How To Build Clarity with Proposition

The Relationship Between Clarity and Proposition

Clarity is all about how clear people are about the role of your brand in their lives. Your brand needs to have an incredibly clear and motivating purpose, for people to understand the role it plays for them. The consumer-facing version of this purpose is your “Proposition.” Proposition is extremely important when trying to improve Clarity. Without Clarity, there’s something wrong with your Proposition! 

So that people can be crystal clear about your brand, think about the following questions: 

1. Is there a consumer need at the heart of your purpose? In order for people to deeply understand what your brand means to them, it has to clearly meet a relevant need in their lives. It is essential that your Proposition and its central benefit is centered around something that they care about. A swimwear brand that anchors itself in highly reflective materials may not go far, for example.  

2. Is your purpose flexible enough? Your purpose needs to guide the business across all it does. It needs to be articulated clearly, and in a way that can just as easily guide NPD, communications, and recruitment. When you can use your purpose everywhere in your brand, it will naturally become clearer to your customers what your brand is. Make sure that it’s flexible enough by pressure-testing it with different audiences and across different areas of the business.

3. Is the consumer-facing expression accessible? In order for people to understand where you fit in their lives, they need to easily understand what you’re telling them your brand is. Make sure that no internal language sneaks in here, and that you are using very consumer-friendly, even colloquial, language. A good test on this one is whether you could say it to a parent or friend, and they could immediately understand without further explanation. 

What should you do next?

• Make sure that your purpose has a clear and relevant consumer need at its heart. Think about any fresh needs the category hasn’t yet explored, or a fresh way of expressing a known need.  

• Pressure-test the flexibility of your purpose across all parts of your business by checking whether you can develop all sorts of products, initiatives, and creative ideas from it.

• Ensure that the consumer-facing version of your purpose – your Proposition – is immediately and intuitively understood by your audiences. 

How to determine if it’s working.

• As you articulate your Proposition in a way that is anchored in purpose, people will begin to understand the role you play, and you will see an associated rise in your Clarity score. As you embed a consumer need in the center of it, you may also see an increase in your Relevance score, as people understand what you have to offer them.

  
  Guidance from:
  Searsha Sadek | Head of Brand Partners, ProQuo AI
  
  Searsha has always grown brands in advertising agencies: from haircare and frozen food to spirits and streaming services. She focussed on how communicating explicitly and implicitly is key.