To achieve lasting success, businesses need to build meaningful connections with their customers. You want fans of your brand to come back time after time, sing your praises to their peers, and champion your products. But how do you earn their time, attention, and trust?
Need Help Getting Started On Your Mission Statement?
With our Brand Positioning Package, CatalystCreativ Seventh Level Specialists will help you do just that. Not only will we work with you to develop a Seventh Level Statement that perfectly encapsulates why you do what you do, but we’ll also conduct a deep competitor analysis of your peers. Based upon these two inputs, we’ll deliver to you a personalized Brand Positioning Document that outlines an engagement roadmap, and content pillars for heightened customer engagement.
Want to find out more about this package, to see if it’s the right fit for your organizational needs? Fill out a form here, or at the bottom of this page.
Start with Yourself
To connect with your customers, you need an identity to connect to. That means defining your core beliefs and values as an individual and a company. This most often appears as a mission statement, or what I call your Seventh Level Statement, referring to the seven levels of engagement a customer can experience.
We each have our own individual Seventh Level as a person or as a business. That’s where you ultimately want to engage with your customers. To do that, however, you have to start with yourself.
To define your core values, take a moment to look back on your life and think about an experience when you most felt like yourself. Why did you feel so fulfilled and self-actualized in that moment? What experiences made you, you? Your answer to these questions will lead you to the guiding force behind the decisions you make and how you engage, and the sum of those feelings is the Seventh Level.
Take the time to assess your Seventh Level Statement—both for yourself individually and for your company—because defining your own Seventh Level Statement is the only way for you to know when you’ve actually reached the highest level of engagement with someone else.
Without knowing what you stand for, you won’t be able to tell if you see eye to eye with someone else or if you care about the same things. That emotional resonance is what will solidify your customer connections.
For example, Apple has played a huge role in shaping my identity. As an entrepreneur, it helped me launch my career. My old MacBook was the first laptop that I bought for myself, that I wasn’t forced to use by an employer. It was beautiful and sleek and special and felt more like a gorgeous piece of jewelry than a computer. It made me feel in charge and creative, and now I refuse to buy anything except Apple.
What ultimately matters most is what I have made Apple mean for me—how my personal values and beliefs of inspiring and educating aligned with what I would say is Steve Jobs’s Seventh Level Statement: to create beautiful things that inspire the way people see themselves and the world.
You want your statement to inspire the same emotional resonance in your customers.
How to Write Your Seventh Level Statement
Now that you’ve defined your personal core values, how can you frame those ideas in a statement?
Consider the following examples and use their format for inspiration. The examples shared below are all Seventh Level Statements from attendees at the 2019 AMA Triangle High Five Conference. They’re personal statements, but you could easily use this format for your brand or company’s statement, too. Simply replace the values and goals in the statements with your own.
My Seventh Level is my creative freedom.
Providing peace of mind to clients’ pain points is my Seventh Level.
My Seventh Level is to entertain the people I connect with in a unique and intriguing fashion.
Once you’ve identified your values and priorities, all it takes is a simple sentence to communicate those ideas to your customers.
Living Your Statement
Now that you’ve identified your values and written them into a statement, you need to make sure they permeate every aspect of your messaging. Use your statement as the lens to communication with your customers.
When you communicate your values clearly and consistently, you give your customers a solid identity to relate to and lay the foundation for a long-lasting, meaningful connection.
How confident are you in your ability to succinctly and clearly state what makes your brand tick? There’s no shame in finding it challenging! But there’s no way around it—if you aren’t projecting your best, truest self to your customers, they won’t have any reason to engage with you in return. Whether you’re a new business, or an established one looking to find its edge, it can prove wildly beneficial to take a beat and finesse your Seventh Level Statement.
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