What Is Brand Positioning, And Why Is It Important?
Brand positioning is not static; it’s constantly changing because businesses evolve. Brand positioning is a strategy that helps businesses create products, services or experiences that allow customers to connect with their brand.
To be successful in a competitive market, it’s essential to understand the importance of the brand positioning in marketing of your competitors. Your company must stand out from the competition to win.
You can do this by learning your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. The same is true for the position of your brand. Knowing your brand’s strengths and weaknesses helps you focus on what you’re good at and what you can improve upon.
This week, we will explain precisely what effective brand positioning is and why it matters when creating a brand identity.
What is Brand Positioning?
We live in a world of products, services, and brands that consumers love and hate or find confusing. But the fact remains that there are only two kinds of products: Loved and those that are hated.
Think about it. Your brand will always be either liked or disliked by customers, and you have to decide whether or not to use that as a marketing advantage. It’s as simple as that. You can’t control what people like or dislike about your product or service, but you can position yourself in a way that makes it easier for them to love you.
So let’s define what brand positioning is since many businesses don’t know that this term exists. Brand positioning is your business’s strategy for standing out in a crowded market.
It’s the reason why you do what you do. It’s the basis for all your marketing and advertising decisions. The better your brand positioning is, the more likely you will be successful.
Why Does It Matter?
For decades, researchers have studied what motivates consumers to buy. One of the reasons people buy is because they see someone else buy something they like, and that person looks and feels good. But another reason people buy is because of what they see.
We all know that images sell products, but there’s a deeper story here. Images are just visual messages, and messages are the messages that we send to the world.
A strong brand positioning strategy helps us choose which messages are sent out. A brand needs to communicate a message. Brand positioning strategies have three components: brand promise, attributes, and personality.
How Can We Define Our Brand Position?
I’m a massive fan of using a story to help define our brand and communicate its purpose. This may be a story from someone who represents us or one we can relate to and identify with. It could be the story of a real-life customer.
But it should allow us to understand ourselves, our brand, and who we are. This is what separates good brands from the rest of the pack.
What is our brand position? How do we define our brand? A set of values defines a brand, and it becomes the foundation on which our business is built.
To ensure we are delivering what we promise, it is crucial to understand our brand position and its values.
A brand sets us apart from competitors and we can easily express, but it should be distinct from who we are. We should be proud to tell the world who we are and what we stand for.
How to Do Brand Positioning
Understand Your Market
While there are certainly people who might think of themselves as being brand-conscious, they might not realize that what makes them unique makes them a desirable brand for others.
If you’re looking to attract customers through your branding, your first step should be to think about your brand positioning. When you do, you’ll figure out who your ideal customer is.
If you’re looking to attract clients, you’ll want to do the same thing—and figure out how to appeal to your ideal client in your marketing strategy.
Use Customer Insights
There are a couple of ways to do this in your marketing strategies. One is to take the customer insights and start putting them into a brand positioning strategy.
Another way is to look at your competition. What would you do if you were your competitors? What would they do to win the hearts and minds of their customers? This is often referred to as the “what if I was my competitor” strategy.
According to HubSpot CMO Chris Garrett, there’s a reason why brands like Amazon and Target are so successful. They’ve become known for offering products relevant to their customers, so they become a trusted source for that product and can leverage that trust to build long-lasting relationships with customers.
When a customer feels heard, understood and feels confident in the brand, they will be more inclined to do business with it, which means higher sales.
Learn From Similar Companies
There’s no substitute for real-world experience. A startup is just a group of passionate people about a particular idea. What sets one company apart from another?
If you were looking for a job, what would you consider essential? How does your prospective employer position itself? What do customers say they like or dislike about the company?
The best way to figure out your brand positioning is to look at other similar companies through market differentiation.
- What are they saying about themselves?
- What are they doing well?
- What are they not doing so well?
- What could they be doing better?
Discover Your Competitive Advantage
To find your competitive advantage, start with a clear understanding of the problem you’re solving. Once you have a clear understanding of the problem, look for the gaps in the market, where the competition isn’t providing solutions or where there is no viable alternative.
Ask yourself questions like these: Why doesn’t the competition do this? What’s preventing them from doing this? Why hasn’t anyone else attempted it if the problem has not been solved yet?
Once you understand your competitive advantage, it’s time to begin developing brand positioning. Your competitive advantage is why customers should choose your brand over the competition.
If your brand doesn’t have a competitive advantage, you have no choice but to compete against brands.
- So what is your competitive advantage?
- Where does your company fit into the market?
- And what sets your company apart from competitors?
Build a Strategy Based on Your Unique Value Proposition
One of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make is to assume that positioning doesn’t matter. In the case of online businesses, this could mean thinking that they don’t have to position themselves because people know who they are.
While that’s true in some cases, it doesn’t consider all the variables that affect the success of an online business. It would be best never to assume your brand; it must be planned and executed.
A brand is a promise of who you are. Your brand promises that what you sell is of value to your consumers. So, if you aren’t careful, you can give people a brand that they’ll never like or buy from you.
Define Your Audience and Message
Brand positioning is one of the most critical aspects of marketing for a company that wants to stand out from the crowd and achieve long-term success. However, if you aren’t careful, branding may be an exercise in confusing your audience instead of getting them to recognize and associate your brand with the specific image you want them to have.
There’s no better way to do that than to define whom your audience is—knowing your audience means knowing where you’re trying to reach and what they want.
Craft a Powerful Visual Identity
Think of your brand as an emotion. When consumers see your company name, what emotion does it evoke? Do you evoke feelings of warmth, trust, excitement, or fear? Each emotion is unique.
So is each product or service that you offer. And each emotion leads to a corresponding behavior. Think about how you feel when you come home to see your loved ones. You feel warm and safe when you walk into the house. Your children jump on your shoulders, hug you, and thank you for making the trip home.
A brand identity is your company’s visual voice. It’s what you’re trying to portray to your audience, and it should reflect who you are.
It’s a bit of a paradox because branding is not just about what you want people to see. You have to decide what message you want them to see and how you want them to feel. It’s all about your brand’s personality.
Create a Compelling Brand Story
A brand story is something so compelling that people will share it. People will talk about and tell others about it because they love it so much.
When I talk to businesses about brand stories, I tell them that a brand’s story is the collective experience of all the customers who have had a positive experience with that brand. People become brand ambassadors.
Create a Strong Brand Promise
The second most potent psychological principle in marketing is brand positioning. Think about Coca Cola or Google. Both brands have clear brand promises that clearly define who they are, what they’re about, and how their customers can benefit from using them.
If a company or brand doesn’t position itself, then the company’s identity becomes blurred, and its mission and promise are hard to discern. You can fix this problem by communicating the brand promise to resonate with the people who are most likely to buy from the brand.
You can also be creative with language. “We are here to help.” “We are the ones who help you succeed.” “We are your brand of choice.” These are examples of promises that help drive the concept of branding into customers’ heads.
Communicate Your Brand Message
Whether you are selling a product or service or a B2C or B2B company, you need to know your brand. This is critical to understanding what the brand stands for and how to position yourself in the marketplace.
So many businesses fall into the trap of only communicating their products or services. Without the context of what they stand for, their branding is just a label.
But if you understand what you stand for, it becomes a unique selling proposition. This is where your audience comes in. They become your brand ambassadors.
It would help if you defined your brand as clearly as possible to do this. The best way to do this is to think about who your ideal customer is.
- What do they want out of life?
- What kind of relationship do they have with your product or service?
Think about what messages you want your audience to receive, how they should feel after using your product, and how they will talk about your company.
Use Social Proof to Build Trust
This article is not about whether you can use social proof to build trust for brand positioning; there’s been a lot written about that over the past couple of years.
Instead, it’s about how you can use social proof to help you understand what consumers already think about you or your brand. This is important because many people forget that people form opinions of brands based on things other than their product or service. They may even form opinions about a brand without ever interacting with it.
In addition to using urgency, consumers will also use social proof to decide. What does that mean?
For example, let’s say that your target market fears heights. They are afraid to climb the stairs to the highest floor of your store because of the danger of falling. Therefore, you’d need to provide some safety net in a fire escape or ladder to help them overcome this fear.
Build Brand Loyalty by Being an Expert
Experts are not only trusted sources of knowledge; they’re often treated as authorities, even if they’re starting. People don’t just trust their expert’s opinions; they want to follow their advice. And in many cases, it’s because people perceive themselves as experts.
A group of scientists from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, and Indiana University found that people have a better memory for those perceived to be more knowledgeable than those who are not.
So, when you build a reputation as an expert, you become an authority on your subject matter.
Focus on Customer Service
Customer service is crucial for every business, but if you’re not sure exactly how to position yourself as a company that provides excellent customer service, take a look at some of the most successful companies of the past.
The best example is Dell Computer Corp., which positioned itself as the leading PC manufacturer by being the company that delivers the highest quality customer service.
They started by putting together a plan to hire new sales staff to train them in the company’s new computer model. Once they felt they had enough of an employee base to handle the training, they sent the employees to technical colleges and universities to learn about the products.
Once the employees felt they understood the technology, they went back to their sales teams and trained them on the product, explaining the details of the system to each customer.
Create an Amazing Experience
There’s no doubt that brands that offer a great user experience have a better chance of building a loyal customer base.
As the founder of the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos ensured that customers had a great experience when buying online.
He recognized that many people who shopped at his company didn’t even realize that Amazon was a retail website; instead, they assumed it was simply a catalog service. So, he made sure that he communicated the value of his site to customers with the tagline, “Your kind of store”.
Showcase Your Passion
To get someone to purchase from you, you must first persuade them to trust you. This means your customers will want to do business with you for a long time if you can earn their trust and confidence.
The second thing that helps people trust your brand is passion. People will feel more comfortable doing business with a company that seems passionate about its product. People will feel less threatened by a brand they can’t connect with.
Conclusion
Brand positioning has existed for as long as brands and companies have existed. We have always been too busy doing other things to notice it and never quite got it.
Brand positioning is all about giving customers what they want from you, when they need it, and why. It is about providing your customers with the answers to their questions and, more importantly, answering the questions that they are not asking yet, but they should.
This is where we think that marketing is different from branding. Marketing tells customers what they want, when they want it and from whom they want it. But, to answer their questions, you need to understand their needs, desires, and pains.
Brand positioning is one of the most important parts of branding. It’s what makes your company unique and what it does best. This article will give you a better understanding of brand positioning and why it’s so important.
