.
In an increasingly content-polluted environment, it can be difficult to cut through the noise and get your audience’s attention. Consumers are more sceptical about brand messages than ever, but having a clear and unique Point of View can help a brand stand out.
A Point of View helps brands differentiate their insights on specific trends or topics within their industry. My favourite example is Airbnb’s vision of being more than an accommodation provider, to instead be a creator of communities that bring people together. Its foundation is rooted in consumers’ desire for community, which threads across all of Airbnb’s communication assets.
Other successful brands like Dove, Nike and Coca-Cola have a common theme across their communications programmes: they stand for something that means a lot to their customers. Dove stands for real beauty; Nike stands for a can-do attitude; and Coca-Cola stands for happiness and shared joy.
These brands have a Point of View that resonates with what their customers care about, but it’s different from a marketing or brand message. Neither is it a tagline. Nike’s can-do spirit is clearly seen in the Nike+ line of products, software and services. The Nike+ brand is all about taking charge of your own performance and improving it through data-driven training. If “Just Do It” was a mere tagline, do you think Nike+ would have come to life?
The following chart helps illustrate the differences more clearly.
| Attribute | Marketing Message | Point of View |
| Focus | Company / Brand | Customer |
| What It Is | Sales message | Opinion / stands for something |
| Addresses | Product benefits | Customer problems |
You could say that a Point of View is another way of applying design thinking to communications. Instead of taking a company-centric approach to messaging, the Point of View looks at the customer’s biggest motivations or concerns, and translates them into a brand opinion that helps the customer address those issues better.
This brand opinion seeks to inform or educate, does not sell, and contributes towards creating long-term brand recall.
So how can brands create their unique Point of View?
We use a three-part framework with clients to do this. It needs to be Relevant, Insightful, and Provocative (RIP) because sometimes, to build something truly great, you have to retire some long-held notions and habits.
| Relevant | Insightful | Provocative |
| Must mean something or resonate with your target audience | Gives a new interpretation or twist – particularly when addressing major trends | Gets a reaction and stimulates conversation |
For marketers and communicators, this framework can be used to create new products or services (as Nike did), inspire new campaigns (Dove), and–at the most basic level–anchor the development of assets across multiple channels.
With this framework, we take the following steps with our clients:
- Understand the impact of customers’ challenges and why conventional approaches or solutions fail to address them
- Speak with the brand’s leadership, management and functional teams, and customers to identify proof points and examples that back up the solutions
- Differentiate our proposition from competitors and industry influencers
A strong Point of View provides the platform upon which meaningful conversations are built and strengthens positive brand association. It also helps prioritise relevant topics and issues that the brand should engage with, establishing a consistency for the broader communication strategy.
Get in touch with us today if you’d like to develop a Point of View for your brand. We’d love to hear from you.