What is Brand Positioning?
Brand positioning is a strategic process in which a company develops its products and image to establish a unique place in the minds of its target audience. Very handy, right?
For your audience to truly connect with your brand, you need to make your brand relatable and memorable. To achieve this, you can use brand positioning to enhance your brand, refine your messaging, improve your reputation, and more.
It’s not only a practical activity, it’s also a lovely one. It helps you discover what makes your brand special, and there’s no bigger confidence boost than that!
Whether it’s your pricing, quality, personality, or customer service, you’ll be able to highlight the features that set you apart from your competition. It sounds like a lot, but don’t worry, a brand positioning map can help you work all this out.
Brand positioning helps you understand how your target audience perceives your brand in relation to your competitors. It’s about ensuring that when a customer has a need, your brand comes to mind as the best solution.
To effectively position your brand, you’ll need to deeply understand your market, competitors, and, most importantly, your audience. Only then will you be able to elevate your brand from ‘one in many’ to ‘the one and only’ in your customers’ minds.
Let’s dive in and explore how brand positioning works.
The Brand Positioning Process
1. Evaluate Your Current Brand Positioning
Unless you’re a new brand, you’ll likely already hold a certain position in the market. Fab! That’s one thing already ticked off your ‘to-do’ list. Now you just need to figure out what that position is.
How do you assess your current positioning, you ask?
Take a close look at your existing customers and get to know them better.
Who are they? Do they match your target market? Which of your products or services do they like best? What do they think about your brand, and how do they interact with it?
Customer feedback, such as surveys or interviews, will help you see the bigger picture — it’s like putting together a puzzle. Whatever insights you’ll receive, you’ll know they’re genuine as they’re directly from the source: your customers.
Not to be Negative Nancies, but sometimes, their feedback will disappoint you. You might receive differing opinions about your brand image, indicating that your position is unclear in both the market and your customers’ minds.
But hey, that’s not necessarily a bad thing! In fact, this is an excellent opportunity to grow and improve, and position your brand where you want it to be.
Take a moment to reflect on your brand’s voice, goals, and mission statement. Also, consider the products and services you offer — do they require any changes?
2. Identify and Research Your Competitors
Next, it’s time for some (healthy) comparison.
Find your direct competitors — those who operate in a similar market, and share the same vision, offerings, or audience — and assess their strategy.
Monitor what customers are saying about them. Analyse your competitors’ marketing approach and pay attention to how they engage their audience on social media. Ideally, you’ll learn a thing or two from them, helping you stay ahead of the game.
Let’s take it a step further and conduct a SWOT analysis — a framework for assessing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This will provide a clear picture of your position in relation to your competitors, particularly in terms of price, quality, cost, convenience, and customer service. You know, all that fun stuff!
Conducting a thorough competitive analysis will help you find your competitive edge and frame your unique selling proposition (USP). By understanding where your competitors fall short, you can take advantage of those gaps and strengthen your brand positioning.
3. Specify What Makes Your Brand Unique
Everyone’s brand is unique, but especially yours. You should be proud and shout about it from the rooftops — nay, mountains!
But (and we’ll let you in on a little secret here), there’s a more effective way to tell people about your brand than yelling about it. Yes, we can hardly believe it ourselves!
Here’s how: craft a unique value proposition (UVP). This statement clearly explains to potential customers why they should choose your offerings over your competitors’. It outlines how your brand is unique (and better!) and what makes it the best choice.
Here’s an example: your products are priced higher than those of your competitors, but while your competitors are more affordable, they can’t match your high quality. This is where your brand can fill the gap in the market and meet the needs of customers who value quality over low prices.
Although your brand is excellent and there’s lots to discuss, your UVP statement must be short. We’re talking two to three sentences long. Customers have no time to waste — you have to sell yourself fast!
4. Write a Brand Positioning Statement
Woohoo! We’re moving from one statement to another.
Your brand positioning statement, unlike your UVP, is an internal resource. It’s designed to help everyone in your team stay on the same page about what your company does, how it benefits your customers, and what sets you apart from the rest.
Like the UVP, it’s also meant to be brief.
Think of the brand positioning statement as your guiding star for everything you do, whether it’s marketing or product development. It helps shape the tone of your business and keeps you focused on your goals. It’s the bedrock of your brand identity.
5. Implement Your Brand Positioning Strategy
This is what you’ve all been waiting for. With all that prep, it’s time to put everything into motion.
Begin by ensuring that your communication with clients and customers accurately reflects your brand’s positioning statement. Share your statement with your employees as well, so they know what to do and how to do it. It’ll help you develop consistent messaging and align your internal and external communications.
Success is never guaranteed, and that’s okay! All you can do is constantly test your strategy and examine what works and doesn’t work with your customers. Pay attention to how they perceive your brand. This will help measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
For instance, do they have a better awareness of your brand? Can they see your value and how you stand out from your competitors? Ask yourself these questions (we’re big fans of reflection here at Zap, as you can tell!), and analyse your engagement metrics.
6. Test and Evaluate Your Strategy
Continuing from step five, let’s look at how your brand positioning strategy is shaping up.
- Visibility. Check out what your customers are saying in reviews or on social media. Are they identifying your products or brand better than before?
- Originality. Have you been able to differentiate yourself from your competitors following your implementation? How successful were you?
- Customers. Their opinion matters a lot when it comes to brand positioning. Sometimes, the best way to get their insights is to simply ask them. Consider sending out surveys to learn how they feel about your brand.
- Marketing campaigns. Since your brand positioning strategy plays a big role in shaping your marketing campaigns, it’s good to measure your growth. Have you noticed an increase in conversions, sales, or engagement since implementing your strategy?
Don’t worry if your implementation isn’t what you hoped it would be. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are iconic brands. It takes time and consistent effort to create a deeper bond with your customers, let alone retain them, but it’s worth it.
Keep working on positioning your brand in the market, and stay committed to being the best choice. Adapting to changing trends, market dynamics, and your customers’ needs is crucial in staying one step ahead of your competition.
Different Types of Brand Positioning Strategies
No two businesses are the same. Every company will pursue a different brand positioning strategy, depending on its industry, offering, and target audience.
Here are a few popular ones:
1. Quality-Based Positioning Strategy
Taking on this strategy, you’ll position your brand as a symbol of top-notch quality.
For example, if your competition business is centred around luxury cars, this strategy might work for you.
To implement this strategy successfully, you’ll need to highlight your expertise, your use of high-quality materials, and your outstanding performance.
This way, you’re bound to connect with customers who prioritise excellent products — and, potentially, fancy cars. These folks enjoy luxuries, big or small, and are happy to invest in something that offers excellent value and satisfaction.
2. Price-Based Positioning Strategy
By adopting this strategy, your brand can position itself as the most budget-friendly choice in the market.
As a competition business, you can do this in several ways. Focus on low-cost or free competitions, and emphasise the high value of your prizes (which aren’t necessarily on the ‘wallet-friendly’ side of things).
This approach targets shoppers seeking great deals and value. If you take this route, highlight your competitive low prices, special discounts and offers, and valuable prizes to attract cost-conscious customers.
3. Customer Service Positioning Strategy
This strategy focuses on positioning you as the market leader for the best customer service and support. The primary goal here is to establish a reputation for caring about your customers, building strong relationships with them, and fostering loyalty by consistently meeting their needs.
Social media is a great place for this. Engage with your customers through comments and direct messages, but also consider creating a community group (such as a Facebook Group) where they can connect with one another, and with you. It’ll give your customers a more personalised experience.
(Psst, if your brand is priced higher than your competitors, you may want to try this positioning, as your exceptional service will help justify it).
4. Convenience-Based Positioning Strategy
Positioning your brand as the most convenient choice for customers can mean various things.
For instance, if you’re a competition business, this may mean that:
- You make it easy for people to enter your contests
- Your drawing process is efficient
- Your website is user-friendly
This strategy aims to make life easier for busy customers who appreciate a smooth and easy purchasing experience.
5. Social Media Positioning Strategy
You may have noticed, but we live in an online-focused world nowadays. This makes social media a helpful medium for brand positioning.
If you take this approach, you’ll have to really build up your social media presence. This means engaging with your target audience, running some social media comps (i.e. ‘like this to win’), and crafting a brand image that aligns with your followers’ interests.
By being active on social media, your brand can enhance its reputation, connect with a broader audience, and acquire new customers.
Communicating Your Brand Positioning to Stakeholders
Stakeholders all have different interests, needs, expectations and ideas for your brand. It’s these differences which make communicating your brand positioning strategy to them so complicated. But it’s not as hard as you might think — especially if you follow these steps.
1. Active Listening
Active listening is the basis of any healthy and productive brand positioning discussion.
It’s not easy to listen to everyone’s differing perspectives, especially if you disagree with them and eagerly await your turn to speak. But if you’re actively listening, you’ll need to take a breath and listen rather than defend your position.
Absorb what you’re being told; you never know, the stakeholder might make a fair point. Reflect on what they tell you, too. Ask them questions and rephrase their ideas to show you’re listening and truly understand their perspective.
Also, listen to stakeholders from different departments, backgrounds and experience levels. Embracing all perspectives will give you a richer understanding of how your brand is perceived. You’ll be seen as inclusive and obtain much more unique insights than if you were to speak with similar stakeholders.
Plus, your stakeholders will feel respected and valued by you, which is a win-win.
2. Encourage Open Dialogue
Create an environment where open, honest conversation is the standard. It’ll positively impact how frequently and truthfully your stakeholders engage in brand positioning discussions with you.
Encourage everyone to voice their opinions by creating an environment where sharing even the strangest, most unconventional views is welcome. Hey, sometimes weird ideas can spark great things.
There are plenty of benefits to doing this. It’ll make everyone feel more comfortable opening up to you and create a sense of belonging among your stakeholders. They’ll feel truly involved in your brand and its future.
3. Use Feedback Loops
Feedback loops are another way to make your stakeholders feel heard. After each discussion, summarise your key takeaways and decisions and share this information with everyone for additional comments.
This is peak transparency — everybody loves it, especially stakeholders with a stake in your brand. They’ll feel like they have real influence on its trajectory.
Also, this approach is an easy way of keeping everyone on the same page, reducing future issues and bottlenecks. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy for everyone involved!
How Do You Measure Brand Positioning Success?
So, you’ve positioned your brand in a way you deem suitable. You’re confident that it shines brighter than your competitors, so bright that it invites your target audience to you.
And maybe it does, but it’s still good to double-check!
There are several ways to measure your brand positioning success:
- Conduct brand awareness surveys to understand if your target audience recognises your brand, and if they can recall it (without prompts!)
- Measure customer perception to understand how customers perceive your brand’s value proposition. You can find this info through surveys, focus groups, or by analysing online reviews and social media conversations.
- Track your sales data to see whether more or fewer purchases have been made after implementing your brand positioning.
- Measure your Net Promoter Score (NPS), which gauges customer loyalty and their likelihood of recommending your brand.
- Continue conducting competitive analysis. You know how it goes: evaluate your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and see how you’re doing in comparison. Always look out for new opportunities.
Ready to Make Your Brand the Talk of the Market?
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At Zap, we’re excited to share our specialist tips for making your brand shine. Our Knowledge Base is packed with wisdom, and it’s created just for you.
If you’re interested, contact us. With our team of experts by your side, we’ll help make your brand the buzz of the market.
