The two fundamental positionings of Identity and Journey are the basis for creating powerful user experiences with content, that enable the change of a brand’s position and power within its industry. They provide all the information a marketer needs to know where to get started.
Identity
A brand’s identity highlights the language and discourse that surround it. It brings to light the ideals, beliefs, and attitudes of its audience. With this, brands are able to leverage the most significant and accessible features of a reader to convince them to convert.
A powerful brand doesn’t just access and adopt the ideals, beliefs, and attitudes of its audience, it influences them through shifting an individual’s relationship with both their own and the brand’s identity. By doing this, a brand is able to create a stable relationship that pushes towards sustainable conversion.
Journey
A journey starts at nothing and moves to something. Every brand has its own journey; regardless of how similar they are. Journey is intertwined with the elements of identity that make its ability to sell so powerful.
To keep things simple, identity can be broken down into the three fundamental stages of a sales funnel: awareness, consideration, decision. Each of these stages defines a different user mindset. The further a user progresses, the more susceptible they are to shift.
A user’s susceptibility to shift is important in understanding how a journey and its discourse can be influenced. As, when you influence discourse, you will be able to reposition your brand within your industry. That is to say: changing the way your brand is talked about changes how your brand is viewed and how significant to the individual your brand’s journey and identity are.
The Shift
The Shift comes from horizontal movement across a customer’s journey, with each “column” embodying a different set of ideals which slightly change from the previous one. A good example of the shift can be seen in the travel industry.
| Audience | Shift 1 | Shift 2 | Shift 3 | Ideal |
| travel | travel | travel | travel | travel |
| Asia | Asia | Asia | Asia | Asia |
| planning | backpacking | backpacking | backpacking | backpacking |
| island | island | eat | eat | eat |
| Bangkok | Bangkok | Bangkok | mountains | mountains |
| need | need | need | need | best |
Instead of starting with our ideal landscape, analyzing what an audience thinks allows us to access the discourse that already exists. We then line this up with our ideal result and begin the process of shift by slowly exchanging concepts where we can. This process is not 100% foolproof and like anything in marketing, trial and error (with collection of results) are integral to its success.