Authority Experiments
Repositioning your business (which often involves rebranding) is not something you do regularly.
It’s not like you get up on Tuesday morning and think, “How do I re-focus my entire enterprise on my most premium set of my clients…and achieve it by 5 o’clock?” That would be the path to destruction!
When repositioning, or rebranding, happens it tends to stay like that for several years.
This approach is sensible. Adjusting every five years or so allows a business to correct course.
However, this approach is constrained.
The rigidity in a brand may constrain the exploration of market opportunities.
The brand may act as a straitjacket to a person’s thinking (either the business owner’s or the client’s).
My business story
I ran an experiment. I asked, am I using the language of my business or am I using the language of my customers?
I started using client-perspective language. Rather than talking about logos, and graphic design (which is what I do) I started to change the language, and shifted it from “branding” to “authority building”. Of course, in many ways “authority” is brand but the customers resonate more with the result, rather than what we provide.
The results were amazing! So amazing I changed my business!
Yep - that’s me. Jason Knight
Downhill mountain biking versus road cycling
Let’s think about the link between perfectionism and radical freestyle. To me, perfectionism is like cycling on the road but freestyling is like downhill mountain biking (which is a passion of mine) as I quickly correct the course to deal with challenges I come across on the trail.
I've been stuck in the “get-it-right-before-you-launch-it” mindset, but now I’m open to six-week experiments in my business. "Experiment" takes it out of the performance paradigm, and allows me to get ideas out in the marketplace for feedback quicker than I normally would in the old days.
Even at a local primary school recently (which I mentor at) I encouraged students to quickly come up with a business idea, a plan and a pitch, to the point where a local business gave them $1000 to get their project up and running.
Low-risk experiments
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Thomas H. Davenport states that when US retailer Robert E Wood “opened Sears’s first free-standing retail stores in 1928 he placed two in Chicago. Asked why he needed two in one city, Wood said it was to reduce the risk of choosing a wrong location or store manager”.
Davenport went on to say:
“Tests are most reliable where many roughly equivalent settings can be observed. This might mean physical sites, as with Sears’s stores, or it might mean more ephemeral settings, such as alternative website versions. Among the earliest and most extensive users of testing are retail and restaurant chains. Because so much is held constant among their multitudinous sites, it is easy to designate which ones will serve as experiments and which will serve as controls and to attribute cause to effect. By the same token, workplace design changes are most readily tested in companies that have offices in many cities. Drawing statistical inferences from small numbers of test sites is much more difficult and represents the leading edge of the test-and-learn approach.”
No other company has demonstrated this concept as widely or as successfully as Google. Writing for ThinkWithGoogle, Roberto Croci states:
Start simple. Begin your testing with insignificant things. You don't want your first tests to change (or break!) your whole platform. Always think of creating frictionless experiences by testing specific actions your customers can do across the funnel from the time they visit your home / landing page, through their navigation and their engagement with the content on your site or mobile app, down to their conversions.
Be incremental. Don't redo an entire homepage all at once; test one item at a time. You'll get a much clearer picture of what's actually working. For example - if you are an e-commerce client - think about improving the home / landing page first, then menu & navigation, search, category / product, conversions and form optimization. For each step in the user experience funnel, think incrementally which additional interaction you could improve. Let’s take for example the step when a user interacts with your products, there is a wide array of variants you could think of to make sure you have a value prop at every point in the funnel, including for example category and product pages, allowing users to sort/filter large number of products easily, adding urgency elements, having pricing info above the fold on product pages or secondary CTAs that facilitate x-device, like wishlist, email or call.
Be scalable. Make sure those small changes will scale across your site, your company, and your global teams. Remember to A/B test all recommendations and leverage a repository of audiences and signals to inform both your creative and media strategy! A good A/B test starts with having a clear plan defined in terms of objectives, target audience (test vs control group), sample size (if applicable) and which campaigns to leverage.
Using experiments to reposition your business
I work with a lot of clients who are repositioning their business. Either they’re scaling up, or narrowing their focus to go deeper with a premium set of clients, or shifting their lifestyle. Experiments are a great, low-risk way to test options. Want to launch a coaching business off the side of your normal operations? Test out some marketing. Give it a month. Want to build multiple brands under one umbrella company. Start by creating some brands, and build on them over time, rather than launching in a big-bang approach.
I have a lot of fun helping successful businesses use experiments to reposition.
Want to find out if you fit our Designing Authority workshop?
Grow from ‘meh’ to MAGNETIC
Align your expertise with your customer’s needs to become a world-class brand
Become your industry’s go-to expert. Join the expert consultants who have repositioned their brand, clarified their message and attracted high-value clients with an irresistible offer and a magnetic brand all within a month. HOW? Ask Jason Knight or schedule a 15 minute call to talk through any questions.
