Strategic market repositioning
Almost every business in this channel has changed what it sells in the last five years. Very few have changed how they present it.
The lines business became a hosted business. The hosted business added connectivity. Then mobile, then Microsoft 365, then security. Each step made commercial sense and none of them reached the website.
The result is a business selling one thing and advertising another.
This is not a rebrand
A rebrand is a logo and a colour palette. Occasionally useful, mostly cosmetic.
Repositioning is deciding what the business is now, who it should be selling to, what it is genuinely better at, and then making every part of how it presents itself say the same thing. It is a commercial exercise that happens to produce marketing assets, not the other way round.
The specific move in this channel
Reseller to technology partner. From being compared on the price of a product to being the supplier a customer does not want to change.
It changes who you sell to, what you lead with, how you price, and what you are eventually worth. It is not achieved by adding services to a list.
When you need it
- You sell something materially different to three years ago
- You have acquired, merged or been acquired, and there are two brands in play
- You are competing on price because nothing else separates you
- You are thinking about selling in the next few years
- You have moved between categories, from telecoms into managed services or the reverse
What it produces
- Positioning and proposition
- Messaging for the business, each service and each sector
- Tone of voice
- Visual identity system and guidelines
- Templates for proposals, decks and social
- Then the website that expresses it
