Brighter Marketing

What does cooking a family meal have to do with positioning your products and services. Well quite  a lot really. I realised quite a long time ago that the name you give to certain meals influences how it is received by your target audience i.e my children.

Take my 12 year old, vegetable phobic daughter, no matter how hard I have tried over the years to promote healthy living, she has turned her nose up at many a meal that I have put before her. Until I tried a new approach a few years ago, I simply renamed the food that I made and cut the vegetables up a bit smaller. So…

Brown Rice with Chicken and Vegetables became…Chicken Curry Rice

Ratatouille with Pork or Chicken became… Mediterranean Pork or Chicken

Vegetable Stirfry became… Special Chinese Noodles

Baked Chicken became…Nandos’ Chicken, because it was like chicken she had at Nandos

Butternut Squash Soup, became… Orange Surprise Soup

And so the list goes on, and even her two year old sister seems to enjoy eating Orange Surprise Soup more than she did the butternut squash version.

Sometimes it’s not what you actually provide to a customer, it is the way you position it. The classic fairy story The Emporers’ New Clothes shows how with a little imagination you can even make an Emporer believe how great, absolutely nothing is. Lucozade effectively repositioned themselves as a sports drink in the 1990′s but prior to that it was seen as a health drink to help you recover when you had an illness.

So take a look at your products and services, how would you make them more appealing to your target audience, either by renaming them or making some small changes?