Brand positioning is the process of carving out a unique niche in the marketplace for your products or services. It guides brand messaging to let customers know what your brand stands for and why they should buy.
The benefits of brand positioning include (1) creating a memorable brand identity, (2) forging an emotional connection with your target audience, and (3) supporting your pricing strategy.
This article examines five steps your brand can take to set its brand positioning strategy.
The Harvard Business School offers the example of three bottled water brands with distinct brand positions:
Voss: An upscale brand for consumers who are willing to pay extra for pure artesian water from Norway.
Perrier: A mid-market brand for consumers who want a premium experience at an affordable price.
Ethos: A socially conscious brand with a mission of “helping children get clean water.”
Each of these brands enjoys a unique brand position, with its own target audience, even though they sell similar products.
Understand your target audience: Who are the people interested in the products or services your brand offers? Learn where they live, how they shop, what income levels and life stages they occupy. Are they retired boomers looking for convenience? High-earning millennials looking for prestige? Gen Xers who want to make a difference in the world?
Study the competition to find out where your brand fits in relation to others. Perceptual mapping (see graph below) is a useful tool for understanding where your brand fits now, and how you can position it for sustainable growth.
A perceptual map represents how your brand is viewed in comparison to the competition by graphing qualities or attributes across two dimensions.
Below is one example of a perceptual map:
[Image credit: amaboston.org]
Visualizing where your brand fits into the competitive landscape can tell you not only where your brand is today, but where you can position it in the future. This technique is not limited to consumer products but applies to B2B services as well.
Find your brand’s unique niche in the market. Differentiate your brand from the competition. What makes it different? What does your brand offer that others don’t? The market research from Step 2 will be helpful in finding your niche.
Define your brand by thinking through the values it stands for – its brand culture. Don’t be afraid to stand for something! Be authentic and look for ways to connect with the values of your target audience. To capture attention in a crowded marketplace, your brand needs to appeal to its target audience on an emotional level, not just a practical level.
“Consumers are looking to brands to create meaning in their lives – to make their consumption of everyday products and services more significant. As long as brands are meaning-makers, they will continue to create value for consumers and for firms,” says Jill Avery of the Harvard Business School.
“In a nutshell: Your brand positioning statement defines how your brand is perceived. While it is not public facing, consider it the North Star that guides your brand marketing strategies and messages,” writes the Harvard Business School (“HBS”).
To create a brand positioning statement, start with your value proposition. This is the statement that answers the question, “Why should I buy?” The HBS suggests this format for a brand’s value proposition:
“We help [whom: target audience] to [achieve what: customer need] by [what my products or services deliver: brand attribute].”
In the case of the premium bottled water brand Voss, the value statement might read, “Voss offers upscale consumers a luxurious, stylish drinking experience, with the purest water sourced from an artesian well in Norway.”
Your brand positioning statement builds on the value proposition by considering the competitive landscape, points of difference, and what the HBS calls “reasons to believe.”
Using perceptual mapping from Step 2, identify where your brand stands compared to the competition. What makes it different? What proof, or “reasons to believe,” can you offer to make the difference believable?
The result is your brand positioning statement. The HBS suggests this format:
“For [target audience], our brand is the only one among all [competitive set] that [unique value claim or point of difference] because [reasons to believe].”
Returning to the premium bottled water brand, its brand positioning statement might read, “For upscale consumers looking to make a design statement with their water choice, Voss is the only brand among all bottled waters that offers the purest, most distinctive drinking experience because it derives from an artesian source in southern Norway and is packaged in a stylish, iconic glass bottle.”
Your brand positioning statement should clarify the brand promises that set it apart – and give specific reasons to support the promise.
It isn’t enough for brands to be relevant now; they need to stay relevant. “Consumers don’t just want brands to be different and relevant but to keep being different and relevant,” according to Branding Strategy Insider. “Successful brands recognize this and know [brand positioning is] not a place, it’s a direction. They must constantly evolve, not stand still.”
But it is unwise to lose the soul of a brand with every change of the wind – as said earlier, a successful brand stands for something. Keep your brand DNA as the North Star, you can change other aspects of your brand, but do not mutate your brand DNA (that will lead to cancer.)
Brand positioning is never a finished task. To stay relevant, brands must stay in contact with their target audience. They must keep an eye on the competition, the marketplace and adapt when necessary. Conduct regular brand audits to assess your competitive position. Reacting to changes in the marketplace will help build your brand for long term growth.
If you would like to learn more about brand positioning, please contact us.
©Joanne Z. Tan all rights reserved.
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