The purpose of a brand positioning strategy is to identify the particular place in the market you want to dominate and where you can best deliver value. To do that, you need to mean something specific to customers. And to establish clear space between where you are and where others sit in the market. This is our take on how to develop a brand positioning strategy.
What is brand positioning?
Robust brand positioning is about recognising opportunities to shine, and developing the strategy to strengthen your current position or shift your brand into that space. While others may choose to define it differently, we see brand positioning as identifying where you choose to compete. And brand strategy as resolving why that position represents your best future and what your brand will need to encapsulate in order for that to happen.
Wikipedia defines positioning as “the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the products of the competitors”. It goes on to say that “positioning is closely related to the concept of perceived value … the difference between a prospective customer’s evaluation of the benefits and costs of one product when compared with others.”
Positioning is often defined using what is known as the STP Approach. Segmentation defines the overall audience (current and potential) and what they are looking for. Target market identifies a grouping or sub-groups within that market segment to focus on. Positioning defines the distinct position the brand owns.
How we approach brand positioning strategy
Our approach to brand positioning strategy looks at brand positioning options in two ways:
- Where the brand positions itself relative to competitors in order to gain the attention of customers; and
- Where the brand positions itself within a market in order to deliver on performance expectations.
There’s no point in positioning a brand to appeal to customers if the position is untenable commercially.
We use two tools to resolve your brand positioning strategy. The first articulates what you intend to be best in market at. And the second, which puts that in a context, is a brand positioning map. Ours comes with an important twist though that helps inform the brand strategy.
A brand positioning strategy pivots around alternatives. For example, if you are positioning around price, chances are your strategy will focus on either premium or value options. If you are positioning around time, fast or slow. If you are positioning around geography or immediacy, then your positioning might focus on local or international.
Up is not the only direction
Once you know where you want to position yourselves as a brand, that decision carries through to the type of brand you develop, who you target, the messages you create etc. The goal of every brand positioning strategy is to ensure that you are where you need to be in the market to fully realise your potential. If you’re not, your positioning will disadvantage you.
When a brand positions itself correctly, everything about the brand makes sense. It can target the right customers with the right products at the right prices. Equally, if a brand positions itself as premium and then sells discounted goods, customers will be confused.
There’s a temptation to believe that brand positioning strategy is about moving a brand up the value chain. That’s not necessarily true. If, for example, the top end of a market is saturated, then the presence of competitors in the premium pricing positions opens up an opportunity for a brand to compete as the democratiser or as the value-priced option.
Options for your brand positioning strategy
Depending on your own competitive strengths, you can choose to position your brand in a range of ways. Here are some examples:
- Price-based positioning – this works well if pricing within a market is concentrated. You can look to break with what others are doing by offering more value or by elevating perceived value (depending on what people in that market are looking for)
- Immediacy advantage – speed-to-customer can be a competitive position if everyone else is slow, for example
- Quality of your product – you can lift or lower the quality of your product to make your brand feel more premium or more accessible
- Service basis – this is an effective position where there is a lack of service, where customers want more service than they are currently getting or where you are looking to add service-as-a-service to a sector that is usually product-focused
- Innovation/first-to-market capabilities – positioning your brand as an innovator works well in slow-to-change sectors where the target audience is looking for change and development. This positioning is also strong in sectors where buyers are looking for the next-new-thing
- Challenger position – if you are in a market dominated by complacent large operators, you could adopt the position of the upstart and look to challenge the status quo. This can be a particularly effective position to take if the market and the legacy brands are conservative and moribund, and customers perceive (or come to perceive) that they are being short-changed as a direct result.
Best positioned
Your brand positioning is a critical decision – because choosing the strongest basis for your positioning will influence how you define and communicate your brand going forward. You can resolve your brand positioning strategy in a couple of ways. You can start by analysing where your brand could best position itself – and then define your brand on that basis. Or conversely, analyse who you are as a brand and position your brand to make the most of your strengths and your competitors’ vulnerabilities.
Developing your brand positioning strategy
- Evaluate your current brand positioning.
- Review your ambitions/purpose.
- Identify your key competitors and their intentions.
- Research or workshop where you sit in relation to them.
- Appraise the dynamics of your sector(s).
- Identify where there are gaps in the market.
- Review the performance expectations in your business plan.
- Isolate the positions in the market where there are gaps and the dynamics work to your advantage.
- Express your chosen position in a brand positioning framework.
- Evaluate what it will take for your brand positioning strategy to work.
1. Evaluate your current brand positioning.
A key decision in every brand positioning strategy is whether you are going to reinforce your current positioning or whether you need to make a shift for the better. Start by appraising current performance – market share, volumes, margins etc to get a sense of how you are going.
If you need to reinforce your current positioning, work through where you are weak and strong and what you need to change for the better. Work through too how you are current perceived and how that is working for you. Finally, ask yourselves “what are we recognised for, and how are we recognised?”. This will help you identify where you have brand equity and therefore what you need to grow with.
If your evaluation indicates that you are not in the best position for your market, examine what’s working against you that is within your power to change. Where the points of weakness are perceptual, that’s a brand positioning or a brand strategy issue. If they are operational, then brand positioning or a new brand strategy alone won’t fix them.
2. Review your ambitions/purpose
It’s no coincidence that Roger Martin’s Play to Win model places “Where to play” just below “Winning aspiration” and above “How to win”. Once you have worked through the robustness of your current brand positioning, review your ambitions/purpose to see whether they are still working to inspire you in the right way. Strategy is all about making deliberate choices to capture value, and what you aim for is absolutely one of those.
You don’t necessarily need to wordsmith changes here (you can do this during the brand strategy process if you prefer) but you should at least identify what you are best to pursue and why it is different from what you have been pursuing.
A shift here can re-set not just where you position yourselves to achieve your ultimate goal, but also your whole trajectory for that pursuit.
3. Identify your key competitors and their intentions
No brand operates in isolation. It’s important to understand who you’re competing with and what indirect influences may also be acting as “competitive forces” against your brand. For example, disinterest can be a powerful competitor in some sectors because it prevents people from engaging with any brand – including yours.
Research your key competitors and, where possible, use market research to understand where competitors are taking market share from you. Don’t forget to also check social media feeds, blogs and disclosure documents like annual reports to get a sense of their direction, intentions, upcoming product launches, new markets and the pressures and opportunities they are willing to publicly disclose.
Another key engagement point here are your own people and your sales teams who are receiving feedback on what other brands customers are mentioning and who is in their consideration set.
Look too at how competitors are positioning themselves, and how that carries through to their products and services and their marketing. Be specific about how they see their strengths, and what you see as their vulnerabilities.
A really good question for this kind of research is, “If I were them, what would I do?”
Document your findings. And continue to monitor their activities to see if they are doing what you expected.
4. Research or workshop where you sit in relation to them.
It’s important to apply the same rigour to your assessment of your competitiveness. Conduct the same research that you did with your competitors on your own brand. Or hold an internal workshop to assess where you stand in relation to the other market options.
Where possible, look at things like where customers think your products are interchangeable with another brand or if people mistake your brand for another. Look too at where you are losing or gaining market share and why, the consideration set you get grouped in with, conversion rates through your sales funnel and anything else that tells you whether buyers and prospects fully understand and appreciate your brand as it stands.
Finally – and this is the hard one – look at where you came up short. In the context of a brand positioning strategy, understanding what people didn’t see in you, what they missed or what they chose to highlight or ignore is critical to understanding where you are currently positioned in their minds as a brand and in relation to the other offers in the market.
5. Appraise the dynamics of your sector(s)
It’s critical to understand two things when appraising this. Is the market working for you or against you? In other words, does it have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that will act as a tailwind? Or is the market shrinking or diversifying? These dynamics are important because they tell you whether presence alone gives you an advantage or whether it counts against you.
The second dynamic is trend. Apart from the economic cycle, what are the natural inclinations of the market? Is your sector inclined to globalise – or to become more focused locally? Chris Anderson once observed that the natural lifecycle of technology was to move towards free. Knowing where your market goes, and how quickly, helps you understand what we refer to as the “tides” of the market – the ebbs and flows that feed volatility.
For example, according to EY, the average lifespan of a US S&P500 company used to be 67 years. Now it’s 15. That’s an important consideration if you’re looking to position a corporate brand because it provides an expected rate of deterioration.
A key dynamic we are always looking for is commoditisation: the erosion of value to the point where products or services are so standardised that they are interchangeable. If that’s an inherent characteristic of your sector, it will influence how (or maybe if) you proceed.
6. Identify where there are gaps in the market.
Now that you understand where everyone is positioned relative to one another and the overall characteristics of the market, look carefully at where all the brands are. If they are all clustered in one part of the sector, are there opportunities elsewhere in the market that are being under-catered? If there is a growth part of the market with relatively few competitors (yet), is that a position that your brand should move towards?
As a general rule, don’t shift your brand into a crowded part of the market unless you back yourselves to out-position other brands. To do this, you’ll need a sweep-aside competitive advantage that others cannot counter or copy. (Not easy.)
Our other note of caution is that markets often continue ‘voids’. By that, we mean parts of the market that no-one has ventured into because there is no market and no margin. Not every gap is an opportunity – because it could be an unsustainable place to trade. Voids can be filled and become feasible, but only if you have a business strategy and an economic model capable of defying prevailing market wisdom.
7. Review the performance expectations in your business plan.
Understanding the underlying dynamics of the market provides a solid basis for managing expectations within your own business. Too often, we see expectations for brand performance that are out of kilter with the established patterns in the market. We use our Market Tides model to help decision makers clearly see whether their expectations for the brand are realistic, and how the brand positioning strategy that is being proposed is informed by underlying currents.
It’s important for decision makers to see that their expectations make sense, so that they understand not just where the brand should be positioned, but why. Quite often, marketers are simply given a growth target that may not align with realities. This review enables marketers to make the case for what they will need to fulfil targets or to re-set expectations before they get locked in.
8. Isolate the positions in the market where there are gaps and the dynamics work to your advantage.
By combining the insights from the gaps in the market and what the business expects from the brand, it’s possible to establish clear parameters for positioning options. The goal here is to draw up a shortlist of opportunities for where the brand could be positioned.
A brand positioning map is a proven tool to do this. It enables you to see where your competitors sit in relation to critical attributes. And to map your own place in the market on the same basis. The most important decision in such a map though is not where you (or anyone else for that matter) sits. It’s which attributes you choose to place on the axes. The temptation is to use criteria that work to your advantage. Instead, focus on the two most important factors for customers, and create extremes of those factors for each end of the axes.
Do several versions if it helps, then map the positions of your brand and your competitors to spot parallels and differences. When we do this in workshop, we overlay other factors that often get missed using our Market Tides approach. We identify where the gaps are using circles. Then we add in the market dynamics as directional arrows, along with an arrow that indicates the positional direction the business expects the brand to take.
This will quickly tell you how you are placed. It will show whether you are moving in the same direction as your competitors for example. It will also tell you whether market dynamics are working for you or against you in terms of aiming for your ideal market position.
9. Express your chosen position in a brand positioning framework
The standard template for writing positioning statements looks something like this:
For (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity),
the (product name) is a (product category)
that (key benefit).
Unlike (primary competitive alternative),
our product (statement of primary differentiation).
This template works well enough to explain who the brand is positioning to cater to.
Our version of a brand positioning framework for internal consideration is aimed at decision makers and answers the question: “Why have we chosen to position ourselves here?”. It summarises the decisions you’ve made to stake your claim to your place in the market.
The purpose of this kind of brand positioning framework is to explain to key decision makers within the business how the brand intends to position itself to deliver what’s expected. If we are preparing this, we draft it more as a use case than a positioning statement:
- The broad dynamics of your chosen sector
- Where you are currently positioned in the market
- Your key competitors and where they position themselves
- Whether you intend to stick with your current position, or to shift
- The key audiences for your brand and their driving motivations
- The position in the market you have chosen
- The opportunity that exists for your brand
- The key attributes you intend to compete on
- How this position enables the brand to deliver what the business expects
- How your intended position aligns with progressing your purpose/ambition
10. Evaluate what it will take for your brand positioning strategy to work.
You should of course use your brand positioning framework to get buy-in across the business. But you should also evaluate what it’s going to take for your positioning strategy to work. Once you have found the position that works best to your advantage, you need to ringfence it in order to maximise your presence. You need to be prepared to do enough to own that place.
If you intend staying where you are, that may not require any further resources. If, on the other hand, you need to dramatically shift where you are positioned, you will need to quantify what’s required and why.
Brand strategy should align with brand positioning
At the beginning of this piece, we defined brand positioning as identifying where you choose to compete, and brand strategy as resolving why that position represents your best future and what your brand will need to encapsulate in order for that to happen.
This is particularly true if you are adjusting your purpose/ambition. Doing so, in effect, re-sets what you stand for and where you are heading. It makes sense to relook at your brand strategy on that basis. You want to ensure your brand DNA is consistent, and that the key attributes of your brand strategy align with where you intend to compete.
The alignment can also be done in reverse. You can redefine what your brand stands for and your greatest goal. Then evaluate where you need to position yourselves in the market to make that happen.
Need help with how to develop a brand positioning strategy?
Brand positioning strategy is a crucial part of ensuring your brand is in the best place in the market it can be. A strong brand, positioned well, should help your business generate revenue and reputation.
A brand positioning strategy can be a powerful stand-alone piece of work. Or it can lead neatly into, or out of, developing your brand strategy. Our Plan to Thrive is an effective way to strategise your brand at an organisational or product level that can easily incorporate a brand positioning strategy.
If you are looking to build a brand positioning framework to explain to decision-makers why you should reposition a brand, a strategy session is an effective way to start that. It’s a forum to discuss much of what we have discussed here. We can then provide further analysis and prepare presentations if needed.
To find out more, please take a look at how we can help you define your future.
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Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash