Be clear on who your market really is.

"Marketing" begins with the word "market". So should every brand strategy, advertising campaign and new product or service development. Perhaps surprisingly, though, that's not always the case.

"Who are you for, and what do you do for them?" are simple enough questions, but critical to any brand's success. If you have absolute clarity on both, you should do well.

And look carefully at any apparent "gap in the market". Sometimes, it's there because nobody actually wants the product or service you think they do.

Often, the market isn't quite what people think it was. So the gap changes shape or size accordingly. We worked with a client who had identified what they thought was a gap with huge potential: over 30% of the UK population suffered from a particular condition, while only 10% bought a product to deal with it. That, our client calculated, meant that over 20% of the population were available for their product. So the positioning they had developed was one of educating the public, rather than making the assumptions shown by the current market leader in this segment. But had got nowhere.

We looked at the data differently, and asked a couple of different questions. What became clear was that the population was quite aware of their condition, and needed no further education. The 10% were the ones who wanted to do something about it. The remaining 20-something% did not.

So, the market changed; and the gap changed. Our recommendation was that the positioning should, too. Especially when we discovered a genuine and unique product advantage in our client's product: one that was relevant and compelling to those people in the gap.

The result? A huge uplift in distribution, recommendation and sales. Just by getting clarity on those two questions: "Who are we for, and what do we do for them?"