What is a brand positioning?
Without a doubt, brand positioning is one of the most critical elements in the entire brand strategy.
It aims to place your brand in the mind of your audience for a very specific reason to help them distinguish your brand from the rest.
No matter which industry you’re operating in, it’s probably a noisy place full of competitors all vying for the attention of your shared audience.
You can’t just expect your audience to understand why they should choose your brand over a competitor’s; you need to help them to that discovery.
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Brand positioning is about owning a unique position in the mind of the target consumer
Examples : Positioning
Australian Yellow Tail Wines
Yellow Tail Wines objective was to enter the US market and to be perceived very differently from the vast majority of wine brands, which all sell complicated products with sophisticated and hard-to-understand wine terminology. Yellow Tail focused their positioning strategy on being perceived as
“approachable, easy-to-choose, and fun”.
This is how they achieved this brand positioning:
- The product: Yellow Tail developed a wine that is soft and sweet in taste and as approachable as beer and ready-to-drink cocktails. It resulted in an easy-drinking wine that did not require years of experience to develop an appreciation for it.
- The name: A fun and adventurous name that represents the tail of a Kangaroo (as a reference to the Australian origins).
- The visual identity: Designing a fun, colorful, and unintimidating packaging design without complicated enological terms.
- The communication strategy: Focusing their communication on in-store activities with the brand ambassador that helped the product to be perceived as approachable and funny/down-to-earth ads.
- The price: Offering a price of less than $10 to fit be perceived as “approachable” and being used at every festive occasion.
Organic Bath Co.
Organic Bath Co. Positioning Statement: We are creating an airline people love. Each day, we are guided by our core values of “own safety”, “do the right thing”, “be kind-hearted”, “deliver performance”, and “be remarkable at work and in our communities.” Alaska Airlines also fosters a diverse and inclusive culture and is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
Beautycounter
Beautycounter Positioning Statement:
One by one, we are leading a movement to a future where all beauty is clean beauty. We are powered by people, and our collective mission is to get safer products into the hands of everyone. Formulate, advocate, and educate—that’s our motto for creating products that truly perform while holding ourselves to unparalleled standards of safety. Why? It’s really this simple: beauty should be good for you.
Amazon
Amazon Positioning Statement:
For consumers who want to purchase a wide range of products online with quick delivery, Amazon provides a one-stop online shopping site. Amazon sets itself apart from other online retailers with its customer obsession, passion for innovation, and commitment to operational excellence.
Tesla
Tesla is a luxury brand that’s more expensive than its competitors. Because of that, they leave price out of their branding and instead focus on the quality of their vehicles. Tesla cars are long-range, eco-friendly and electric — in addition to being luxury vehicles.
Tesla differs from other gas-powered luxury vehicles because their cars are electric. They differentiate themselves from the standard electric vehicles because their cars are of higher quality and have a longer range.
Tesla built out a niche market for themselves and a fun brand to match it. CEO Elon Musk has built himself up as a Tony Stark-like character, and the brand promotes its uniqueness through ads and quirky features, like “Ludicrous Mode.
Trader Joe’s
Trader Joe’s have differentiated themselves from their competitors by positioning themselves as a “national chain of neighborhood grocery stores.” They offer a more tight-knit corner store shopping experience than similar premium food competitors like Whole Foods.
They have a wide variety of high-quality food at a low price and try to make shopping fun. Their nautical theme is reflected across their assets from in-store signage to the Hawaiian shirts their employees wear to the language they use on their website.
As they say on their website, “if an item doesn’t pull its weight in our stores, it goes away to gangway for something else.” That single sentence exemplifies their commitment to offering value through quality products at reasonable prices in a fun atmosphere.
Dollar Shave Club
Their name alone demonstrates one of the main aspects of Dollar Shave Club’s value proposition: their low cost. Dollar Shave Club has focused its positioning on affordability and convenience, creating a brand that’s relatable for the average consumer.
Whereas their competitor Gillette is more expensive and has a very masculine tone to their messaging and branding, Dollar Shave Club is more cheeky and casual. Gillette has a very sleek look and features guys who look like actors and models. Dollar Shave Club features average looking people across a wide age range who are more relatable to consumers.
Dollar Shave Club’s brand is cheaper, cheekier and more convenient than their competitors.
Nike
Nike started their product with a focus on performance and innovation. They invented the waffle shoe and built their brand targeting serious athletes. Their product offerings have now moved beyond shoes, and they offer athletic attire that enhances performance.
Their branding and messaging focuses on empowerment, from their tagline “Just Do It” to their namesake, the Greek Goddess of Victory. Their models and athletes aren’t smiling and happy, they’re doing physical activities with their game faces on.
Nike’s brand is focused on the concept of innovation for serious athletes to help you perform at your best every single time.
Importance of Brand Positioning and Strategy :
- Market differentation The unique and creative Brand Positioning not only clears the clutter from the market but also gives the factor of differentiation to the brand as compared to its direct and indirect competitors. It makes the brand stand out in the market as well as in the customer’s mind with the unique selling proposition and the strong attributes of the brand getting ingrained in their minds working as a recall factor.
- Justifies the pricing strategy Yet another benefit of the Brand Positioning is that it helps the management of the company to justify the pricing strategy. If the pricing of the products offered by the brand is high owing to the feature of quality and class, and the Brand Positioning is formulated in such a way that showcases the factors of quality and class, the pricing part gets automatically justified in the minds of the customers. The same is applicable for the products that are reasonable and affordable in nature and the positioning strategy is planned and executed accordingly.
- Competitive advantage A strong Brand Positioning that tactfully and strategically highlights the core values, strengths, attributes, and the unique selling propositions of the brand enjoys the facet of competitive advantage that results in accomplishing the objectives of higher sales, increased market share, customer loyalty, attracting the new set of customers, and elevated profits.
- Makes the brand more creative
There are quite many brands in the market offering the similar lines of products and services to the same target market and audience but it is the Brand Positioning that makes one brand different and unique from the other. And if the brand is able to come up with the innovative and novel positioning strategy and execution, the brand is adorned with the tag of the creative brand.
A good Brand positioning helps customers to resonate with the values and concepts of brand and helps them to associate with it on a deeper level which is beyond buyer and seller relationship. A positive positioning helps the brand to stand out amongst competitors and gain competitive advantage along with the added market share.
8 Types of Brand Positioning Strategies
Value-based Brand positioning
Value-based positioning has two approaches and both are based are very much dependent on the quality of the product. They use a psychological approach which exploits the belief that more expensive something is, the better it is. This increases the value in the minds of the customer and the product is positioned as expensive and useful and good.
Alternatively, you can also position your brand as providing high quality and high value-priced products or services. It is essential in value positioning that the company should first establish the values of the product in the market for themselves to sell.
An excellent example of a strategy would be Southwest airlines which are offering affordable flights to people along with free check-in luggage. Thereby Southwest airlines establish its value in the minds of the customer.
Quality based Brand positioning
Positioning with the help of an important parameter like quality can be a very challenging positioning strategy. Although it can be combined with other strategies and positioned easily. Every business in the market nowadays is trying to establish quality and its commitment to maintain it.
One unique way to distinguish your products amongst the competitors would be to narrow the focus to a particular area of expertise and use that as branding strategy in terms of quality positioning. For example, when it comes to audio everybody knows that Bose audio is the best, they have positioned themselves in that way. There worked only on one parameter significantly rather than working on all parameters simultaneously.
This makes them specialized in one feature thereby ensuring proper focus on the quality of that particular feature. Another example would be BlackBerry mobile phones which used by selective few in the market but seen as one of the best phones when it comes to security.
Competitor based positioning
Since the competition has increased companies are taking this strategy to demonstrate the superiority amongst all other available competitors in the market. Right from insurance companies to mobile phones every company establishes its supremacy by comparing their products or services to other companies or direct competitors.
The messages are usually straight, clear and address the competition directly although some may use an indirect reference to their competitors. An example would be, in 2017 iPhone X was launched with the notch in the mobile for the first time in the industry. Samsung mocked Apple by creating an ad in which a person if the notch stands in the line to buy new Apple iPhone while a person who just switched from Apple to Samsung is depicted to be happier. This was an indirect reference to Apple and its new phone while mocking its shortcomings.
Benefit positioning
Working with the benefits of attributes and communicating those benefits to the customer has been an old strategy followed by many brands. The strategy highlights the benefits of the product or service to the customers and cream that no computer can copy them since their unique to that particular brand. Sensodyne is an example which uses benefit positioning and today is a premium toothpaste in the market of oral dentistry and oral hygiene. It has positioned itself as an oral medical solution provider which customer can use on a day-to-day basis to get rid of oral problems.
While other kinds of toothpaste focus on whitening and reducing the bad breath Sensodyne has focused on medical aspects of oral hygiene which is a unique benefit in the market and that has helped them to stand out.
Problem and solution positioning
Many brands present themselves as a solution provider to the problems of the customers. The ideology behind such positioning is to demonstrate that this particular brand can help you solve your problems instantly and efficiently. Banks, Insurances, and loans have started themselves to a position as a solution provider.
Often advertised as ‘Need a loan? Contact us and we will get the loan Approved within Minutes or Seconds with minimum documentation’ is the claim which is followed by many banks thereby acting as a solution provider to the financial problems of the customer.
Price Positioning
As much as quality plays an important role in the product success price is an equally important factor which determines the enormity of success of a particular brand. Why is there are expensive brand positioning themselves as unique and niche, the appeal to a very limited segment of customers who can afford to purchase them? There still remains a major bulk order chunk of customers who are not able to purchase those nice products or services. It is to appeal to these customers that price positioning is done by many Brands. One such example of price positioning is Air Asia, which is the South Asian airline service, whose operations are based in Malaysia.
The airline has successfully positioned itself as an economic service appealing to the middle class and lower middle class and making foreign tours possible for them. While they may compromise on the quality sometimes, the fact still remains that they are seen as the first choice by every first-time flight travellers who cannot afford to travel by a luxury brand like American airlines.
Celebrity-driven positioning
Using celebrities as a spokesperson to endorse a particular category of product or services has been a popular way for a long time. The aim of celebrity-driven positioning is to get the attention of people and increase brand awareness and recognition by associating the product or a brand with the glamorous personality of the particular celebrity. This is often an expensive affair for the companies but they knowingly choose this method of splurging because of the fact of familiarity and popularity of the celebrity.
This association of celebrity with the brand inspires many buyers who follow the celebrity to buy the same brand and make them feel psychologically associated with the celebrity.
Leader-based positioning
Very few companies have opted for this route since to declare a market leader you would require your brand to be the best and unique in the market. Many companies start with this positioning but as competition increases, they fall out and the strategy needs to be revamped. The best examples of long-term leadership-based positioning are done by Facebook. In the segment of social media, Facebook is unique in terms of the services it provides and has the greatest number of users associated with it.
Why there are other players like Instagram which is owned by Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, none of the services overlaps in the category of services provided by Facebook wild Facebook, on the other hand, provides part of services that all of these provisions. With recent acquiring of Instagram and WhatsApp Facebook has become the unrivalled leader in the industry of social media.
Craft a Positioning Statement for Your Business
Every positioning statement is different, but we can distinguish a common framework.
Different brands have different positioning statements, but when you analyze most of them, we can notice some similarities.
Use this time-tested and widely-used positioning statement framework:
Remember that this is the place where you need to be succinct and make every word count.
But you also must to be sure that you capture everything you need to.
So in order to capture everything in a succinct way you must be selective with words, but you also need to understand all of the elements that go into it.
Step-by-step:
Empathize with Your Audience Persona
Start with the audience persona you created in the previous steps
Who are your customers? Describe their demographics and psychographics.
Demographics is all that that people in marketing always refer to: sex, income, age (all the facts about the users).
Psychographics are totally different and there are more valuable to us designers and brand strategists.
Describe your category of business
The more creatively you can describe the frame of reference in ways that still apply, the better.
Define your category of business, but do so in a unique and creative way.
Just like BMW did with the slogan: “The ultimate driving machine”.
BMW could be a car company, or engineer of ultimate driving machines.
Your point of difference
Point of difference refers to the factors of products or services that establish differentiation.
Qualitative and quantitative research should inform this point.
What can your brand or product say that no one can say?
This is very difficult to write, it's your onliness statement basically.
What is the end benefit
State what the brand or product does for the target that is emotional and intangible.
What does the brand do for the target audience?
Remember that features are not benefits.
What's the difference between them? - I described that in the “brand ladder” paragraph.
Positioning Statement Examples
Nikon Positioning Statement
“For (creative professionals with an eye for capturing and sharing beauty), (Nikon) is the (digital point and shoot) that delivers (a window to their world), so they can (experience deeper connections through a shared perspective), because (of Nikon’s 100 year history of developing new technologies that allow you to capture and share your experiences in their purest form, it’s as if you were there)”
Apple Positioning Statement
For (individuals who want the best personal computer or mobile device), (Apple) is the (leader of technology industry) that delivers (the most innovative products) so they can (enjoy seamless experiences across all Apple devices & be empowered with breakthrough services), because (Apple takes an innovative approach to business best practices, considering the impact our products have on customers & the planet).”
Coca-Cola Positioning Statement
“For (individuals looking for high-quality drinks), (Coca-Cola) is a (wide range of the most refreshing beverages), that delivers (happiness unlike other beverage options), so they can (enjoy a Coca-Cola drink & make a positive difference in their lives), because (the brand is intensely focused on the needs of customers)."
💥 Take Action
Brand Positioning Statement
1. What is Your Brand Positioning Statement?
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Next Step Step 7 ⇒ Brand Differentiation
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