How To Be Clear With Your Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is arguably one of the most misunderstood things in marketing. Far too often I see positioning statements that are a paragraph long. My question back always is: can you tell me that without reading the slide?

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Brand positioning is one of the three imperative strategic decisions you must make as a marketer (alongside targeting and objective setting).

What often ends up happening, however, are marketers not making tough choices, leading their positioning to be watered down and too generic.

Whenever we are talking strategy we are talking about sacrifices.

• What are you NOT going to do?
• Who are you NOT going to appeal to?
• What benefits are you NOT going to highlight?

These are tough decisions because whenever you’re too close to the product/service you see it in its entirety. All the amazing things your brand offers in comparison to its competitors, and you want everyone to know it.

However, as the great Steve Jobs once said: “ It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. “ In other worlds: BE CHOICEFUL.

Distinction vs Differentiation

There are two main levers brand should pull to drive mental availability and the right associations between themselves and the occasions they’re trying to own: distinction and differentiation.

Distinction is how a brand looks and feels. That’s where you see distinctive assets — or fluent devices, as some might call them -, your logo, colour palette, typography, a mascot, and so on. I’ve written extensively about this in a previous article, so if you want to learn more check it out here.

Check out my article “The Power Of Distinctive Brand Assets” by clicking the link above, to learn more about how to best use them.

Differentiation, on the other hand, is how you position your brand in the market. These involve making tough choices up and down the benefit ladder on what truly makes you different RELATIVE to your alternatives.

Note the emphasis on the word “relative”.

Uniqueness is a myth, and brands who claim to be unique are lying to themselves. Because even if you find that magical unique trait that sets you apart, there’s nothing stopping your competitors from stealing it. The same goes to “owning” attributes — loads of research has already proven that no brand overindexes in any meaningful way across any single attribute.

Therefore, you need to lean on something that matters to your customers, is relatively different from your competitors, and that you can actually deliver on.

This is what we call the 3 C’s.

The 3 C’s Model

The 3C’s model is quite simple:

• Consumer: what do they want more than anything else?
• Competitors: what else are consumers considering and can we be relatively better?
• Company: can we deliver on these relative differentiators as core competencies?

If you can answer the questions above, you have yourself the groundwork for your positioning.

Remember, positioning isn’t about uniqueness, it’s about relative differentiation. But if you’re getting stuck in answering the questions above start with the end in mind: what do you want consumers to think? Then work backwards ensuring your idea passes the 3C’s test.

Once you land on your 3C’s, then we’re off to writing a positioning statement.

This can be a contentious topic because there are a million different ways to write one, and none of them are supposed to be external facing.

If your positioning statement is coming across as a tagline, you don’t have a positioning statement — you have a tagline, which is a tactic not a strategic choice (more on that later in this column).

My favourite positioning statement format is the following:

• Among [target market], [x] is the brand of [frame of reference], that [point of difference] because [reason to believe].
• Example: Among snackers, Snickers is the brand of candy bar that satisfies your hunger because it is packed with peanuts.

Simple, coherent, and easy to remember.

Whenever positioning statements go on for several sentences trying pack just about everything under the Sun in them, you end up with an unclear aspiration — NOT a clear positioning.

So, keep it short, simple, and clear. That’s probably the best positioning advice I’ve ever been given.

How To Use Brand Positioning

Once you land on your brand positioning you now have a clear idea of what you want your consumers to think of when they think about you. And I should clarify that it’s totally fine to have different positions for different target audiences, as long as they pass the 3C’s test.

But, how about the mass market? How do we position ourselves to the broader market?

This is where we enter the territory of “we can’t agree on a name for it”.

Some brands call it their “brand DNA”, others their brand tenets, values, mission, beliefs, promise, etc. Depending on the brand I’m working on I pick a name that makes the most sense, but one of my favourites is the “Brand Tenets”.

Here’s Apple’s brand tenets:

Apple typically keeps their stuff close to their chest, but these were submitted to the Effies and we’ve gotten a peek into their magic.

Everything Apple does needs to pass this test: it needs to convey simplicity, it needs to be creative and it needs to be human. Let’s take a look at a few tactical executions of this simple, yet brilliant brand position.

When the iPod launched, Apple went to market with this iconic campaign showing people dancing with the outline of their distinguishable headphones. Creative, human, simple.

In 1997, Apple went to market with their “Think Different” campaign where they showed images of “game-changers” over the course of history (pictured above is Picasso), and how Apple understood them. Human, creative, simple.

Positioning Is Strategy, Not Tactics

Oftentimes marketers will write a tagline under the illusion that that’s a positioning statement.

Let’s us be clear: Apple’s “Think Different” isn’t their positioning statement — it’s a manifestation of it.

Taglines, much like media channels, creative, innovations, product naming, packaging, price, etc. are ALL informed by the brand positioning — but aren’t the positioning themselves.

So, before jumping into tactics, remember that your strategy needs to be in order, otherwise you run the risk of having an out-of-touch product name, disjointed messaging, and confusing executions in the market that are not reinforcing your positioning.

Everything you do should be reinforcing your brand position. EVERYTHING.

Consumers will not think about your brand nearly as much as you’d like to believe, so be choiceful about what you want them to know about you, resist boredom, and say it over and over again with bigger and bigger budgets and through new and creative ways.

Only after years of doing it in a disciplined way will you have a chance of “claiming” a position in your customers’ minds.

PPA

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.

Originally published at https://marketing-chronicles-newsletter.beehiiv.com.