 Why in the morning if it's Tuesday it's entrepreneurship Tuesday at Y2F4 channel is where you can find us across all social media handles at Michelle Ashira so you can find me across all my social in this particular session we dive into an interview that looks at brand positioning we'll dive into this conversation look at how important how important it is to align yourself as a business owner when it comes to branding and what it entails in studio I am joined by Anthony Kiguta who is the managing director of Ziprof Technologies good morning Anthony Good morning Michelle How are you doing? How is your Tuesday coming along? It's coming along fine Fantastic So briefly take us through who Anthony Kiguta is Where did you grow up and what exactly what do you do? Well my background okay Anthony Kiguta is born and raised in Nyeri County in a family of three and growing up I grew up just like any other kid a first born for that matter and all along I've come a long way even coming to the point of now getting to school and all that Ziprof Technologies he spoke on that is something that came along the way because initially I was pursuing something totally different and I was pursuing accounting but I developed some passion in IT and it's something I decided now I need to pursue this growing up we were not so much exposed to technology you know in Nyeri County interiors and all that so when I came to the city I got that exposure and I got to learn much about IT processes and now I decided to pursue that passion Nice So our conversation today is on brand positioning of a brand And let's look at what is brand positioning? Brand positioning is the process you undertake in placing the brand in the mind of your customer How the customer will perceive your brand You may come up with very nice colors you know the logo the tagline and all that but you need now to position that in the mind of the customer Alright and how do you achieve that? One of the ways is okay let me just take you all through the steps you need to understand yourself because in one or another whether you are aware of it or not you are doing some bit of brand positioning you start a company and there is a way now people get to perceive about you and now you need to position yourself in the right way you need to identify how you are doing it how other people are doing it you analyze that compare that what is your unique element what is your brand bringing in that is unique different from the rest now you need now to position yourself in such a way that people now get that element that it comes out clearly and there are various strategies that you can employ Ya I was heading there Ya sorry sorry there are some ways you can approach it you can approach it from the angle of quality that is quality based positioning where you are communicating the quality you are bringing on the table bringing you possibly you are developing a software for example this is something that is reliable this is something that is unique to the market so that element of quality needs to come out clearly that is when you are taking the quality based approach this is also the price value approach there is the general perception among customers that when something is quite pricey it must be good ya we always think that it is actually expensive it has to be of good quality it has to be of good quality so if you decide to go that way you can still take it but you also need to match to that so that when they are buying it they don't get frustrated along the way then you also don't want to price yourself so low so that someone is like are you guys serious are you serious in what you are doing the other approach you can take when you are doing the positioning you can look at the problem and solution where you are communicating to the customers I ignore your problem and I have this solution for you I think it is very common in those vernacular stations you hear have you been doing this, this and that we have this solution for you and it is still an approach that you can take it needs much of research you need to go back to your customer get to identify clearly what is their problem so that now you can then come in and present a solution for them another thing is I like what you say if I come onto the picture and they give a very low pricey quotation then they will question how legitimate I am and the quality of what I am offering so let's take me through the fact that if I am building a business profile for a business problem is just starting off how do I go about it about you need first to identify what you are selling because then what you are selling you need to give value to it you don't want to sell something just for the sake of making an extra coin it needs to match that even when you are doing your profiling you need to profile based on your product or your service so that you align yourself in such a way that really when you are presenting that business profile to someone they are like ok you understand your thing so if you knew you asked this much yes you understand your thing alright so you have been into business in the space of technology for approximately 7 years now yes since 2014 since 2014 and you left employment in 2018 in 2018 I was doing it on the side you do a side hustle you pursue but then with time you realize this is where my passion is alright and you get into business and here we are right now so why does positioning matter for a business it matters because the position in the mind of people how they perceive your brand if they perceive your brand is low quality then your growth won't be as better compared to a position where people feel this is something I can identify with this is something I can grow with for example like in our case we have positioned ourselves as a go to people for small scale startups SMEs and the rest so when they come to us they need to feel this person understands us and the kind of solution I need they will be able to give me so based on the first impression they got about us and how we have positioned ourselves in the market and our competitors they are able to identify and also give you business so if you don't position yourself well you will fail terribly we have looked at the brand positioning strategy so let's look at what makes a winning position a winning position a winning position is striking a balance between all of them because you may pick one and along the way you may burn out for example if you focus on price alone you will find this is not a client who doesn't mind about the price when I come to you I need a solution money is not a problem so if you had centered your whole approach on price you will fail because that person will come picking holes into the quality you are assuring them is the solution giving me quality is it solution coming to solve just a section of my problems so if you employ pricing then along the way you bringing the element of the benefit your communicator you are giving them they feel ok this is the person I need to work with before we actually continue I think it's best this is the time where we can look at different types of positioning different types of brand positioning I would say they are quite interlinked with the strategy it has used there is a way you can position yourself as a solution provider like in our case as a solution provider this ok for us it's a service there are people who may go to sell they are selling products so the product is not necessarily possibly it's a cosmetic thing there are people they can do away without it but you need now to communicate that to them so you need to position yourself in such a way that you are you are rhyming with the customer needs yes still speaking about customer so why should I use my consumers to develop my positioning because they are the ultimate people who will support and keep you afloat if you develop a solution and you are forcing people into it they will keep away from you because they need to essentially when they come to you they are looking for a solution so if you are working the other way like you are bombarding them with you know information bombarding just we sell this without getting to understand what they really need it will frustrate you because ok you will have a few trials ok there are those people who are risk takers the customers but others are not risk takers they really have a defined thing they are looking for so it is very important you work from there customer feedback, customer responses and you work together with them in what you do actually you guys offer digital marketing we offer web developing we offer digital marketing I see IT consulting when you look at the digital marketing space and brand positioning what is important is that when it comes to people into the business world including just an inclusion of digital marketing in just putting their brand out there the internet I would say is a very big market it's yet to be fully exploited I would say so and when you are alone you are just in that kashop in that kashop area if you just keep around the people close to you and all that you limit yourself but when you get into digital marketing you are marketing your product to people out there you will get limitless possibility limitless opportunities and I think during this pandemic it has really opened up our eyes on the power and the importance of digital marketing I remember when we got into the whole issue of lockdowns and the rest we got approaches from several clients who were like how do we get into the digital space and we helped quite a number of them just to position themselves out there now in the online market and it is very important because you continue even to get referrals out there you continue to tap into other markets that possibly you are not even aware of just for our case there are clients who call even from out of the country I have never maybe gone to that particular country but we have our digital marketing team working in there out and positioning our brand out there and we get enquiries we get business so it's very important to get into the digital marketing so I want to use this opportunity to dig into the fact that you also offer IT consultancy so how important is it just from digital marketing space apart from social media what else can we do because I understand you also do web development what else can we do just to put our brand out there because when you talk about digital marketing the internet space we just think about social media what else? social media is just one component of digital marketing and many have employed it it's working I would say it's working especially in the Kenyan market but you need also to explore the other opportunities for yourself and first you need to create a space of your own and that is in the form of a website you need to have a website where you are displaying your products where you are communicating your vision mission your target market and all that because maybe it's not necessarily a product driven business it's more of a service driven business so people need to have somewhere they can come to and learn more about you so I would highly recommend you start from that base get a website then also now you need to also get into another digital marketing aspect we call as search engine marketing where you work with the search engines you make payments you pay according to your keywords possibly you would want people to reach out or to get to your website using a certain keyword the best filmmakers you can pay for that that is search engine marketing you can pay and also you can also use something we call search engine optimization that is done on your website you optimize your website such that now the search engine can rank you better so that people can now get to learn about you there's also what we call ad display where you can work with the marketing agents Google being one of them they have they can tap into many websites like you get into like a betting website it's very common you'll get some popups here and there so you need to work with such agencies to display your adverts out there you may not know which is the best in terms of traffic the website which is the best website to advertise on but when working with the agencies they are able to tell you okay this and this websites we can place your advert here so that is also another part of digital marketing looking back seven years ago we're still starting off the new kid in the block a couple of mistakes that you made when you came to just putting your brand out there to the public one of the challenges I had is lack of confidence of what I'm selling and you enter it to a boardroom full of the guys who make the decision you lack that confidence what possibly I would say I worked towards that building my capacity because one of the reasons why you are not confident is your capacity you are doubting your capacity I remember it was one instance I got into it's a government entity and it's full of people who actually know less about IT and they are like they are asking those small questions they are like okay I didn't think this would be initially I need to explain so with time I got to build my capacity in that the other one was in terms of marketing you place your money where it's not really giving you any returns okay you feel okay this is working for so and so I also need to put some money in there and you realize oh I am not matching my or rather my position is very different from them so your approach needs to be in line with what you are selling so some of the mistakes I did is like just place an advert out there I remember like paying a daily and you are like the people who call you are people looking for work not really people who are like to give you business you may the paper or rather the daily may work for someone else but it may not work for your case so you need to understand which are the avenues that can work actually for your marketing case and you mentioned something very important about building capacity so how can we for just business startups that are getting into the market they are trying to put their brand out there so how can we build their own capacity one start with someone who is already into it get a mentor at times the capacity may not be on the papers possibly you already have the papers you need someone who will guide you like okay I want to try this like for my case I have my mentor once in a while I am thinking of doing this and he is like okay Tony don't try that don't try that won't work so that is one element then continually learning there is no end to learning there are so many resources out there get online get to YouTube learn much about your field anything revolving around your business anything revolving about your product if it is a product that deals with elements things like ingredients it's a food product learn about those ingredients is there something you can do with the ingredients is this something you can adjust on one flavor also that can make that difference so continue learning every day there is no end to learning because there are new trends coming up there are new trends so let's look at a couple of when it comes to this space of branding couple of lessons that you have learned along the way because you looked at the mistakes you made so what couple of lessons that you have learned along the way as you grow branding is very important what like in our case we started with and our focus was to present the professional element of it because in our field there are quite a number of quarks and it's something we needed to really communicate out there like we do it in a professional way oh yeah and also going to the right person for information sure sure sure you really need to have even a support system within your business like okay who can gain me on this who can gain me on this also learn from the rest learn from other brands how are they positioning something how are they presenting themselves so that now when you come in you have your own uniqueness yes so that's something I learned I didn't want to go to okay I'm seeing so and so is doing this I want to do exactly this learn from this person learn from another person then develop now your own brand based on what you do and what you're good at authentic and a couple of challenges that you faced while just coming up with a brand which is unique to the market okay on the brand element there are times you may want to possibly want to get into the space of advertising to the level like we were really looking into getting into big advertising you know billboard and the rest you don't have the finances okay finances are a major challenge to many startups and at times you feel without these finances I can't go much you're not really doing it especially if you want to get into means chain it's a very major challenge and getting even to the mid you want to communicate your brand out there you look at those rate cards and you're like I need to work more so we were really working and also collaborations at times you want to collaborate with partners and they are not even sure about your brand okay you're a new kid in a block and are you really sure about this so some of the challenges we met along the way are some of those where you approach people and you're like okay let me give you a few more years then you come and how do you cap that the whole situation of challenges being like example finances and the people who you're able to win their trust credibility aspect of it so how do you cap that situation in terms of winning their confidences continue doing what you're good at because with time they'll get to notice it at times you would we would do that then along the way someone the same person calls you I saw you were doing this come we talk I saw you were doing this it's the same people you were approaching on possibly a different issue but now they have seen you are really serious about this you are serious about getting into this business in that level now in terms of finances you really need to control as much as you have expectations you can't do everything at once it's quite a process you need to work on your financial discipline you need to work within your limits work within your limits don't over price don't go to the level of trying to exploit your customers just to get that extra coin to handle your cash flow issues speaking about financial being responsible in terms of finances couple of financial lessons you have learnt along the way financial lessons at times one of them is the one I've mentioned live within your limits even in your personal life if you don't live within your limits it will flow even into your business because you'll start even picking the little that the business is making and you don't have any reserve on the business so the element of this plan it's something I've learnt I would say in a hard way and in a good way I think guys if you want to pick anything from this interview or anything else just pick the aspect of discipline because I think it runs along every aspects of our lives so Anthony Kiguta thank you for creating time to be with us probably share your social media handles on how guys can reach out to you Twitter handle Instagram all of my social media handles at Tony Kiguta Tony is T-O-N-I-E Kiguta and also now for the Ziprof we are at Ziprof Tech T-E-C-H for Twitter for Instagram is Ziprof underscore tech for Facebook is Ziprof Technologies Limited alright thank you very much Anthony Kiguta for creating time to be with us so make sure you guys follow up with him to keep the conversation going and if you have any question pertaining the branding position he's the guy to talk to at Y244 channel is where you can find us across all our social media handles at Michelle so we'll be right back with so much more right here on Entrepreneurship Tuesday