Streamlining is a term that’s all too common in the business world—to the point where it can be difficult to discern what is actually meant by it. What can make this more difficult to understand is that the term itself can have both positive and negative connotations, making it difficult to apply in a marketing context without the risk of misinterpretation.
However, you and your brand might have more control over this perception, especially when the term is used in relation to your purposes, meaning that you firstly need a solid understanding of what you want streamlining to mean.
The Positive Perception
It might be that your rendition of streamlining is simply listening to all the feedback and data you’ve received over the years and taking the opportunity to cut out what doesn’t work, and refine what does. That might be the most straightforward perception of this process, but what does that actually look like?
It might be about the tools that you use—implementing an API management platform that can help you and your staff to exercise better control over your digital platforms in order to deliver an optimal experience. It might also refer to how you structure your operations internally, establishing a more cohesive infrastructure that simplifies who’s delegated which tasks and who manages which area.
Streamlining as Simplification
How some audiences might perceive this term, however, could be one of simplification. Again, that’s not something that’s inherently negative, but in certain fields, such as video games, for example, it’s a term that has often been synonymous with the melting down of systems into something more universal and less unique. It’s worth stressing that this still can be something that’s viewed positively, but you have to do what you can to control the direction that this image takes.
Streamlining is an excellent opportunity to make your operations more effective and your structure more efficient, but when you start to clean up the edges, it can be difficult to know where to stop. If there’s a critical piece of your business or brand that’s at risk of being lost in this process, it’s worth ensuring that you’re not doing more smoothing out than you really need to. After all, you don’t want to risk making yourself too generic or unrecognizable through this process.
How You Market It
Once again, though, you come back to this idea of the process not being inherently positive or negative, but rather dependent on how you depict it outwardly. You might decide to market this process as part of your second debut, perhaps incorporating a logo redesign to prepare your audiences for the kind of changes and improvements that might come along with this process. If services or aspects of your business are being cut as a result of these changes, it’s important that you’re transparent and communicative about why these things are happening and alleviate any fears that your audiences might have by helping them to understand what might be improved as a result of this.