How do you carve out a positive space in your target customer’s minds? Through powerful brand positioning.
Your product marketing efforts will be wasted if you don’t begin with strong brand positioning.
Have you heard of Colgate Kitchen Entrees or Cosmopolitan Yogurt? Nope?
It’s because they are examples of failed brand positioning. The products were soon pulled out of the market after they were launched.
When people hear “Colgate,” their immediate association is “toothpaste.” But, in 1982, Colgate decided to launch a product line of frozen dinners.
The logic was that if people already trusted the Colgate brand, they would also trust it in producing other products. Well, Colgate overestimated people’s trust.
Although there is a connection between toothpaste and frozen dinners – you put them in your mouth – people simply did not find the idea of a teeth hygiene product in relation to a palatable and satisfying dinner. It’s like eating toothpaste.
So, Colgate Kitchen Entrees flopped.
Another example is Cosmopolitan Yogurt. Cosmopolitan is a globally recognized popular magazine for women, especially young professional women. It’s trusted by its readers to offer advice on health, sex, and professional life.
Although the women in its target market are health conscious and do eat a lot of yogurts as a portable, semi-healthy meal, Cosmopolitan did not anticipate that the women just don’t associate the magazine with a producer of dairy products. It’s like eating a magazine.
So, Cosmopolitan Yogurt lasted only 18 months in the market.
Why Do We Do Brand Positioning?
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We do brand positioning to clearly tell our target customers who we are, who we serve, and why we are the best for them.
Once this is clear, it will also justify our pricing strategy and all the other marketing efforts we make.
The importance of brand positioning cannot be overemphasized. Logos and taglines alone won’t cut it.
For strong brand positioning, you must think about how you’re going to be seen by customers and what makes you stand out from all the other businesses offering similar products and services.
You need to be strategic. You must make sure that your brand appeals to the right audience.
Every business has a brand, whether by default or by design. You can either passively let others do your brand positioning for you, or you can take the reins and proactively work on your brand positioning.
If you opt for brand positioning by default, you have zero control over the results. But, if you choose to steer your own brand positioning, you will reap its benefits.
Three of its main benefits are:
1. Unique Differentiation
Brand positioning enables you to differentiate your brand by establishing your unique identity. This is crucial to capture the attention of your target customers and then interest them enough for them to want to take action.
With proactive brand positioning, you clarify your identity in the minds of consumers. You also make it clear who you serve and why you are in the best position to serve them. You establish what sets you and your products and services apart from the rest of your competitors in the market.
2. Brand Creativity
Several brands can offer basically the same products and services to the same target audience and market. How they do their brand positioning can make or break their brands.
If you have an innovative and creative brand positioning strategy combined with strong and successful execution, you can positively impress your brand in the minds of customers and make them want to keep coming back for more.
3. Pricing Strategy Justification
How you position your brand can justify your pricing strategy.
For example, if your product or services pricing is high because of their superior quality and exclusivity, and you emphasize these features in your brand positioning communication, the price automatically makes it reasonable in the minds of consumers.
This also applies to low-priced or medium-priced products and services if your brand positioning aligns with the pricing strategy you decided on.
What Is Brand Purpose and Positioning?
Brand positioning in marketing works along with two other pillars: brand purpose and brand personality. These three go together. Otherwise, your branding is incomplete.
Before you can develop your brand positioning strategy, you must first clarify your brand purpose and brand personality.
Brand Purpose
Brand purpose is why you do what you do, beyond just driving profit.
It’s your manifesto and commitment that can align with customers’ values and unite your team members around a higher aspiration.
Brand Personality
Brand personality is who you are, which is also your brand identity and style. It is expressed in your logo, taglines, messaging, tone, colors, shapes, and many more aspects of your personality or identity.
It’s the distinctive humanity of your brand that shapes how people see you and desire to interact with you.
Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is what you do. It is your handshake to the world.
It starts with articulating through simple, memorable statements that help plant and differentiate you in the minds of consumers.
Brand positioning is the unique value of your business that you present to your customer. It is your strategy to create and own a concept in the consumer’s mind and for them to associate you with it.
Even as contexts and environments change, your brand is a solid tent pole. Once you’ve established who you are and why you do what you do, you can more flexibly adapt to changes without losing your authenticity.
As more people join your company, they become a part of its living expression. Those who fit tend to stay, and those who don’t leave.
Brand positioning is the strategic expression of your business, its offerings, its people, and how it exists in the world. It’s also your ability to influence consumers’ perception of your brand.
Consider these brand positioning examples:
- Apple positions itself as the provider of innovative, premium-quality, and user-friendly products in the consumer technology industry.
- Kurt Geiger positions itself as a luxury status symbol in the footwear industry.
- McDonald’s positions itself as a place to get quick and inexpensive meals in the food industry.
- Starbucks positions itself as a creator of high-quality, fair-trade coffee for busy achievers and explorers with budgets to spare and spend, looking for premium-quality products in the beverage industry.
What Is The Goal Of Brand Positioning?
Brand positioning aims to create clarity around who the company is and who it serves so the company can align its marketing efforts with the company’s brand and value proposition.
An effective brand positioning strategy not only defines your brand purpose and brand persona but also the scope of your brand’s communication strategy. It provides a clear direction for all creative content while strongly establishing what the brand is for.
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What Are the 6 Most Common Brand Positioning Strategies?
Effective brand positioning helps companies distinguish themselves from their competition and capture a share of consumers’ minds and wallets, driving long-term customer loyalty.
Here are six of the most common brand positioning strategies companies use, depending on the product category and the industry they’re in, and successful company examples:
1. Benefit Positioning
This brand positioning strategy showcases the benefits of a product or service that are unique to the brand.
However, in today’s ultra-competitive marketing environment, benefits are tough to claim as uniquely one’s own.
What companies do is claim “new,” “improved,” or “better than” the benefits offered by competitors’ products and services.
This is a delicately sensitive strategy and requires product marketing expertise. If not done well, it can be very risky, short-cutting and undermining the effectiveness of the strategy.
Johnson & Johnson’s Neutrogena uses this strategy effectively. Neutrogena is a brand of skin care products and cosmetics which mainly caters to the skin problems of mature adults. The product lines include eye and face makeup, skin care creams, sunscreen lotions, hair care products, and anti-aging products.
Neutrogena uses need vs. benefit positioning for all its product lines. To understand the correlation between needs and benefits, they use detailed customer surveys so they can develop effective positioning statements to which customers can relate.
2. Celebrity Positioning
This brand positioning strategy involves connecting a celebrity with a brand. It’s one of the oldest positioning strategies for quickly gaining awareness of and credibility for a brand.
However, it can be very expensive and risky. In today’s “no holds barred” social media world, a celebrity’s reputation and popularity can change in an instant. Businesses should weigh the risks and choose their celebrity endorsers very carefully.
Pepsi is famous for its marketing strategies and advertising campaigns using celebrity endorsements.
Its first celebrity endorser was car racing pioneer Barney Oldfield in 1909 up to the 1930s. As Pepsi evolved its brand positioning over the decades, it also partnered with different celebrity endorsers who aligned with their messaging, with Joan Crawford in the 1950s, Michael Jackson in the 1980s, and Britney Spears in the early 2000s among them.
However, Pepsi also had celebrity endorsers who proved too costly financially and brand-wise: Madonna who elicited serious negative reactions from the public, especially the Catholics, who considered her immoral, Ludacris whose music style promoted crime, drugs, and immorality, and Kanye West whose engagement with Pepsi was suspended when he made negative comments against then U.S. President George Bush in 2006.
3. Price Positioning
Price can be used as a brand positioning strategy for both high-end and low-end pricing strategies.
A high-end pricing strategy depends on effective brand positioning, where customers believe that since the product is expensive, it must be superior.
On the other hand, a low-end pricing strategy relies on brand positioning that conveys to customers that the product or service is very accessible and affordable.
For example, Rolex uses the high-end pricing strategy and brand positioning in the watch industry, while Timex uses the low-end pricing strategy in the same industry.
However, there are significant risks to consider. If not executed well, a high-end pricing strategy may suggest to consumers that the product is beyond their reach. Meanwhile, a low-end pricing strategy attracts competitors who are willing to undercut a brand by offering lower prices.
4. Quality Positioning
Typically, highlighting product or service quality is part of every brand story. However, if you’re considering a brand positioning strategy based on quality positioning, think again.
If you’re a new entrant to an already very crowded and competitive market, this might not be best for your business.
A quality positioning strategy is recommended for when your product or service is in a very narrow category, where there is a clear difference between your offer and competitors’ offers.
For products, it can be the materials used to create the product, its durability, and/or its performance. For services, it can be the exceptional quality of your people’s proven expertise and skills and a strong, positive, service-focused business culture with documented customer satisfaction.
For example, Mercedes-Benz positions itself as a maker of vehicles designed to provide car owners and passengers with a world-class luxury experience.
Its value proposition is about consistently delivering premium features and luxury on every Mercedes Benz. Each interior is designed for ultimate driver and passenger comfort and engagement, outfitted with only the best quality materials.
5. Solution Positioning
This brand positioning strategy presents the product or service as the most effortless or the quickest way to address the customer’s problem.
Businesses in highly specialized industries such as finance, insurance, legal services, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) use Solution Positioning.
A financial company can offer solutions for bad credit.
An insurance company can tailor their positioning to those who are rejected from the usual insurance coverage due to their age or health.
A legal service can position itself as an expert for couples seeking divorce.
A SaaS company can offer specific software solutions for digital users’ particular business process problems.
Staples, the well-known office supplies retailer, positions itself as an essential partner of businesses of all sizes. It does this by providing them with the necessary supplies they need to thrive in the competitive marketplaces they’re in.
Its mission statement is clear and concise, “We help businesses succeed by making it easy to make more happen.”
Staples emphasizes its role as a facilitator for “making more happen” by streamlining the process for businesses to achieve their goals. It recognizes that time is a precious asset for entrepreneurs and companies, so it continually seeks to provide them with convenient and efficient solutions.
It is also customer-centric in its approach. It provides exceptional customer service, personalized solutions, and a seamless shopping experience both in its physical stores and its online stores to build long-term relationships with its clients.
6. Value Positioning
Value Positioning is a brand positioning strategy that aims to create a perception of accessibility, practicality, and low-cost products or services. This appeals to customers who are looking for the best deal, convenience, and functionality that a product provides.
Value products commonly have higher sales volumes, lower prices, and lower profit margins than premium products.
The Value Positioning strategy integrates elements of the Price Positioning and Quality Positioning strategies. Basically, this brand positioning strategy conveys the message that your brand offers the best combination of superior quality at the lowest price.
However, the term “value” has become so common that there is no clear differentiation between brands in the same industry.
Value Positioning is best when the product or service has already been established in the marketplace and is not recommended for new entrants.
Take for instance Target Corporation, the American retail company that operates a chain of discount department stores and hypermarkets. It has a clear value proposition: stylish and affordable essentials for everyday life.
Its brand purpose and positioning are clear and simple: “We’re here to help all families discover the joy of everyday life.”
Its strategy is rooted in offering national brands that its customers know and love, as well as the only-at-target items they can’t get anywhere else.
The core elements of its strategy involves delighting customers with new, stylish products with everyday low pricing, transforming its supply chain for increased efficiency, capacity, and reliability, and opening new stores to become consumers’ favorite “discovery destination.”
5 Keys To A Winning Brand Positioning Strategy
Before we go into how to develop a winning brand positioning strategy, it is important to first set out its key characteristics to avoid the biggest branding failures.
It’s not enough to be unique, credible, relevant to your audience, and consistent with your messaging. In actual practice, developing an effective brand positioning strategy requires understanding and keeping these five important considerations in mind:
1. Meaningful Differentiation
Distinguish between a differentiated offer and differentiated messaging. In product categories where it is difficult to distinguish one product from another, it’s not enough to differentiate your brand by coining the right sales proposition with differentiating words and visuals if basically, you do the same thing as your competitors do.
Crafting a winning brand positioning strategy is best if your product offer itself is simply different or better than the rest in the market.
If your main offer is not so differentiation, try launching new and innovative product or service extensions or sub-brands, or both, to create new categories or sub-categories.
2. Relevance Over Uniqueness
Don’t try to be unique just for the sake of being unique. Your brand positioning presentation of your uniqueness or differentiation should serve how relevant your offer is to your target audience.
Often, brands narrow down to a niche just to be different. But what is more important is how well your offer and your messaging meets the target consumer’s needs.
Consider Amazon’s promise to deliver the convenience of buying from the widest selection of products at the lowest prices. It’s not so unique, but it’s very relevant to consumers.
3. Simplicity Over Sophistication
There are a lot of brand launches and relaunches today, but what do they really stand for? The best brands can be described in a few, simple words. If a brand takes several pages of brand books to explain, it will not be understood by consumers.
Uber is an example of complicated messaging in an attempt at sophistication. Originally, it was positioned as a high-end taxi service positioned as “everyone’s private driver.” Then, when it became more mainstream, it repositioned itself using the metaphor of bits and atoms to portray the difference between the analog and digital worlds (huh?). Much later, it redefined its brand as “igniting opportunity to setting the world in motion.” Today, it’s about “reimagining the way the world moves for the better.”
In contrast, when Elon Musk took over Tesla in 2008, he repositioned the electric vehicles as “the new technology for clean energy.” Its brand positioning is one of strength, pioneering innovation, and trendsetting.
Because it started with a prestige pricing strategy and target segmentation of the elite, it created a demand and market for a premium all-electric luxury car. As Tesla moves into the affordable car market, it carries with it the public perception and esteem that comes from its association with high-end exclusivity, luxury, and pace-setting innovation.
4. Perfect Execution Matters More Than Perfect Strategy
The world’s most admired and valuable brands all share this same characteristic: perfect execution. They carry out their business strategies flawlessly in implementing their offering, marketing solution, and customer service.
On the other hand, too many other companies spend too much time, energy, and resources strategizing and not enough of those same resources executing their plans as perfectly.
Consider Apple, whose brand positioning strategy is about creating a better world through superior-quality design and technology. Many other companies could have a similar positioning, but only Apple executes its strategy seamlessly.
5. Internal Buy-In First, Then Customer Acceptance
If your own people in your business don’t know, don’t understand, and don’t agree with your brand positioning strategy, it doesn’t make sense to communicate it externally. You would only sound fake and hollow.
Remember that everyone involved will be implementing the brand positioning strategy based on what they know, what they understand, and whether they agree with it or not. So, it makes better sense to get stakeholder buy-in first.
A successful brand positioning strategy requires that all product and communication activities build a coherent brand image and experience for target customers, delivered consistently over time.
How To Develop A Winning Brand Positioning Strategy
Effective brand positioning has not straitjacket formula. Since each brand is unique, with different strengths and complexities, the creative process in positioning each brand must also be as unique.
However, there are fundamental phases to undergo that can be followed for a more logical structure and flow.
Developing a winning brand positioning strategy begins by asking your team these key questions and answering them with well-researched information and reasoning:
1. How is your brand currently positioned?
If you ask 10 different people in your company what your brand stands for, and you get 10 different answers, that’s a signal for your company to re-assess its brand’s position.
Consider again what your end goal is, what you are offering to your customers, and how they are responding to your offer.
Reclarify who your target customer is. Segment the market by making sense of your brand’s attributes and offers and how they align with your customer’s values, needs, and desired benefits.
Who are your competitors? Run a competitive audit and study your competitors. Learn where they are positioned in the market and how their brand attributes and offers align with their customers’ values, needs, and desired benefits. Which audience segments are they serving and not serving? Where can you carve out a unique brand position in the competitive marketplace?
Think about the future and how your industry might be like 5, 10, or 20 years from now. This helps you set a direction for your brand and create a flexible brand positioning strategy that will still be valid as your industry constantly evolves.
It’s highly recommended to use a brand essence chart when thinking through what your brand is really about.
A brand essence chart is a powerful tool for helping your team organize and clarify the key ideas and concepts that underpin your brand. It’s designed to give you a clear and concise overview of what the brand means to its customers.
There are seven components of a brand essence chart. List your ideas and concepts for each component in the chart.
- Attributes – the distinct features and characteristics of your brand
- Benefits – what customers gain as a result of using your brand’s product/service
- Emotional impact – the emotional response or connection that your brand evokes in customers
- Implications for the customer – what the brand means for your ideal customer and how it aligns with their values, aspirations, needs, and desires
- Personality – adjectives that personify and describe your brand
- Source of authority and support – the foundation of your brand’s credibility and expertise, such as your brand’s heritage, industry recognition, awards, customer testimonials, and scientific research outputs
- Positioning/brand essence – weaves together all the previous six components and distill them into a brief statement that captures the key points for customers to know and understand; includes clarifying your unique value proposition, which is the unique value you provide to your target audience
To see how your brand is currently positioned in terms of how it compares to competitors in consumers’ perceptions, a brand positioning map can help. It involves perceptually mapping brands against two axes, where each axis represents an attribute that drives brand selection.
Here is an example of a brand positioning map or perceptual map for three different brands in the sugar substitute product category, based on two important attributes for sugar substitute users: taste and the degree of “naturalness.”
As you can see in the sample map below, Equal is considered as perceived by its users to be less natural and less tasty, compared to Truvia, which is more natural but mid-range tasty, and Domino Sugar, which is the tastiest and most natural.
To do mapping right, create multiple versions of the map based on different sets of attributes, which you can base on the values your customers hold dear in relation to the product or service.
2. What is your brand positioning statement?
A brand positioning statement is a brief description of a brand’s product or service and how it fulfills a particular need in the market.
Unlike a company vision-mission statement which is public facing, a brand positioning statement is an internal tool that guides every business function. You don’t want to give this away as this is part of your competitive intelligence.
A brand positioning statement is the source of truth to guide your business processes, such as the messaging for your marketing campaigns, or the talking points your sales team can use during one-on-one prospecting and sales calls.
A basic framework for creating a powerful brand positioning statement includes the following elements:
- Target audience – your target customer
- Differentiation – what makes your brand unique
- Positioning – how you position your offer
- Unique value proposition – value your brand provides to the target audience
- Reason for being – why you’re in business
Combining your ideas and concepts from these elements together gives you your brand positioning statement:
“For (target audience), (Brand Name) is the only (positioning) that (differentiation) because (reason for being).”
Of course, your brand positioning statement doesn’t have to be stated exactly in this way. You can be creative with it to reflect your brand voice, as long as these essential elements are there.
For example, Tesla Aviation’s brand positioning statement takes two sentences and goes like this:
“Tesla Aviation (brand name) is committed to providing a luxurious way (positioning) for the elite (target audience) to travel with innovative and sustainable technology (differentiation). As with our parent brand, Tesla, our mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy (reason for being).”
After crafting your brand positioning statement, you then proceed with the next two phases, which are the action phases.
3. Evaluate whether your brand positioning statement works.
Test and experiment with your initial brand positioning statement by gathering feedback from your customers on whether your positioning is achieving its goal. Does it have the desired effect on your customers?
If not, tweak, finetune, and test again.
Keep iterating the tests and experimentation until it becomes clear that your content and delivery achieve their desired effect on your target customers.
4. Communicate and deliver on the brand positioning strategy.
Once the research and testing are complete and you now have a formal brand positioning statement, it’s time to implement it.
Follow these four key guidelines for a winning brand positioning strategy implementation:
Establish emotional connections with the target audience.
Make it a standard policy for your teams, especially your marketing and sales teams, to connect with your target audience on a human level first before going in for the hard sell.
Get to know them more by listening to them, and get them to know you more, not just on your prospecting and sales calls but in all your marketing collaterals. Nurture the relationships you build with prospects and customers.
This builds trust and helps your prospects have a positive experience with your brand on an ongoing basis.
Reinforce your brand’s differentiation during the sales process.
If you’ve created a strong brand position, the differentiating qualities of your brand offering should be easy to understand and refer to.
As much as possible and in different creative ways, reinforce this differentiation in your interactions with your prospects, online or offline, but particularly in the sales process.
Create value.
Always keep in mind that your main goals is help your prospects solve a problem or conquer a challenge they are facing, ideally through your brand’s offering.
Aside from offering an irresistible product or service, other ways you can create value for your prospects and customers would be to:
- Create motivational programs for them, such as special offers, free trials, discounts, subscription services, and partnering with other brands through co-branded offers.
- Using loyalty and rewards programs, which can be based on points earned, tiers attained, and/or surprise perks.
- Sharing valuable content (original content, influencer content, and user-generated content) through effective content marketing.
- Ask for customer feedback and thank them by rewarding them for their feedback. Also, make sure that you use their feedback to improve your products and services.
- Hold challenges and contests that are fun and rewarding. This also improves brand awareness and engagement.
- Personalize all of your customers’ experiences with your brand.
Make sure that customer-facing employees personify your brand.
Your customer-facing employees are your company’s most valuable brand ambassadors. All your prospects and customers must receive an experience with them that personifies your company’s core values and cohesively aligns with your brand.
They should also embody your business’ communication style: tone, language, non-verbal communication, how respectful and courteous they are especially in responding to resistance and negative feedback – all the works.
If your company has a lighthearted and fun approach to branding, they should also be naturally lighthearted and optimistic in spirit.
If your branding is more formal conveying professionalism, credibility, and trustworthiness, like in the case of financial institutions and insurance companies, these qualities should also be exhibited by your employees, especially those at the frontlines.
Your company’s customer-facing employees should be the living, walking, talking embodiment of your brand.
Brand Positioning Done Right
Brands can be in the same industry, offering similar products and services to a generally similar target market, but they don’t have to be direct competitors if they do their brand positioning right.
Take Chipotle and Taco Bell, for example. Both make Americanized Mexican food. Both are affordable and quick to serve. But when you think of these two brands, you come up with two totally different images in your head about what the insides of their stores look like, their typical customers, and the circumstances that would make you buy from each of them.
Chipotle stands for building a better world through sustainable practices. It’s branding efforts are focused almost exclusively on the quality of its ingredients. It emphasizes organic produce when they can, dairy from grass-fed cows, and meat from animals raised without synthetic hormones or too many antibiotics.
So, the typical Chipotle customer is a white Millennial or Gen Z, who is more socially conscious and sustainability-oriented, married without children, likely living in urban areas, with a college degree, and making more than $80,000 a year.
On the other hand, Taco Bell makes no claims about its ingredients. Their website’s homepage doesn’t even mention them. What Taco Bell emphasizes is that their food is delicious, cheap, and convenient.
So, according to Taco Bell itself, there are five kinds of people who typically dine at their stores. These are the “dudes,” “status feeders,” “edgy cravers,” “morning hustlers,” and “social explorers.”
Generally, they are also young (Millennials and Gen Zs), budget-conscious, late-night and fast-food enthusiasts, and college students. They regard fast food as a cheap alternative to a healthier option.
Although Chipotle and Taco Bell are in the same fast-food industry, serving a young demographic, with similar products, they have differentiated themselves from each other so distinctively with their brand positioning strategies. They are scarcely even competitors now.
Committing To Brand Positioning
It’s not enough to have a great product or service.
You need to be noticed and adopted by your internal team and the external public as acceptable and agreeable to them.
You need to consistently deliver positively engaging customer experience across all the customer touchpoints in all your channels for your brand to shine through.
Brand positioning is not just a one-time event but a daily commitment to be authentic and to deliver on your promises. Although it begins with crafting a winning brand positioning strategy, it never ends as you execute your strategy as perfectly as you can, day in and day out, over the long-term.
Brands also can and do change over time. Google went from a simple search engine to a provider of email, calendar, cloud storage, and other services. What matters most is that brand positioning and repositioning are handled thoughtfully, strategically, and slowly, making sure that customers understand why you’re changing.
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