What You Need, Dear Brand, Is a Point of View
By: Steve Bryant
Tags: Branding, Marketing, Content Marketing

A POV is not about you, it’s about the world

A brand wants people to desire its product, but people don’t desire products. People desire feelings that products give them.

A POV is about having an opinion or set of opinions about things that are not your product. Your experience determines your view, but your view is not about yourself.

The more authority you have to espouse those opinions, the more interesting and trenchant those opinions, the more those people will listen. Having a POV allows a brand to better determine the rules of the conversation.

But a POV is not a sales pitch. Not directly. The utility of that point of view is not to capture dollars by selling a thing. The utility of that POV is to capture attention by selling an idea adjacent to that thing.

Having a POV doesn’t mean capturing market territory, it means creating it.

How to create your POV

At the end of the day, a point of view is really only an opinion about two things:

It’s an opinion about the audience you want to speak with. It’s an opinion about a topic that you and your audience have in common

The point of view is simply how you speak about the topic to the audience.

It includes your understanding of who they are, what you think about them, what you think they already know, how much you care for them, and how you communicate those feelings. Or, in other words, a point of view is the attitude and altitude of what you say.

Here’s a triangle-shaped memory device:

This basic framing device works for any type of content you want to create, whether it’s a magazine or a conference about artificial intelligence and space. But like anybody named Euclid will tell you, you must have all three vertices to form a triangle.

If you have an audience and a point of view, but you don’t have a consistent topic of conversation, you’ll fail with respect to curation. This would be WIRED, if WIRED also covered recipes for creme brûlée.

If you have a topic and a point of view, but you don’t know which audience you want to speak to, you’ll fail with respect to tone. This would be AWS Re:Invent, if AWS Re:Invent were presented entirely in Esperanto.

And if you have a topic and an audience but no point of view, then you’ll fail with respect to being interesting. This would be a whitepaper.

And so, you have to ask yourself some questions

So it’s one thing to understand what a POV is and why a POV can be helpful. It’s quite another to actually create that POV.

When we work with clients to figure this out, our agency begins with a series of questions. We begin with the brand’s goals, and end with how do those goals align with what the audience wants and needs.

The most difficult part of this process, for the brand, isn’t the questions. Anybody can make pretty tables of questions. The most difficult part is unlearning the habit pattern of brand first and learning, instead, to focus on the audience’s wants and needs. As with everything, the most difficult part is being honest with yourself.

Different goals require different types of content and different methods of producing that content. Every medium has its own operating principle and method for measuring success. A thought leadership blog, for example, operates by creating content that attracts new readers (awareness) and measures success by engagement metrics. Since awareness is the principle, content decisions must support that. IOW, make it as easy as possible for people to become aware.

What does your brand need to accomplish? Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

The most under-served part of any content project. You need to understand what the audience wants and decide how you can help them get it. If you’re doing thought leadership, for example, what the audience wants isn’t your product. What the audience wants is a supposed benefit of your product. They want work to be easier or they want to feel more productive or they want to feel confident in the future. Like that.

Once you understand what the audience wants, you can match topics to those desires and choose the altitude of that topic. For example: If your audience wants to feel more confident in the future of AI, and that audience is comprised of CTOs, then your topic’s altitude will be quite high — you’re not telling them what AI is, you’re explaining how AI is determining the future. You can even attach a benefit to each of these topics — that is, a takeaway that the audience will get. (“Every time we talk about AI to CTOs we’ll stress point A, B, C, etc.”)

Make sure what you want to talk about aligns to what they want to hear. If it doesn’t, you may be speaking to the wrong people, or you’ve chosen the wrong adjacent possible for your business.