What Is Brand Positioning?

Why is brand positioning important for a business?

Brand positioning is the foundation on which to build your brand. With many retailers and marketers pushing to appeal to the target customers, brands need to articulate their message clearly to get noticed. A company’s brand position in the market will determine its market share within a given product category.

A company like Coca-Cola has maintained a huge market share for decades despite stiff competition. An effective brand positioning statement is a huge part of Coca-Cola’s success. The company has developed a powerful brand image that fosters consumer loyalty.

How does brand positioning impact consumer perception?

Positive brand perception is crucial. Positioning yourself right can set you up as a brand people trust, value, and come back to over and over again. Put yourself in the wrong spot and it can garner mistrust.

Authenticity is important here, and you should think hard on how your brand promise, brand values and vision, and your audience align. Authentic brand positioning can foster emotional connections by standing alongside their values and aspirations, encourage loyalty, and be a powerful driver of trust.

Brand positioning can even make people pay just that little bit more for your product or service: perceived value is a powerful thing, and communicating your value in the right space and in the right way can solidify your position in your chosen market.

You may well change your brand position over time as consumer behaviour changes and the market shifts and adapts, but any move should always ring true to create positive consumer perception of your brand.

Examples Of Brand Positioning Strategies

There are different brand positioning strategies you can use to stand out from the competition. A few of these include:

1. Price-based strategy: High pricing can communicate value, whereas pricing your products or service lower than those of competitors can make them more accessible and affordable. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. One implies quality but excludes customers, one risks giving a less aspirational impression, but is accessible to more people.

2. Quality-based strategy: This is an effective brand positioning strategy that involves not only selling high-quality and reliable products or services that outshine the competition, but building your brand around that quality. You’ll think about your unique value proposition (UVP) that sets out what makes your product or service different, useful, and the best option available.

3. Differentiation strategy: This is a strategy that focuses on the uniqueness of your product or service compared to those of competitors. Thinking about your unique selling point (USP) and how it solves a problem in your potential customers’ lives is key here.

4. Convenience-based strategy: This strategy emphasises comfort, ease of access, satisfaction, indulgence, and other aspects that promote consumer satisfaction. Think of Amazon Prime, delivering products within 24 hours to their customers.

You’ll need to analyse your target market to spot existing niches so that you can pick a strong brand positioning strategy to use. It’s also possible to leverage multiple strategies at the same time to create a great brand, but this can require more time and resources.

Getting Started With Brand Positioning

There are three critical elements that make up your brand positioning strategy

• Your customers
• Your competitors
• Your unique value or selling point

Identifying each of these elements carefully is the key to developing an effective brand positioning strategy. To understand what brand positioning is and get started with it, you need to answer three questions:

1. Who Is Your Target Market?

Remember, your brand exists to serve the needs of its target customers. Customer needs are unique, dynamic, and personal. Before you embark on brand positioning, you need to study your target market—and closely. Understand what your audience needs and use that as a perceptual map to craft an impactful brand proposition and visual identity.

To position yourself properly, you must gain an understanding of your consumers’ perceptions, which means putting yourself in their shoes, assessing their desires, challenges, values, likes, dislikes, and much more, to truly understand what they want from their customer experience and how you can provide it for them.

You can do this by building customer personas, which are fictional representations of the people you’re trying to sell your product or service to. Dedicating time to quality market research and gaining a deep understanding of your customer demographics can guide your brand messaging, marketing efforts, and more.

At the end of the day, your brand may attempt to influence the perception of your brand, but ultimately, your audience decides how you’re perceived. They will decide whether or not your brand fits their preferences and whether they’re interested based on their brand awareness, experiences, circumstances, and, of course, the exposure to the messages you provide through marketing campaigns and other touchpoints they interact with.

2. What Competitive Advantage Do You Want to Leverage?

Millions of businesses out there are competing to dominate the market. To gain an upper hand in the competition, you need to have some competitive advantage. Your competitive advantage is reflected in the strategy you adopt.

Competitive advantage doesn’t have to be a game-changer. The key is to identify and address any weaknesses in competitor brands that burden the target customers. For example, if the local cafes in your area don’t offer delivery services, you may base your competitive advantage on food delivery services. This way, you won’t necessarily need to have the best pricing since the convenience you offer is attractive to the target customers. In a crowded marketplace, finding these niches is incredibly important.

Having a good brand identity can also guarantee you a competitive advantage. A powerful and relatable brand identity can drive your target customers to choose your product over those of competitors. Successful brands like Tesla achieve this by creating new products that challenge the status quo in terms of efficiency, innovation, and pricing.

3. Why Should The Market Believe You?

After building the product, it doesn’t matter what amount of competitive advantage you have. You need to convince your target customers that they need to switch to your brand. The final step of any brand positioning strategy is to create brand awareness and persuade your target audience to give the product or service a try. You’ll need to have a good marketing strategy and a strong brand proposition encompassed in your value proposition.

A value proposition is a promise of value your business vows to deliver. It shows your customers why they should believe in you and choose your product. Through the value proposition, you’ll be able to convince your ideal customers to choose your brand.

Apart from having a value one, your key messaging that you communicate to your target market is also important. There are many strategies you can use to do so, such as social media. It gives your business something more than consumer brand awareness. It enables you to display social proof through things such as customer feedback and stats.

This can strengthen your brand image by convincing your customers that your brand has achieved a lot within its product category, is in high demand, and therefore, they should choose your brand. It is also a great tool to convey your brand personality, as it pulls on an emotional trigger in the target customers’ minds enabling them to take action and stay loyal to your brand.

How do you measure the effectiveness of a brand positioning strategy?

To assess the success of any business strategy, you will need to track metrics. These can be:

• Brand awareness: How many people are talking about your brand? How easily can people recall your brand name, logo, or product? Website traffic, social media activity, and how quickly people think of your brand when considering certain topics, activities, values, or qualities, can all indicate how widespread your brand awareness is.
• Brand perception: Customers will have opinions about your brand—even neutral reactions to your brand tell you a lot about the success of your brand positioning. Remember, customers that feel connected to your brand can be some of the most powerful promoters at your disposal.
• Sales and revenue: Successfully positioning your brand should result in an uptick in customers, sales, and retention.
• Competitor performance: Every business is trying to position itself as the most unique brand on the market, so looking at how your competitors’ brand positions are benefiting (or hurting) them can be invaluable to help guide you.

You can gather data on these metrics with customer surveys that dig into what they think of your brand compared to competitors and how they feel about your brand as a whole, analyses that compare your strengths and weaknesses compared to your competitors in the form of SWOT analyses (more on those here), and good old revenue tracking that shows you whether people have moved from potential customers to regulars.

With all of this data at your fingertips, you’ll get an accurate picture of how successful your brand positioning exploits have been.

To sum it all up

Whether you want to venture into a new market or increase your market share in your current niche, brand positioning is a powerful strategy that will guarantee you amazing results.

Brand positioning ensures that your brand remains on top of consumers’ minds so that when they are faced with a choice between brands, they will choose you. Big companies like Apple and Nike are masters in effective brand positioning, but you don’t have to be a goliath to get it right.

Build your brand positioning know-how by studying your niche and choosing a good brand positioning strategy. Then, leverage your competitive advantage to attract new customers, build brand loyalty, recognition, and a great reputation.

Want to take the next step?

If you’re interested in learning more or already know you want help with repositioning your brand and building your brand equity, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.