Brand positioning or ‘mapping’ is a very useful tool that helps us to decide what we need to do to shift people’s perceptions of the British Council. The following explains how it works and we strongly recommend that you use it as part of your core thinking.

First, we need to decide how we would like the British Council to be perceived. For example, wherever we work, we would like to be seen as a catalyst or partner for change, as opposed to being seen simply as a funding agency or donor.

Equally, we would like to be seen as being proactive in pursuing our agenda, rather than simply responding reactively to other people’s agendas or proposals.

So if we take these perceptions and use them as co-ordinates on a simple grid, we get:

On to this grid, we can map what each of our target audiences’ current perceptions are, and we can also indicate where we would like them to be – generally moving towards the top right-hand sector for all audiences.

The actions we need to take to achieve these perception shifts will depend on the audience and their current perceptions, and over what time period we would expect to be able to achieve this.

There are generally three main things we can do to shift perceptions:

do different things
e.g. change the products or services we offer

say things differently
e.g. change our communications, looking at the messages, the media we use, the tone, images and quality of the communications

behave differently
e.g. change the way we deliver the service or experience.

So, for instance, if our T2 potential partners believe that we are simply a source of funding for their projects, but we believe that we are offering the right products and delivering them well, then we probably need to improve our communications.

If we believe our communications hit the spot (i.e. our audiences understand our offer), but we just aren’t offering the right products and services, then we need to decommission projects and commission new things that will achieve the shift in perception – and subsequent action – that we’re looking for.

Similarly, if we believe we’re offering the right products and communicating the offer effectively to the right people, then perhaps we need to consider how to improve our service delivery. And so on.

Of course, shifting people’s perceptions is rarely as simple as changing one thing, and will usually involve a combination of improvements in several areas. But the positioning or ‘mapping’ procedure still applies.

Other positioning parameters you can use in mapping your audiences’ perceptions of the British Council brand include:

service provider versus partner

purely commercial versus valued partner

elitist and exclusive versus prestigious but accessible

worthy and bureaucratic versus enterprising and customer oriented.

As well as using any particular parameters that may be important in your area of activity, you can also map any of our brand values or personality co-ordinates (see section two – Communicating the brand), to track whether these are being experienced by our target audiences.

This exercise can be useful in providing a baseline to establish where we are starting from – or, more precisely, where each of our target audiences is starting from.

Done in teams, this simple tool can help establish a picture of what needs to be done, and begin the debate on how to achieve it.