Andy Cunningham- Get to Aha!: Discover Your Positioning DNA and Dominate Your Competition
Too many leaders fail to ask the two most important questions about their company: Who are we? And why do we matter?
Like people, companies are organisms that reflect their creators, their environments, their obstacles, and their strengths. They carry a core instruction set that informs the actions and outcomes of their work. In short, they have DNA – what Cunningham calls corporate DNA – and there are three types: Mothers (customer-oriented), Mechanics (product-oriented) and Missionaries (concept-oriented).
Using Cunningham’s DNA-based methodology, you’ll perform “genetic testing” on your company, examine the market through the six Cs of positioning, and develop your positioning statement―a rational, factual statement about your company’s unique role and relevance. Then, and only then, can you create a branding and marketing strategy that will build market momentum and crush the competition.
Andy is a renowned Silicon Valley marketing strategist and expert – she helped Steve Jobs launch the original Apple Macintosh – and founder of Cunningham Collective, a marketing, brand and communication strategy firm.
Andy Cunningham has been at the forefront of tech and innovation since day one, and she’s been helping companies create new product categories ever since. Now she reveals the winning framework she uses to transform markets and industries.
Cunningham Collective is a marketing firm that helps companies through challenges of traction, transformation, and turnaround. We are executive-level leaders who span the full spectrum of technology marketing disciplines. We blend strategic management consulting rigor with practical, fast execution.
We were founded by Andy Cunningham, a category kingmaker who has helped the who’s who of Silicon Valley tech launch innovations over three decades. She worked closely with Steve Jobs for several years as PR strategist for the launch of the Mac, NeXT, and Pixar. She launched and ran two successful PR and communications strategy agencies with exits – Cunningham Communication and CXO Strategies.
In 2012 Andy hand-picked her team of marketing leaders to form Cunningham Collective, a different kind of tech marketing consultancy for a different kind of tech world. Ever since, the firm has achieved a steady stream of successful outcomes and invented a better, faster, and more affordable method for solving complex business problems.
A marketing entrepreneur at the forefront of communicating the Next Big Thing, Andy has played a key role in developed the branding and launch strategies of numerous game-changing technologies and companies including Adobe, Aldus and Apple; video games with Atari and Electronic Arts; digital imaging with Kodak; RISC microprocessors with IBM and Motorola; software as a service with HP; very light jets with Eclipse Aviation; and clean tech investing with VantagePoint Venture Partners.
Today she is the proud co-founder and president of Cunningham Collective, a marketing, brand and communication firm dedicated to bringing innovation to market. We help entrepreneurs at companies both large and small tackle issues of traction, transformation and turnaround, and specialize in clientele that use technology to develop or improve their products or services. I have also acted as interim CMO at Avaya Inc. Beautifull, Deem, Specialized Bicycle Components, Inc., Tendril Networks and VantagePoint Capital Partners.
Andy got her start in Silicon Valley in 1983, when she moved from Chicago to work with marketing legend Regis McKenna to help Steve Jobs launch the original Macintosh. Her character plays a role in the award-winning film Steve Jobs by Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle. When Steve left Apple to form NeXT and acquire Pixar, he chose Cunningham Communication, Inc., the public relations agency I launched in 1985, to represent him.
During my time as CEO there, the agency (later known as Citigate Cunningham) represented many of the world’s leading high technology corporations including AMD, Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Xerox. In 2004, I founded and led CXO Communication, a bi-coastal, privately held brand strategy and communications consultancy that today is still going strong from its
headquarters in Boston. While running CXO, I counseled many of the boards of directors, CEOs and venture capitalists currently shaping the world’s technology and consumer industries.
In addition to serving on the corporate boards of Specialized Bicycle Components, Inc., Finelite, Inc. (an LED lighting systems company), and Blinkx (an ad tech company that is publicly traded on the UK AIM exchange), I sit on the boards of the following institutions and non-profit organizations: The Aspen Institute; Menlo College; Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications; and ZERO1: The Art & Technology Network, an organization I founded with the mission to shape the future at the intersection of art and technology.
Her websites are http://www.andycunningham.com/ and http://cunninghamcollective.com/
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