A Complete Guide To Successful Brand Positioning

In doing so, Vodafone gained 46,000 new outlets and was able to get Fakka into the hands of thousands of Egyptians during their routine shopping activities. Such a comparison would immediately make the Micro Recharge cards look high value because these other items are so value-less. First, mothers had become quite sceptical of foods or brands purporting to be natural. Yet, they didn’t see a rational reason to pay a premium price for Denny.

• All your messaging—whether your product page, sales copy, or a campaign plan—now needs to speak to the value your target buyers care about.
• Train of Thought clients share a commitment to tangible goals, an appreciation for on-target creative, and a burning desire to succeed.
• Previously we were also afraid to call out competitors by name.
• It’ll be different for everyone, but here’s a quick test.
• However, when we tried to describe our value to prospects, they couldn’t understand why they would buy a “database” to do that.

Wide coverage across the market is a must to guarantee penetration. Most probably, this is going to be an impulse purchase.

Mature brands that were founded at stage two are probably now the leaders of their categories. As the market place becomes saturated, some brands are capable of becoming icons.

Here, we’re going to focus on making a human connection with your audience. And that’s about it — If everything looks right to you, let’s translate the prioritized awareness goals into the main Strategy Worksheet. And then let’s do this with each of the item on our list. And the goal of this exercise is to figure out what we can do to get people to discover you. Finally, let’s put this all together to create your Positioning Statement. For example the end-benefit to Coca-Cola consumers is “Feel energetic and vibrant”, and for Dove is “Feel confident and glowing”.

This can be out of the budget of many companies and potentially unnecessary if you’re not seeking a full rebrand. Branding agencies are experts at not only designing great logos but also focusing brands on their core values and target customers. Popeyes uses a differentiation strategy whereas Chick-Fil-A touts a hybrid customer service / quality-based approach. What’s unique about Chick-Fil-A is that its brand positioning strategies are both overt and covert.

Positioning Around What You Know

Every company I have ever worked with has struggled to make their awesomeness obvious. Now, map your features against the Elements of Value that are either most valuable to your customers, where you’re most differentiated, or ideally both. To start you can assign these values based on existing market knowledge, research, and data. It can then be refined with customer survey and interviews. Once you understand what’s driving your customers and what they want in a solution, you can compare and contrast your brand with the competition to find areas of strength (and weakness!). With our customer Jobs defined, we can use the Elements of Value framework to get even more specific about the needs of our customers.

So the key and the trick is to keep you archetypal mix refined and focused. So now, as you can see, I’ve also included some of the famous brands on that wheel – just to give you an example, so that you can relate. But before we do the exercise, we actually need to fly quickly through all of them, to help you understand what they are all about. People expect brands to have a personality, so that they actually feel like they’re engaging with a person, when they’re really engaging with the brand. And if the consumer didn’t feel a connection or had a complaint, they basically had no voice. Brand Strategy — Brand Persona sectionBecause you see, back in the 80s and 90s consumers didn’t have much to say.

Market Category

It can be as simple as telling your brand story and introducing a positive business philosophy. Or it could be as broad as creating a brand that emotionally reflects your target market’s values and lifestyle.

Every tenet leads to the end of a relationship because, put another way, your brand is the quality of the relationship with your audience. Obviously, you’re not taking your customers to prom — at least, I hope not. In this context, relationship means the stickiness of trust coupled with compelling reasons to return. In this exercise, have one person visit a stock photography website or search Google for pictures of all different types of people. Search for multiple different types of people based on age, city, activities, socio-economic status, type of industry, gender, or anything else that is relevant to your product.

Step 3 Align Your Positioning Vocabulary And Let Go Of Your Positioning Baggage

The brand leads its convenience positioning strategy right from the home screen of the app which prompts the user to enter a dollar amount before anything else. Dunkin’ focuses on both its leadership in the field and wide-ranging availability, and thus their strategy is leader- and convenience-based. «It’s crucial to test, experiment, and actively gather feedback from your target customers on whether or not your positioning is actually having its desired effect. Chances are after you conduct competitor research, you’ll begin to see patterns. You’ll start to see some businesses that have the same strengths and weaknesses.

• Attempting to become the market leader is also incredibly challenging since all your competitors are likely trying to do the same.
• It’s a painstaking and research-intensive process which takes weeks, if not months.
• However, herein lies the catch – the unique features doesn’t necessarily have to be a plus; it could also be a minus!
• Please note, while Emily was at Asana for 4 years, she didn’t know how to make perceptions when she started building the marketing team in 2013, and these are not real.
• Sometimes this search for authentic experience results in a barely perceptible layer of marketing.
• From onboarding to support, they’re nearly flawless at executing our brand promise.

Your positioning needs to be centred on the value that you alone can deliver for customers. It provides context and a frame of reference that makes it easy for customers to understand why they should care about what we do. I joined a startup early in my career that was founded by a team of database experts. They built an innovative database, one that could quickly analyze massive amounts of data in a fraction of the time that normal databases could do it. Interestingly when we tried to sell the solution most folks wouldn’t even take a meeting with us. “We don’t need a database, they explained, we have Oracle”. For them, “database” meant a lot more than just an ability to do a fast query — our unique value was sidelined by everything else they trusted Oracle to do.

How To Develop A Brand Strategy Free Guide

“In my case, I was trying to look at what could I do that was differentiated. You know, there are so many marketing consultants on the market. https://wave-accounting.net/ April Dunford, a positioning consultant for growing tech companies, keynote speaker, and book author, knows “a little” about it.

• The shift from marketing to classic branding is never easy, for the consumer nor the companies.
• And that’s about it — If everything looks right to you, let’s translate the prioritized awareness goals into the main Strategy Worksheet.
• This is because if a certain action points you towards your future brand, then you’re much more likely to stay «on brand» and on track.
• Then, the final outcome should be a relevant brand positioning statement.
• This type of branding uses the strength and familiarity of an existing brand to create positive associations for another product or service.
• Are you currently marketing your product or service as just another item on the market, or are you marketing it as something distinctive?

Declaring that your product exists in a market category triggers a set of powerful assumptions. Once you’ve defined the personas of a few potential customers, figure out what products, services, and benefits they’re likely to appreciate. The whole point is to uncover which benefits they would value the most. Focus groups, customer interviews are all integral to the process of product positioning. If you’re a small business, you can always ask someone in your network.

A.To urban-dwelling, educated techno-savvy consumers, when you use Zipcar car-sharing service instead of owning a car, you save money while reducing your carbon footprint. For who , the is a that (statement of key benefit; also called a compelling reason to believe). A case study, sent via an email campaign, that highlights a customer’s recent positive experience with the product. Of one of your customer segments, and communicating the ways that your product alleviates those pain points.

Step 2: Write Your Brand Positioning Statement

In this post, you’ll learn the framework for successfully positioning a brand within your ideal market. Below are the high-level topics we’ll cover — but don’t worry — we’ll be getting into the weeds so brand positioning exercise you have a thorough understanding of how to position your brand. You won’t find positioning statements on a company’s website, but here are a couple examples based on what we know about the companies.

A friend of mine conducted a positioning exercise with a group of ad agency executives. He asked each executive to jot down one word that described their agency’s superpower. Then, he had the execs pass their note to the person next to them. Our “small pond” would be a subcategory of SaaS companies who need a focused, less complex messaging tool . We prepared for that question well and even put together a dedicated page on our website featuring some of these customers. We won’t call out the names here, but most raving fans have been fellow SaaS founders who were fairly technical (hence didn’t have any problems with the integration).

Consumers become so literate about marketing and communication that they see through the conventions and devices designed to persuade them. Furthermore, advertising at this stage has a minimal role to play. Any advertising here is a straight sell that focuses on rational, functional attributes. The advertiser assumes the role of the maker, ‘expert’, or salesman.

Establish An Emotional Connection With Prospects And Customers

In this final step, you want to decide on the right context for your product or service, which will make it easy for your target audience to understand your value. Many companies worry that focusing on a hyper-specific market will be too limiting. After all, targeting a niche market means fewer potential buyers. But it also helps you double down on your marketing resources more effectively.

Brand Strategy From The Storytelling Masters

Successful branding yields benefits such as increased customer loyalty, an improved image, and a relatable identity that sets you apart from the competition. A strong brand positioning statement uses inspiring terminology, yet the phraseology must also appeal directly to your target market because one constantly informs the other. You must consider words that might offend the sensibilities or sensitivities of your market. For instance, you would not use the term ‘earth-shattering’ if you are an environmental group. Focusing on inspiring words will—guess what—inspire people to share your vision and spread your word. With communication as a primary vehicle, brand positioning should have longevity as an essential trait. A positioning can evolve over a period of time but it cannot drastically change.

If you’re thinking to yourself that perceptions won’t actually be useful, give me a couple more minutes here. Oftentimes busywork gets prioritized over impactful work in marketing. You need to stay focused, and stay relentlessly focused on staying focused (tongue twister!). We’ve created some perceptions, pretending we were marketers at these companies when they were starting out—so much time traveling in this newsletter. Today we launched a community job board, powered by Pallet. The MKT1 job board is a curated list of early & growth stage startup marketing roles. Here’s where we have to start making the tough choices.

Why Is Brand Positioning Important

Then, when you’re writing a piece of content, include a content brief at the top of the doc. Include what perception the content maps to again so it’s easy to stay focused when writing and editing. Developers should focus on building what’s core to their product. Marcel, we hope you find this helpful in getting you started in bringing your brand’s promise to life. The opportunities for bringing the brand’s promise to life are almost endless.