Can ‘positioning’ unleash your brand’s potential?

Mobile security provider Corrata has enjoyed success, awards, and solid partnerships with leading mobile networks—bringing loyal business customers. But, like many CEOs, Founder Colm Healy has greater ambitions: To seize the opportunity to play on an international stage—and propel the business to the highest levels. 

Mobile security provider Corrata has enjoyed success, awards, and solid partnerships with leading mobile networks—bringing loyal business customers. But, like many CEOs, Founder Colm Healy has greater ambitions: To seize the opportunity to play on an international stage—and propel the business to the highest levels. 

But where to begin?

“As a CEO you see there’s this big market opportunity you’re not playing in. How do you ‘tool-up’ to address that market? We know we have the best product to serve that market. But there’s so much more to it than that!”

Corrata devised a uniquely powerful and user-friendly approach to protecting the mobile devices of business customers. This has earned them partnerships with industry giants like AT&T, Three Mobile UK, and Three Ireland, who recommend Corrata protection to their business customers.  

But, focusing on future growth, Corrata identified that while 40% of businesses buy their mobile security through their network operator, 60% do not.  

“We’re not visible to that 60%. So, there's this larger share of the market that we’re completely missing out. There’s a world out there we want to address. The US. Western Europe. We need to speak to potential customers, those who value a high-performance product.”

Best-in-breed, ready to compete

Confident that for their ‘best-in-breed’ product, accessing the US and European markets is a viable opportunity, Corrata set about positioning their offer to businesses. Success requires taking on giants of tech, with their super-powered marketing teams and budgets. This demands a clearly-differentiated brand that communicates key messages, to excite and engage potential customers.  

In spite of multiple attempts and false starts, finding the right positioning eluded the team.  

“You reach a certain point in your evolution and it’s a pivot point. You need great clarity and a degree of distance to create the positioning and brand you need. My advice, you won’t get there yourselves.”

A dilemma not unique to Corrata. Marketing Magazine’s Mark Ritson offers this… “Remember … We are not the consumer … You can’t, as the ancient slice of marketing wisdom puts it, see the label from inside the bottle.” 

Partnering up

“You may have ‘built a better mousetrap’, but if nobody knows about it, and what it can do for them, that’s not worth much.”

With a lot at stake for Colm and the team, they called–in outside expertise. “We took a lot of care finding the right partner to optimise our brand for this next stage. We’re not a huge company, we needed to maximise on our investment.“ Corrata engaged specialist partner, Totem, to guide and define a new brand strategy, to position and brand Corrata in clear and simple terms.   

Set trajectory for transformation

TOTEM reviewed the market, interviewed customers and workshopped with Corrata’s core team, to uncover the insights needed. The process identified something unique and true to Corrata, “Having the most powerful mobile protection for business is quite something,” says Colin Byrne, Founder & Creative Director of TOTEM, “but we were struck by how easy the solution is to deploy and maintain for the client’s overworked IT department. Plus, with intense focus on privacy, Corrata allays end-user’s concerns and removes the friction that invasive security products can cause with employees.”  

TOTEM’s findings led to a simple statement to distil Corrata’s proposition—to clearly express their positioning… “Easily, the most powerful protection”.  

Captured in this deceptively simple phrase is Corrata’s ease of use and deployment, paired with the product’s powerful advantage over competitors. 

Customer in mind

This eloquently represents what TOTEM and Corrata were seeking. That ‘sweet spot’ between what Corrata were uniquely offering and what their customers really need.  

“Your brand”, says Byrne, “is what your customer thinks and feels about you. It’s your responsibility to influence that. If you’re not really clear, if you don’t simplify your message to focus on what’s essential — you’ll miss your opportunity to connect with your what your audience needs.”  

The clarity and the spark

The results? Healy says Corrata are immediately better represented to the world. And better positioned to hire, “It’s about clarity and depth, we better understand our place in the world and our reason for being. Our culture as a company is clear. Our values are ‘bought-into’. After all, we co-created this, with Totem as guide, and they helped articulate it for us — with the creative spark needed to inspire and unite the team.”  

There’s a tangible sense of relief at this clarity and direction… “This is our positioning we believe in. And it works. And it’s consistent.” 

The impact includes the appeal of the business to potential talent. Colin Byrne of TOTEM is passionate;  

“To ignite your brand, it needs to be what you’re hiring for and rewarding as a business. Brand and culture are tightly entwined. This doesn’t just affect the experience of your people, it directly impacts your customer experience.”

Corrata Slider

Ready to secure the future

All this talk of proposition and positioning comes to life in a brand’s messaging and marketing. Whether landing pages of your website, a more conventional advertisement, or a series of LinkedIn posts.  

We may not be conscious of the deep thought behind these ideas that compete for our attention, but we’re probably familiar with “Don’t do business without it”, from American Express, or Mailchimp’s “Built for growing businesses”. These phrases offer a shorthand, conjuring the place the brand wants to occupy in our minds. Corrata deploys a series of key messages that reflect what they learned about customers through the branding process. 

To better communicate the strategy and customer messaging, Corrata put a fresh brand identity in place, to distinguish the brand and stand apart from the competition. Its combination of visual and verbal consistency, repetition, and variation, provides a degree of ‘stickiness’ in the minds of the audience, to aid recognition and recall of the brand.  

The end, or the beginning?

Talking with Corrata about the journey, it’s easy to see the benefits to any business. Understanding how the offer intersects with the pressing needs of your audience. Devising a strategy to engage that audience. Adding a toolkit of key messages and visuals that connect and build your brand in the minds of customers. Is this the catalyst needed to ignite the next stage of growth?  

It seems appropriate to give the last word to Corrata’s VP Sales, Dylan Fermoyle.

“We have a lot to do, but we have built the foundations. We have what we need in place to get to work connecting with our ideal clients to grow the business. In the process we’re going to make the mobile workplace safer for businesses. Watch this space.”

Corrata’s VP Colm Healy with Colin Byrne of TOTEM

In conversation with Colm Healy, CEO, Corrata and Colin Byrne, Creative Director, TOTEM.