BRAND STORY: 04
Position Your Brand in Seven Easy Steps
Differentiate Your Brand in a Crowded Marketplace using the Brand Story Workshop.
You know your customer. Now, get your customer to feel, “This brand’s for me.”
To summarize brand positioning, you want your customers to:
- Understand what your business is about,
- Want what you’re selling, and
- Experience positive feelings and associations toward your brand.
Instead of selling with features and benefits, you are going to position your product to align with their needs and desires.
Positioning is like finding the right slot for a book on the bookshelf. Suppose you researched and wrote a book on “Biblical Recipes.” There is a section in the library for Religion and a section for Cookbooks — but not for a book of Biblical Recipes. Where to put that book is a positioning problem. Amid the thousands of books:
- The religious reader won’t find your book if it’s in “Cooking,”
- The foodie won’t find it if it’s in “Religion.”
To position it correctly, you will need to know your target customer: Is she a foodie or a believer?
The human mind screens and rejects information that goes against the slots on its mental shelf — data that doesn’t fit with its beliefs and prior experiences (I’m a foodie, not a believer; I’m a believer, not a foodie). Researchers describe this as confirmation bias. We stop considering new information if the evidence we’ve already gathered confirms what we would like to be true.
Our screening nature also serves as a survival mechanism to manage information overload. If you made a note of every leaf in the forest, you might step on a snake. The mind screens out the canopy of green to recognize the diamondback poised on the trail.
INTRODUCING: Donnie — Even a teenager can position a brand.
Brand positioning is not complicated, but it does require an open mind and common sense. To prove this point, in my upcoming articles, we will be following the branding journey of young Donnie.
Donnie, 18 years old, is launching a seriously-underfunded landscaping business. He’s got a pick-up truck, lots of enthusiasm, and lives in a hip part of town where Craftsman-style bungalows scrunch side-by-side on postage stamp lots.
Donnie has no funding, so he can’t compete with the landscaping crews pulling trailers of motorized equipment. He finds an old-fashioned reel mower sitting at the curb and decides to go into business. He positions his little startup: “Lilliputian Lawn Care — The Tiny Yard Specialist.”
Donnie’s in-town hipster neighbors are intrigued by his truck. He preaches the merits of the push reel mower: It’s better for the health of the grass, doesn’t give off greenhouse gases, and reduces noise pollution.
More importantly, Donnie owns the category as The Tiny Yard Specialist!
This is positioning. Donnie is Schweppes, not Coke. Faced with a canopy of “leaves” (buying choices), the lawncare shopper doesn’t have time to research every landscaping service to make a buying decision. Shoppers who prefer larger, well-established companies won’t consider Donnie’s startup, Lilliputian Lawn Care. By identifying his target customer, Donnie can circumvent this disadvantage by aligning his brand to his target customer’s needs. As the owner of Lilliputian, he recognizes his strengths (small yards, no gas engines). As a result, he identifies his target customer as someone deeply invested in a new slot on the shelf: “Sustainable Lawn Care.” For this person, sustainability trumps size. So, Donnie positions Lilliputian Lawn Care as:
“The Sustainable Choice.”
For positioning to work, a market must exist of folks who care about pollution-free lawn care. If people feel, “just cut the damn thing,” the business won’t work. Finding the right slot is like hitting the jackpot.
Here are nine famous examples where positioning hit the jackpot (with much credit to Al Ries, whose book with Jack Trout, Positioning, the Battle for your Mind, is considered the most influential marketing book of all time)
Nine brands that scored big by successful positioning
Brand positioning is not just for big national brands. Here’s my local all-female plumbing company:
A Cautionary Tale
Several years ago, Michael, my business partner, and I dreamed up a business idea that promised to become our ticket to wealth and success: Magnatize.com. Our target customer was the private-party car seller who customarily buys a “For Sale” sign at the hardware store, places it in his car window, and hopes for the best
We created a high-tech alternative. Our car-selling kit offered an easy-peel vinyl window sign, seller forms to finalize the deal, and the ability to swipe a bar code on the sign with your phone. The buyer could instantly read an online ad, and contact the seller — bzzt, easy-peezy!
Our product went through several iterations until we scored the holy grail: Test marketing a floor display in Lowes (2400 stores, $68 billion in revenue). We leveraged this coup to strike an even more lucrative deal with AutoTrader.com (8 million visitors per month who generate $90 billion in sales per year). We connected our humble product to both the world’s biggest home improvement chain and the biggest car-selling platform. Even our worst-case scenarios projected six-figure revenues.
In the end, we lost our shirts. Yep, lost it all.
Where did we go wrong? We failed the first and most crucial test: “Know thy customer.” In 2012, everyone was using smartphones — hooray! Except for one important group: People who buy For Sale signs. Whoops.
An additional problem: our product would require a change in behavior. (Note: If your business idea requires customers to change their behavior, make sure you think this through.) Yes, we developed a superior solution, but scrawling a phone number on a crappy window sign was cheaper and easier for our target customer. Defined loosely as:
Private-party car sellers who live mostly in the boonies, and who buy a For Sale sign at their local Ace Hardware, stick it in the window, and hope for the best.
If we had added “low-tech” to describe our target customer, we would have caught the disconnect and avoided a $250,000 loss, plus years of product development and persistent grief.
I’m not trying to scare you off with our sad tale, but…
…if M. Cary and Daughters can position a toilet float and position a successful brand at the same time — you can too with the Brand Story® Workshop approach.
POSITION YOUR BRAND: The Brand Story Workshop
From experience, startups that huddle in a brand workshop are more likely to hit their mark. Here’s why:
- Bias— If you market a product by following your instincts, you can become blinded by your dreams (e.g., Car-Selling Kit).
- Points of View– The Brand Story workshop throws analytical cold water on your expectations and channels creative energy from other peoples’ points of view. You bring more data points into the decision process.
- Cheap Focus Group — My wife follows this approach. When faced with a personal or professional problem, she will dial her network of friends and peers and talk it through. Likewise, football players huddle, and marketers conduct focus groups.
It never occurred to us, but Michael and I should have driven around town looking for For Sale signs, called the sellers, and pitched our Magnatize car-selling kit idea to actual prospects:
“Are you selling the ’73 Dodge Dart? I saw your sign and would like to get your feedback on a new product we’re developing — an Internet-connected car-selling kit.”
“Say what?”
Prepare for Battle
Think of your Brand Story Workshop as a war game — a chance to game out different scenarios. The New Yorker described the art of military decision-making the same way:
Military planners use immersive war games, carried out in the field or around a table, to bring more of the “decision map” into view. In such games, our enemies discover possibilities that we can’t foresee, ameliorating the poverty of our individual imaginations. And since the games can be played over and over, they allow decision-makers to “rewind the tape,” exploring many branches of the “decision tree.”
Napoleon paid a terrible price for not gaming out his lofty goal to invade Moscow. After a long, bloody march, his armies entered the Russian capital and discovered a deserted city with no czarist officials to sue for peace, nor food and supplies to pillage. Russian patriots soon set fires across the city, leaving Napoleon’s massive army without the means to survive the Russian winter.
Napolean’s ambition blinded him from the flaws in his decision map. For Michael and me, a war game would have revealed the hard truth stated by “Analog Andy” with the Dodge Dart:
“Don’t need a smartphone to sell a damn car.”
Brand Positioning Steps
Step 1. Enlist Your Participants:
Enlist three to five people (plus you and your business partners) who can bring business experience, subject matter expertise, or an informed consumer perspective to your idea. It might be a business-savvy friend, a retiree from that line of work, or someone familiar with your product. If you have an existing business, invite the people who touch the brand — typically the CEO, sales and marketing people, customer service, or even key customers.
Step 2. Build Out Your Workshop Presentation: You can use the Brand Story PowerPoint template to guide your workshop. The template follows the method described in this chapter. Fill out the blanks in advance using your work from this chapter to streamline the workshop. Plan on 2–3 hours for the workshop. Your workshop can be an online event.The opening section of the presentation — modeled on the Brand Story 03 article— explains how brands and brand positioning work. The purpose is to get your group quickly up to speed on brand positioning. A voice-over introduces each slide.
DISCUSSION:
Solving Your Target Customer’s Needs:
Michael and I faced our moment of truth: Our car-selling kit didn’t solve an actual problem for our target customer. We learned the hard way: Unless your business idea addresses a genuine customer need (including the need for a pet rock), your business is not viable. You don’t want to be bleeding cash and accruing debt when you realize this.
The Brand Story Workshop serves as a check that you will solve a real problem for real customers before you launch your business.
Consider King of Pops, a purveyor of expensive, gourmet “Popsicles” that sell for $3.00 each on the streets of Atlanta. Gourmet ice pops might seem like a cockamamie idea since you can buy original Popsicles for 25 cents each by the box at the store. (Popsicle® is a Unilever brand used here generically.)
Question: What problem or need is solved by a $3.00 ice pop? Apparently, a real one:
- King of Pops started in 2010 with a pushcart on a street corner in Atlanta after three brothers enjoyed fruity paletas on a trip to Central America. The company now sells 2–3 million ice pops per year, including wholesale to Whole Foods, major grocery chains, and big events.
- The King of Pops’ target customer seeks a spontaneous diversion, a foodie indulgence, and a guilt-free all-natural treat on a stick without breaking their pace. King of Pops wasn’t the first. Consider the customer who buys a Mrs. Fields cookie at the mall for $2.00 compared to a pound of Chips Ahoy for roughly the same price — proof that a customer base exists for a $3.00 ice pop.
Customer needs aren’t necessarily practical problems. Three-dollar Popsicles don’t solve hunger. Your brand position can target a host of needs: practical, emotional, prestige, and more.
Unfortunately, our high-tech car-selling kit did not solve an obvious problem for Analog Andy.
Which Strengths Solve Real Needs?
How is your product or service great? Let’s count the ways. Realistically, only one or two actually solve a customer need.
Step 3 — Identify your strengths. The problem you solve for your target customer will fall into one (or more) of these seven categories. Circle the strengths that solve your customers' needs.1. Better Price
2. Greater Convenience
3. Enhanced Functionality
4. User Experience
5. Company Expertise
6. Conveys Status
7. Other
Step 4. Describe Your Strengths — Describe what makes your product or service better or unique in each circled category. Here are two examples:Write a short statement for each of your circled strengths:
>> ENHANCED FUNCTIONALITY
- Car-Selling Kit > Offers seamless car-selling experience from end to end. Quicker to read, easier to contact the seller, gives the buyer all the information they need without having to call, and protects the buyer and seller with transaction forms.
>> COMPANY EXPERTISE
- Lilliputian Lawn Care > Expert in small-lawn sustainability. Grass is clipped instead of whacked. Provides lawn care without the pollution, noise, or hydrocarbons of conventional lawn care.
Step 5. Determine Your Secret Sauce — Now comes the most impactful decision: your differentiation, or “secret sauce.” Study your circled categories and descriptions to see where you can stake a claim that matters to customers. Are you the fastest, most knowledgeable, more experienced, first with a function, most convenient, or user-friendliest? Do you offer a unique formulation or technology? Can you claim to install toilets with a female crew?Discussion:
Unless you stake a claim — a unique differentiator that sets your product or service apart — you become a commodity. Every product or service is a commodity at one level because there is nothing new under the sun. But, you don’t want to appear to be a commodity. If you do, you’ll have to compete on price or brand awareness without a differentiating position.
Consider Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats versus Post Shredded Wheat versus the Great Value house brand. When what’s inside the box is essentially the same, you’re forced to build a brand by promoting the outside of the box.
Unless you stake a claim — a unique differentiator that sets your product or service apart — you become a commodity.
Gasoline is an obvious commodity. Refineries add mysterious formulations (secret sauces) to achieve brand differentiation: Chevron with Techron, Mobil with Synergy, or Shell with V12. I doubt there’s a driver on the planet who cares a wit about Techron, but the branded formulation creates the feeling that Chevron with Techron is better for your car.
Customers Want Proof
Gasoline additives are simply detergents. Do they work?
- Panera claims “100% clean ingredients,” but is Panera’s menu free from pesticides?
- Lilliputian Lawn Care claims to be the only sustainable lawn service in town, but can Donnie demonstrate the value of sustainable lawn care?
Step 6. Prove Your Claim — Your customer wants faster, cheaper, better, the original, the newest, more features, or greater expertise. You need to prove it via happy customers, performance metrics, or proven results. Write down how you can prove your claim.Examples of fact-based proof points:
- If you’re opening a farm-to-table restaurant, your menu description would read: “locally-sourced sausage from Ashwood Farms.”
- If your coffee claims: “supporting farmers making a living wage,” reveal how you source your beans and how farmers get paid.
- In 2008, Dunkin’ Donuts reinvented its brand from a donut shop to a coffee destination by citing a blind taste test: 54.2 percent chose Dunkin, 39.3 percent chose Starbucks, and 6.3 percent had no preference. This is a provable metric.
- Volvo became synonymous with “safety” by citing NHTSA statistics with their crash test dummies.
- And Jimmy John’s gave credence to their “Freaky Fast” brand position by comping free sandwiches to customers who suffered delays.
You’ve done the heavy lifting. Now put it all together.
It’s time to create your brand positioning statement. This internal statement guides how you present your business to the marketplace.
I’ve created a fictitious brand positioning statement for Jimmy John’s:
Brand positioning is like fishing. You don’t blindly cast your hook in hopes of a fish — you select the correct tackle (your unique solution) and right bait (your secret sauce) for a specific fish (your target customer).
Jimmy John’s does not advertise locally-sourced ingredients or Boars Head meat. They target college students and cubicle workers who won’t take the time, nor afford the dollars for a restaurant meal. (Quick note: Jimmy John’s has revised its brand position to tout speed and “fresh ingredients.”)
Step 7. Fill out your Brand Positioning Statement. Okay, now it’s your turn. This internal statement works like a chemical formula, so don't try to be clever or catchy. Using your prepared customer description, customer need, secret sauce, and proof points, fill out your Brand Positioning Statement.
So, what do I do with it?
First, congratulate yourself. Most businesses don’t have a clearly-defined brand position. They operate in the “if we build it, they will come” territory. In the articles ahead, you will see how your brand position forms the foundation for your “Brand Platform” — the full recipe for how customers will experience your brand in the marketplace.
With a Brand Platform, every sales pitch you make, Web site you build, and collateral piece you send out will be “on brand.” Plus, you will attract the most qualified prospects and make them customers for life.
But first, let’s name your baby.
Next Brand Story article: 05 | The Name Game
