Finding your positioning
‘Brand positioning’ sounds like one of those phrases fluffy marketing people use to sound clever. The truth is it’s actually pretty straight forward, and it’s surprisingly useful if your business needs it. Here’s what it is, why it’s important and how you can make the most of it.
Why
Remember what you’re here for
The reason I said if your business needs it is because a lot of companies don’t need to focus on it - at least not right now.
Remember, when it comes to marketing our brand, product or service, we have two jobs:
First, make sure your customer knows about us - Your customer has to know your brand exists. If it doesn’t, it’s game over and there’s no positioning to be done. Your biggest focus should be increasing awareness.
If your customer knows you exist, you need to help them figure out who you are so they can form an image or perception of you in their mind i.e. your position. Why do we bother to do this? To help influence customers to want to buy from you.
Very simply put the logic behind positioning to your customer is:
Your make the customer perceive you as different
Because you’re different, (certain) customers will see more value in what you do
You can build loyalty and charge more from those customers. You could loosely define this as building brand equity.
Charging more for your product because of the higher perceived value is a good thing because it means an increase in your profit, not just revenue.
What
influencing what customers think of us
The perception or image your customer forms of you is your brand image.
Brand positioning is just the strategy you use to influence your customer’s perception of you.
Pretty simple, right?
Remember your brand image isn’t what you think of yourself, your brand or your product. It’s what your customer thinks.
And because it’s what our customer thinks we know already that however we chose to position ourselves - we can’t overcook it. There’s no point in trying to put hundreds of things in our customer’s head when they hear our name. They don’t have the bandwidth, and we’re not as important as we think we are.
What’s more important is for customers to see us as unique. Why? Well, if we accept that customers don’t care about us, being unique makes us stand out more than being the same.
HOW
what is our customer thinking?
The easiest way to kick off your positioning work is with research. You should be tracking what customers think of you to ensure your activity is paying off.
First off though we need a baseline of what our customer thinks of us, we can consider the direction we want to go from there.
Most smaller companies neglect this because they’re still at the first stage of just making sure their customer knows who they are. That’s perfectly fine and definitely recommended.
If you’re a bigger player in your market, a quick survey of your existing customers (and ideally non-customers) will help you understand how customers perceive you.
Check out our multiple articles on market research.
HOw
Brand positioning
Brand positioning is simple - but it’s not easy.
The quickest way to do it uses three inputs, also know as the CCC method:
Find out what your customers want
What your company can do best.
And what your competitor(s) can do best.
If you’re a visual person, punt that into a Venn diagram.
I can waste your time going into all the overlaps, but let’s cut to the chase. The part where your customer’s needs, what you do best and where your competitors don’t reach is where you should position yourself.
What does that look like? I’m going to use a very cheesy example to get us started:
Your customers like cheese
You make cheese and make award-winning Brie
Your competitors make cheese and make award-winning Cheddar, Blue and Stilton.
Boom - you’re the ‘Brie’ brand. That’s your positioning. When your customers think of you, you want the brand image they have in to think of Brie, because that’s what you do best. (I really have to stop writing these posts when I’m hungry.)
Positioning can get very conceptual and have multiple layers. But let’s keep is simple for now and look at a real world example.
One of the most memorable and visceral positioning strategies I can think of was deployed by Apple against Microsoft back in the 2000s.
Remember the Mac vs PC ads with the trendy, easy going, hoodie wearing young dude literally positioned against the suit wearing, up tight PC guy?
It's a perfect example of positioning against a competitor.
Apple personified their product (and in the pre-phone world, their entire brand) and that of their competitors to position themselves as different. Easy to use, trendy, fun, cool - all the things its PC competition wasn’t.
How
Inputs into your positioning
Once you’ve identified your niche, the story that accompanies your positioning should be guided by things like your brand or company heritage. Your founders are perfect place to start. Why did you or they get into business in the first place?
Because you’ve chosen an area you’re already strong in, it means you don’t have to change who you are. You just become more ‘you’ and keep turning up that way for customers to provide a consistent experience, and build trust.
Also remember because you’re positioning against your competitors, you can use that. Think about the PC/Apple example above and how effective that is. Especially if you’re a challenger in the category. Calling out the category leader for the things they can’t be (which you conveniently are) is a great way to position yourself.
How
Two speed positioning
Just like our media spend, our positioning works at two speeds:
Long term brand positioning for everyone in the category with emotional messages. Long term means being consistent, so it’s important you’re heading in the right direction and not changing in the short term.
Short term product positioning specific to a segment with persuasive feature and benefit messages. These are more tactical so you can be more flexible and entrepreneurial when deploying them compared to your long term positioning.
Watch out
Positioning yourself for the category
Remember too that your positioning is against your category competitors so don’t get too caught up at a category level. e.g. if you’re selling electric cars, you’re positioning will be against other electric car manufacturers, not non-electric car makers. Why? Because it’s an entirely different category. Should you influence non-electric car shoppers to buy your car? Maybe. But your positioning won’t be as important as they’re not considering your category.
Watch out
standing for nothing
As fluffy as positioning can sound, you can guarantee you’re wasting your time if you end up positioning yourself with something vague and watered down.
Are you…
Customer-focused? Good. Now try again, unless everyone else in your category is a total d!ck to their customers.
Innovative? Cool, who isn’t these days? Is everyone else in your category regressive?
Respect/integrity? Again, like the options above - you’re positioning using a baseline. If you need to inform customers you’re either of those, that might be a worry!
If you’re positioning yourself with things like these, you’re not wrong, but you’ll struggle to actually do anything off the back of your positioning which makes it a waste of time.
What
The output
The output of your positioning work can match the two speed positioning approach I noted above.
At a business or brand level which you’re going to stick to long term it should be a few key phrases, or better yet words that underpin everything you do or say in the market. That will guide things like what you say, to whom and the type of activity you get involved in.
At a product, segment level you can develop positioning statements. These are similar to a SMART objective in that they try to capture a tangible summary of your positioning. They look like this:
To [target segment]
Who [more detail about the product segment, what they think, what drives them, the barriers they face]
What [product, service, brand, the thing you’re trying to sell them (not the benefit)
Versus [the alternative - not just your competitors, think outside the category, this can be lengthy but try and flag the most important]
Is [the benefit/position you’ve chosen using the CCC approach above].
I’d say don’t be the beef company that shows up at vegan festivals. But if that’s the gap in your market and you’ve chosen it as your positioning and you’re doing it consistently - then go for it. Maybe you’re targeting the ‘carnivore dragged along by girlfriend to hippy festival’ segment?
Regardless of what you come up with or how you represent it - what’s critical is that your activity reflects your positioning and that you do it consistently. The easiest way to start doing it consistently is by making sure your brand assets match your positioning and then ruthlessly applying said assets to EVERYTHING.
Summary
Positioning to make money
Positioning is important AFTER your customer knows you you are.
You want to position yourself in a way that’s perceived as unique by your customers vs your competitors. The easiest way to do that is make it reflective of who you actually are.
Split your positioning into two speeds: long term brand positioning and short term product specific or segment focused positioning. And obviously make sure they’re aligned or more accurately and extension of one another.
One of the main reasons you want to do this is because customers who perceive you as different and gravitate towards your proposition will be less price sensitive because they feel your brand stands for something.
Regardless of what you land on make sure you’re consistent.
And don’t position for the category and don’t position using something watered down and meaningless.
Well done. You made it through a pretty hefty rant and you now know more than most about positioning your brand/product/company. Want some help to find your positioning? Let us take your six we’ll help you get it done.