POSITIONING YOUR FIRM FOR SUCCESS

Building on the success you have already achieved, Ignition works with advertising agencies and other professional firms to develop a relevant, differentiating positioning strategy designed to help your firm attract the clients that want you for what you do best.

A clear positioning strategy results in significant short-term and long-term benefits for your firm, including:

1. A well-defined set of criteria for identifying ideal clients.

2. A stronger win ratio when soliciting new business, because you are playing to your strengths.

3. Clearer direction for how the firm should spend its time, money and resources.

4. A broader — not narrower — geographical market area.

5. Fewer competitors, because there will be fewer firms who do what you do.

6. Better margins, because focused firms command premium pricing.  In helping to refine the firm’s positioning, Ignition will work with you to fine-tune the answer to three key strategic questions:

1. WHAT are your outstanding competencies? In which areas could the firm be considered best-in-class?

When it comes to your firm's abilities, the task is to identify not just capabilities but competencies.  Competencies are capabilities of the organization that can be delivered in a dependable, differentiating way. Defining what's core to the organization is often the result of disaggregating a short list of services and abilities, then breaking them down into component parts to find what's truly distinctive.

2. WHO is your ideal customer? What types of categories does the firm know best?

Defining an effective positioning strategy means having a clear definition and understanding of your best customer – the types of clients you are best suited to serve.  This is a process of deeply exploring the firm’s experience with business categories, market segments, audiences, and types of business models.

3. HOW can your firm be distinguished by the way it thinks? What are your unique philosophies, methods or approaches?

The culture and intellectual capital for the firm is a critical cornerstone in business strategy.  This is about identifying the standards, values and beliefs by which the firm operates, serves clients, and makes daily decisions. It's also about proprietary approaches you bring to solving client problems.

4. WHY is your firm in business in the first place? Beyond making money, what is your purpose?

Without exception, the most notable firms have an ambitious reason for being.  Rather than being driven solely by the market, the competition, or the numbers, what is it that drives you from inside? Your purpose must be at the center of who you really are as an enterprise.

The intersection of these four brand boundaries — What, Who, How and Why — defines the firm’s business strategy and points the way to a positioning strategy that makes the most of the firm's strengths.

Ignition then works with the executives of your organization to make sure the positioning strategy is reflected in five essential areas:

Services & Structure - How your products, services, and competencies reflect and support your strategy

Staff Management & Talent Development - How to select, train, develop and manage your people to support the positioning

Self-Promotion & Business Development - How you can best promote your brand to reflect the positioning strategy

Systems & Processes - How internal processes and procedures can support the strategy

Staging & Resources - How your strategy can be reflected in the firm’s physical and virtual place of business

By identifying and prioritizing key initiatives in each of these areas, we’ll work to bring your business practices fully into alignment with your business strategy.

Firms that have completed this program put their time and resources behind what they can do instead of what they can’t do, and direct their energies toward a long-term business strategy that increases the organization's value and relevance to both current and prospective clients.