After the 2008 financial crisis, the Wall Street banks were clearly one of the largest and most hated industries in the country. The recession erased all of the positive impressions people had for this industry. If the business of big banking had a tagline during this tumultuous period, it would be "You suffer, we sail."

The basics of a positioning statement are pretty simple—know what you sell, who your target market is, and why you are better than your competition. While you can put these pieces together to create a basic positioning statement, your audience may still feel uninspired.

The novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway is known for his famous Iceberg Theory—to only explicitly include one-eighth of the details in the story, and leave the other seven-eighths implicit and underwater. For example, his story “Hills Like White Elephants” is about a man convincing his significant other to have an abortion, but the word abortion is never mentioned.

Sometimes the best way to appeal to customers is by doing something totally unrelated to what you do. It can be a critical step towards developing a distinct and likeable brand personality.  

The senses are a near-universal way to connect with people. They are anchors for memory, and that is the goal of marketing—to get ideas related to your company to live in people’s brains.

We know that brand equity is potent. When you have brand equity, you go from selling a product to selling a feeling. But brand equity is intangible, so it is difficult to study. Luckily, we have David Aaker. Aaker developed a model with five essential parameters to measure brand equity.

I was recently shopping for polo shirts and was surprised at the options. The Old Navy pique polo shirts top out at about $14. Ok, that’s acceptable. The Ralph Lauren pique polo shirts cost up to $90. Wow. Logo + “Thermovent” + “hint of stretch” = $76? The answer to why one is so much more expensive lies in each company’s brand positioning.

Think about the ads that appear on the side of web pages. If I am in operations, researching technology providers, I don’t want to see what I was researching on the sidebar and header of every page I look at. It’s unsettling, and makes me want to delete my cookies more than to go back to the page I was looking at. 

How do you present yourself when you meet a client, or even a date? Imagine if you never made eye contact with them or didn’t offer a handshake. They probably wouldn’t want to deal with you, even if your product was impeccable or you were incredibly good looking. 

The most important part of your interaction is taking the small risk to engage. The same rules apply to your B2B marketing strategy. The market is saturated with content—heartless, cookie-cutter content. Make your campaign stand out by making it human. Here are three ideas to consider in that process.