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They are not enough by themselves. It's important to make a difference. Just think: What makes your brand unique?
Brand positioning involves much more than just how well your logo or slogan stands out from competing businesses. It concerns the strategic positioning of your brand's mission, offering, and identity in a crowded marketplace with competing businesses. More significantly, it's what your customers perceive you to be. Where you stand in relation to your rivals is ultimately determined by your audience.
In this article, you'll find a complete guide for properly placing your brand in the ideal market. The high-level things for brand positioning are listed below. We'll also go into the specifics so you can fully grasp which strategy best helps a company reach consumers.
Kotler defines brand positioning as “the act of designing the company's offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market”.
To put it in another way, brand positioning explains how a brand differs from its rivals and how it appears to customers. In order to influence how people perceive a company, a competitive positioning strategy entails building brand connections in people’s minds.
A powerful positioning goes beyond a good first impression. It creates a lasting impression of your brand. You want to be unforgettable with the difference you put in the competitive market, right?
Simply said, it involves your brand connecting with your client in a way that makes them aware of their desire for you. A company's bottom line is impacted by its ability to differentiate itself, communicate value, and justify the pricing.
Brand positioning is important for several reasons:
Why do we remember a brand with its catchy slogan, have you ever thought about this? Brand positioning makes the brand stand out in the sector and distinguish itself from other brands.
Even for the most valuable goods and services, price justification is occasionally essential. The main goal of brand positioning is to identify and evaluate your brand in relation to the competitors. You can then explain why your pricing is either greater or cheaper than those of your competitors. Additionally, you'll see the positive feedback from customers.
The ability to talk passionately about what is important to you comes from knowing oneself well. It enables you to support your point of view with unrestricted clarity.
Getting to know your brand and adding meaning to it allows you to use your creativity in your campaigns and works. Turn your brand into a work of art and provide yourself and your customers with creative brand positioning rather than mechanical and soulless techniques.
Consumers want to make easy decisions. They are not comfortable with spending their time on multiple alternatives. It is not a viable choice to gain these people's trust quickly and readily if you want to make them buy things from you. Your target audience's emotional response to your brand is triggered by brand positioning, both at a conscious and unconscious level.
Brand positioning explains your unique worth whether you sell a limited-edition luxury item or service that the general public buys. Value in this context refers to what you provide customers, how the substitutes offered by competitors are insufficient, and how your good or service best meets customers' demands.
The only thing you can provide without a branding strategy is ambiguity, which no one appreciates or buys. Regardless of the size of your target audience, strategic positioning can help you cut through the generalizations and articulate specifically what you mean.
In order to foster relationships, brands give their products specific features. The aim behind it is to influence people to make decisions based on product and brand attributes.
As a brand strategy example, a shampoo brand can choose to promote its product with shining characteristics or anti-dandruff features. Customers view Pantene as a premium shampoo that produces soft, silky, and strong hair. On the other hand, customers' perception of Head & Shoulder is that it offers solutions to hair and dandruff issues.
The consumer-based perspective emphasizes how brand and category consumption is appropriate to customers' lives. Finding the abstract meanings connected with the consumption of a particular brand or the overall category is necessary for adopting a customer-based strategy.
Competitor-based positioning strategy is a plan that outlines how your company will gain and keep a competitive edge. Your brand identity is the second half of your brand platform, or what your brand stands for. Your competitive brand positioning refers to your target market, company niche, and value-adding activities for your clients.
"For X (customers), we are the A who does B because C"
It is a formula to make a competitor-based positioning statement.
A business should present its product or service as the most cost-effective choice using a price-based positioning approach. No one likes to spend more money than they have to, so if you position your product as the least expensive on the market, you can attract a sizable consumer base. It is simple to convert prospects by providing the lowest price.
Characteristics-Based Positioning | Glossier.
Glossier has positioned itself as a brand that celebrates natural beauty and offers simple, effective skincare and makeup products.
They've built a loyal community of customers who appreciate their focus on inclusivity, and they've become known for their minimalist packaging and Instagram-worthy aesthetics.
Consumer-Based Positioning | Abercrombie & Fitch
A&F advertised using athletic models to appeal to the youth lifestyle. But in recent years, it has expanded its product range to respond to consumers' sensitivities about diversity and inclusion. While this expansion includes a wider range of sizes and styles, the company has also launched campaigns featuring models of various ages and body types.
A brand positioning statement shows your audience what you do, for whom you do it, and the point that differentiates your brand from others. Follow these steps below to create a powerful brand positioning statement:
It is critical to use consumer intelligence analytics tools to achieve a successful brand positioning strategy. If you are a customer-focused brand, you can use specific category-based comparisons and sentiment analysis to understand your customers. This way, you can identify your uniqueness and develop an effective strategy that resonates with your target audience.
Also, you might want to consider conducting a SWOT analysis to acquire inspiration for this section of the brand positioning statement. You can find the SWOT analysis templates at the end of the article.
Ask yourself these questions for testing your statement:
You may start creating your brand positioning strategy now that you are aware of what it is, the advantages of having one, and the basic framework for doing so. It can be a good way to use social listening tools for understanding your customers’ perspectives and finding your pin-points to build a strategic and competitive brand positioning. Pivony is one of the best customer intelligience tools to analyze your customers’ conversations.
Book your demo and find your best brand positioning strategy with Pivony Consumer Intelligence Platform.
Here is the template for SWOT analysis
Template for SWOT analysis (Excel)
Here is the template for brand positioning statements
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