In our first podcast with Daniel Priestley, we looked at his five step framework for becoming a Key Person of Influence (KPI). While becoming a KPI is all about how to position you or your colleagues as subject matter experts, 24 Assets is about how to build things within your business that work independently of your team, contributing to the business’s growth and stability without requiring continuous investment of your time.
Other checklists for business growth can be overly prescriptive and complicated, but the 24 Assets framework makes building up your organisation easy by giving you the freedom to choose the method in which you do it — all it asks is that you have those 24 assets in place.
Daniel divides the 24 assets into seven different classes:
- IP assets – content, methodology, and registered intellectual property
- Culture assets – KPIs, sales and marketing, management and administration, technicians
- Brand assets – philosophy, identity, ambassadors
- Market assets – positioning, channel, data
- Systems assets – marketing and sales systems, management and admin systems, operations systems
- Funding assets – business plan, valuation, structure, risk mitigation
- Product assets – gifts, product for prospect, core product, product for client
While each category is crucial, we’re going to focus on some of the most relevant ones for marketers going forward.
Of course, you don’t need us to tell you that marketers are under more pressure than ever before to do more with less, and it seems like it’ll be a long time until that’s no longer the case. So, here are the key assets you should start collating today if you want to give yourself an edge over competitors tomorrow.
Pinning down positioning
Any good brand manager knows that nailing your positioning is pivotal. But while you can try to define and document your desired positioning until you’re blue in the face, it’s only any use if your brand image aligns with it.
As an agency, one of the easiest ways to test this is to examine the work that others bring to you, unsolicited. If their briefs match your positioning, you’re on the right track: they clearly think of your business in the way you want them to. But if you keep getting briefs that don’t quite fit into your vision for the brand, it’s time to reconsider how to make your positioning as experts in your field clearer.
In this case, Daniel recommends brushing up on your SEO — or, if that’s too easy, winning some awards. ‘Awards are a really good positioning asset. If you’ve won a Michelin star, that’s going to transform your restaurant. SEO actually is a great positioning asset. If I keep Googling a particular term and your name keeps coming up, that is one hell of an asset.’
Under the influence
Influencers, classed as ambassadors under the brand asset section, are set to be a huge part of B2B marketing going forward. Frankly, it’s almost strange that B2B influencers aren’t already more mainstream, given the rampant success of the same model for B2C brands — and, on a common sense level, the primal drive for human connection.
‘Look at how humans are wired, especially these days. The more confused the brain, the more we go back to our primitive urges. We have primal urges to get to know people, to form human hierarchies, to have leaders, to look for people who are leaders,’ says Daniel.
‘We don’t really like business brands very much. Richard Branson has been telling us to love Virgin for fifty years. He sticks it on hot air balloons, planes, trains, islands and spaceships. He really wants us to love Virgin. But only about 250,000 people follow Virgin on Twitter, while 12.5 million people follow Branson. People love Branson a lot more than they love Virgin.’
Virgin is far from an isolated incident of an audience buying into someone’s story more than their brand. After all, it’s much easier to feel strong emotions towards a person, with their relatable human strengths and weaknesses, than it is a business, an entity that only exists to sell you something.
AI’ll have what they’re having
Of all the different asset classes, system assets are perhaps the least ‘sexy’. This category consists of the systems that make the smooth running of marketing and sales, management and admin, and operations possible — undoubtedly crucial, but not massively exciting.
However, that’s all about to change as we step into the brave new AI-powered world. As a revolutionary new general purpose technology that impacts every industry, Daniel believes the effects of AI are likely to be more profound and transformational than even the internet itself.
‘AI is obviously going to transform everything. There’s going to be some really big wedges driven through society,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be an endemic situation where young people who grew up with, for example, TikTok are permanently damaged by their experience with it. So these people won’t be very productive, they won’t be able to get much done. They’ll just be hyper-consumers.’
‘Then on the other side of the wedge is AI’s superpower to hyper-produce. You get these people who are super creative, who come up with an idea for a £100m company and the business is up and formed in a week, got its first customers in a month, and it’s scaling at 10% month on month, in three months. […] We’re going to divide society into the haves and have-nots, or the consumers and the creators. AI is going to do that.’
Heavy stuff. But what can you do about it?
‘Ultimately, now is this moment,’ says Daniel. ‘You’ve got to get ahead of the curve on this. You’ve got to become hyper-creative, not consumptive.’
In other words, get out there and start creating. And if you’re feeling like that might be easier said than done, discover how experts are already using the latest advances in AI to get ahead of the competition in our AI in marketing series.
LISTEN: Essential assets marketers own to drive business success Daniel reveals his full predictions for the next five to ten years, alongside even more tips about the assets that matter most for marketers.
Post from Ornella Weston