How healthy is your positioning statement?

The new trend is to position oneself as a 'life-enhancing agency', but providing advertising services to the cosmetic or health industries makes an agency life-enhancing like being able to sew a button makes you a fashion designer.

Being life-enhancing as an agency is about more than just which industry you provide with advertising services - you can be an agency that focuses on the widget industry and still be life-enhancing; it is about your commitment to quality, the level of service you provide and your willingness to meet client needs, as well as your internal values and company culture.

This translates into providing a more meaningful service to clients by offering strategic market intelligence to assist clients in making business decisions beyond those that involve how much to spend on advertising or supplying your networking skills to bring clients together. Consumers can also benefit from this attitude towards marketing because of the integrity that follows the life-enhancing philosophy as well as the knowledge base an agency can offer consumers and clients.

It is all fine and well to follow trends and position yourself as life-enhancing, but for this positioning to take root and be credible, it should be more than skin deep, becoming part of the company culture, its ethics and principles in all aspects of work externally and within the company itself.

This is particularly important for a pharmaceutical advertising agency, due to the changes in the industry which have created uncertainty in the market. By offering a more holistic service to clients as well as diversifying the core business to include mind, body and soul products and services, an agency can have a far more substantial impact on the market and apply its philosophy by bringing these disciplines together to benefit the consumer.

This outlook should not be a burden, but rather a doorway to new opportunities where your agency can fill gaps of service to the client and the consumer. This change should make business sense, however, and should not be done simply because you are not sure where the industry is headed and you are afraid to appear stagnant.

Naturally, this business philosophy is open to interpretation and agencies must make it their own. Whether they offer creative ideas of enhancing client work environments or stick to more business-focused services such as market research and industry networking, agencies have a great deal of scope in the implementation of a life-enhancing philosophy. What must be remembered is that there is more to being positioned as life-enhancing than a marketing strategy - you must substantiate how you do it by your actions rather than just your words.