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Brand positioning is the strategic process of ensuring your business stands out to your target audience through a unique image and offering. Through brand positioning, brands aim to occupy a distinctive place in the minds of both prospective and existing customers.
In this guide, we’ll discuss effective brand positioning strategies, their importance, and inspiring examples to guide you. Read on for brand positioning insights and tips to boost customer advocacy.
What Is Brand Positioning?
Brand positioning is a multi-faceted strategy that businesses use to create distinct brand associations in the minds of their customers and shape how their business is perceived. It aims to differentiate a brand among competitors by communicating its value to the target demographic and make it memorable and relevant.
To illustrate:
- Ride-hitching service Lyft positions itself as a friendly alternative to Uber’s corporate image, using bright colors, quirky car additions, and casual messaging. It successfully communicates the openness of its services towards all users, as opposed to Uber’s exclusive feel.
- Dollar Shave Club introduces humor and affordability to the men’s shaving market, which was previously dominated by Gilette’s professional and highly masculine image.
- Tesla redefines the perceptions on electric vehicles. While competitors like Toyota Prius and Chevrolet Volt emphasize environmental friendliness and affordability, Tesla focuses on luxury and a high-end lifestyle.
What Is A Brand Positioning Statement?
A brand positioning statement aligns a business with a specific direction and reaffirms its core values to its audience. It should assert a business’s primary demographic and explain how its products or services will help solve their problems.
It has four core elements:
- The target: Before making a brand positioning statement, the company must have a clear idea of its target market’s demographics, psychographics, location, problems, and needs.
- The category/market: The business must come up with a context and a frame of reference so customers can evaluate their product or service. Without this context, prospective customers may not even bother evaluating these offerings.
- The differentiator: A differentiation point or value makes your product or service unique in your niche. Think about this from the perspective of customers who are primarily interested in offerings that can solve their pain points.
- The payoff: To understand what your customers want to achieve and solutions they’re looking for, you must conduct extensive research. Determine the customers’ buying criteria and determine how your solutions and core differentiators fit them.
A quality position statement contains information about the company’s demographics, purpose, and potential taglines. It is typically one or two paragraphs long. Not being overloaded with information makes it easier for customers and employees to understand the position.
The average construction of brand positioning statement may read as follows: "To [target market], [brand] is a [category] that [differentiator] because [target market] needs [the payoff]."
Here are two examples of excellent brand positioning taglines and strategies:
- Disney: This brand aims to bring the magic of childhood into the lives of both adults and children. Its tagline, “Where Dreams Come True,” reflects both Disney’s outward brand identity and purpose and informs all its marketing channels.
- Apple: The brand’s commitment to innovation and creating high-end, technically advanced, personalized products is reflected in its slogan, “Think Different.” Apple has repeatedly delivered on this claim via its unique products, making it a true example of successful positioning.
Why Is Brand Positioning Important?
Giving your brand a unique and distinctive position helps it stand out in a crowded market. Think of it from the consumer’s point of view: with modern information and advertising overload, consumers often have a hard time defining what they need, let alone who to trust.
Effective brand positioning helps companies build authentic identities and establish themselves in their niche, ultimately guiding consumers in understanding how their products and services will benefit them.
An effective brand positioning model also leads to the following benefits:
- Foundation for all marketing and sales activities: Strong positioning is a basis for brand success. It informs strategic marketing, guides business activities, connects with audiences, creates content that converts, and holds together brand messaging. It speaks to shared values and helps customers understand how the brand can solve the issues they face.
- Context: Positioning provides contexts for all your products or services in certain market categories. It helps the target audience grasp why your offering is the best choice compared to others in the same category.
- Brand differentiation: Effective positioning highlights what makes your brand unique. By establishing the primary differentiator, businesses can stand out among competitors.
- Relevance: Brands with established positions are perceived as relevant and knowledgeable by prospects within their niche. This helps customers understand the brand’s value proposition.
- Customer retention: Clear positioning sets the right customer expectations and builds trust. This leads to increased brand loyalty and affinity.
Additionally, a strong positioning statement benefits internal alignment. It helps employees across advertising, sales and other departments align their efforts towards a unified goal.
How To Develop a Brand Positioning Strategy In 7 Steps
Successful positioning means taking an introspective look into your brand to identify what it does differently and better than others. To create a brand positioning strategy unique to your company involves these seven steps:
- Define your ideal customer profile
- Define your competition
- Research your competitors
- Identify what makes your brand unique
- Choose the market category you want to win
- Establish key values and create a positioning statement
- Test your brand positioning statement
Step #1: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile
Use historical customer data and behavioral indicators, technographic, or other relevant audience characteristics to define your ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Your branding and marketing activities will be targeted to these segments, which are most likely to support your offerings.
Answer the following questions:
- Who are your brand’s ideal buyers?
- What problems do your customers need to solve?
Step #2: Define Your Current Brand Positioning
Competitor analysis and knowing who you’re up against will show you how to improve your positioning strategy and maintain your edge. Perform competition research through the following:
- Market research: Investigate companies listed when you perform a keyword search. You can also ask the sales team what competitors come up during the sales process.
- Customer feedback: Interview consumers about products or services they were using or considering using before they opted for your brand.
- Social media: Investigate forums like Quora or Reddit where customers ask questions and discuss related products in your niche.
Step #3: Research Your Competitors
After defining your competition, it’s time to analyze how they position their own brands. This should answer these questions:
- What products or services do they offer?
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What market strategies are they using?
- What is their position in the current market?
- What is their tagline, and what unique values do they point out in their messaging?
Step #4: Identify What Makes Your Brand Unique
Unique brand offerings have an X factor that makes them different and better than all others in the market. Defining what this means for your brand and building an image based on it is a good starting point for brand positioning.
Competition research will show you rival companies’ strengths and weaknesses. Comparing your products and services to theirs might also reveal that some elements in which they are weak are your strengths.
Step #5: Choose the Market Category You Want To Win
Segment your target audience and choose the group that cares most about your brand’s values and offerings. By focusing on a very specific market segment and high-value buyers, your business can maximize marketing resources and increase conversions.
Strategic positioning based on audience segments ensures resonant messaging, stronger engagement, and brand loyalty.
Step #6: Establish Key Values and Create a Positioning Statement
It’s time to connect your unique capabilities and product features to the value they bring your customers. Create a brand positioning statement: a one to two-sentence declaration that communicates your brand’s unique value to your target audience.
Center your statement on these four factors:
- Your target customers
- Your product or service’s category
- Your offering’s greatest benefit
- Proof of that benefit
Let’s look at Amazon’s positioning statement and analyze its anatomy: “Our vision is to be the earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”
Amazon doesn’t segment its audience nor use hyper-specification in this statement. Instead, it is targeting the broadest possible audience. Its greatest benefit and the proof of this is its massive platform comprising millions of product offerings.
Step #7: Test Your Brand Positioning Statement
Simply launching a positioning statement and not evaluating its effects may leave you and your business in the dark regarding its efficacy. Collecting feedback from your customers on whether your positioning has the desired effect, testing, and experimenting is important for long-term success.
Soliciting audience impressions and adjusting accordingly will help you land on the best content and style for the statement. Direct feedback will help you create your brand’s key positioning asset.
3 Popular Brand Positioning Strategies
If you want to establish a unique and favorable position in customers’ minds, brand positioning strategies are a must. Here are the three best options:
1. Differentiation
Differentiation involves positioning a brand as distinct and superior to its competitors. The goal is to highlight unique features, attributes, and important benefits that set the brand apart. This can be achieved by emphasizing:
- Product quality
- Innovative features
- Exceptional customer service
- Superior quality
- Distinct brand personality.
By effectively communicating these points of differentiation, businesses can provide a compelling reason for consumers to choose their brand over others.
2. Competitive Positioning
Competitive positioning is a strategy that focuses on differentiating your brand in a crowded market by directly addressing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. The strategy requires:
- A deep understanding of customer needs and preferences
- A thorough assessment of key competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
3. Niche Focus
Niche positioning targets a specific market segment with unique needs or preferences. Instead of trying to appeal to a broad audience, the brand focuses on a smaller, specialized audience. By tailoring products, messaging, and experiences to this niche, businesses can position themselves as experts and cater to the specific desires of that target market. This strategy enables more focused marketing efforts and the ability to build a loyal customer base.
How To Measure the Success of Your Brand Positioning Strategy
Effective brand positioning increases brand loyalty, recognition, and overall success against competitors. To ensure that your positioning is resonating with your target audience, you must track the following metrics:
1. Brand Recognition
Conduct surveys or polls to assess how well your target audience recalls or recognizes your brand. Monitor the volume of searches for your brand name and related keywords. An increase in searches suggests growing brand awareness. High recall and awareness can indicate that your brand positioning effectively makes your offerings memorable.
2. Brand Sentiment
Leverage social listening tools to analyze conversations and sentiments about your brand online. Successful positioning leads to primarily positive sentiments and alignment with your stated values.
You can also survey your customers to gauge their perception of your brand. Ask about brand attributes, values, and how they perceive your offerings compared to competitors.
3. Market Share
Compare your brand’s performance against competitors in terms of sales trends and overall market share. Increases over time can strongly indicate that your brand positioning resonates with your target market.
4. Customer Acquisition
Track the number of new customers purchasing from your brand and compare it with historical data. Higher customer acquisition rates can indicate successful brand positioning and overall, more support for your brand.
4 Elements of a Successful Brand Positioning Strategy
Positioning strategies that set great brands apart from the rest and make them extra memorable have the following defining qualities:
1. Emotional Bond
Effective brand positioning develops an emotional bond with the audience. Build trust with your prospects and existing customers by establishing a connection with them on a human level before trying to make a sale. Learning about your audience and the problems they want to solve will help ensure a positive and fruitful connection with your company.
2. Value
Help prospects solve pain points and overcome challenges by providing value. In your advertising messaging, website copy, and all other marketing channels, provide helpful, actionable content that is relevant to your audience and their concerns.
3. Differentiating Qualities
Clearly define your brand’s differentiating qualities for a strong and memorable brand position. These qualities should be easy to understand through clear and concise communication. Emphasize what makes your offerings unique throughout the sales process and funnel.
4. Core Values
All customer-facing departments (sales, marketing, customer service) should embody your company’s core values throughout all touchpoints. Consistency in your brand messaging and what you do and provide ensures strong brand recall and customer loyalty.
5 Brand Positioning Examples To Inspire You
Successful brands in various niches have set the standard for brand positioning for everyone else. Let's look at five successful brand positioning examples:
- Apple’s lifestyle brand value
- Bumble’s progressive experience
- Nike's "Ordinary Man" affirming messaging
- Dollar shave club’s low-cost humor
- Lyft’s down to earth friendliness
1. Apple’s Lifestyle Brand Value
Apple is a fantastic role model for all its marketing strategies, including brand positioning. It has formulated its positioning around three key elements:
- Premium products
- Premium service
- Premium brand
Apple creates products that stand out from anything else on the market. This uniqueness is clear in their design, features, materials, and the brand’s premium philosophy emphasizing a lifestyle focused on quality.
Apple has been one of the most successful and valuable brands in the last decade, with millions of customers purchasing its products and signing up for its services all over the world.
2. Bumble’s Progressive Experience vs Other Dating Apps’ Omissions In User Experience
Bumble is a dating app that addressed the frustrations users often experience with its competitors, positioning itself as a progressive alternative. Unlike many dating apps, Bumble introduces an innovative user experience with fewer distractions and unwanted content.
Bumble’s key differentiator is that only women can make first contact, challenging traditional social norms and creating a safer, more pleasant experience for women who are usually targeted with a barrage of messages on other platforms.
Additionally, the app sets itself apart by limiting initial interactions and reducing the number of messages a user can receive from someone they just connected with.
3. Nike's "Ordinary Man" Affirming Messaging
You can take the superhero out of her costume, but you can never take away her superpowers. #justdoitpic.twitter.com/dDB6D9nzaD
— Nike (@Nike) August 25, 2018
Nike is a global leader in sports apparel that creates high-quality and fashionable products. Its go-getting marketing spirit and “Just do it” tagline befit its athletic target audience and the very essence of sporting determination.
However, the brand goes beyond using celebrities to promote their achievements in branded sportswear. Nike also empowers the "average" buyer to expand their limits instead of just focusing on the sporting excellence of world-famous stars. These figures affirm the ordinary consumer's aspirations to an athletic lifestyle.
4. Dollar Shave Club’s Low-Cost Humor vs Gillete’s Masculine Professionalism
Gilette’s highly professional ads and general marketing messaging, which relies on cold and efficient masculinity, once held a stronghold on the market for men’s razors and care products. In contrast, Dollar Shave Club competes with this approach in two ways: through humorous marketing and affordable prices. Its brand positioning begins with its name, which indicates a low cost that captures users’ attention.
The brand also makes a strong case for the quality of its products, with proof demonstrated through its light-hearted messaging. This further differentiates its offerings in the grooming industry, helping it become one of its major players.
5. Lyft’s Down To Earth Friendliness vs Uber’s Cold Exclusivity
Millions lack access to basic human needs because they can’t get a ride. So we’re doing something about it. Today, we’re introducing #LyftUp, an initiative to expand transportation access for those who need it most. https://t.co/VPa7gAnl13pic.twitter.com/kwUOWfpSm0
— Lyft (@lyft) January 21, 2020
Uber and Lyft have drastically different brand positioning despite providing the same service: ride-share apps.
Uber was the market’s pioneer and from the get-go positioned itself as exclusive, sleek, and luxurious for “ordinary” people. Its cold branding in black tones emphasized a brand persona of exclusivity.
Lyft foresaw that this may not attract all passengers and adopted the opposite position: approachable and fun drivers, quirky and zany branding and messaging with casual fonts, and even cars sporting pink mustaches.
This was Lyft’s reaction to Uber’s positioning, knowing it had to take a different approach for a distinctive edge. This down-to-earth messaging made the brand easier to identify with in a market dominated by one brand.
Takeaways on Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is critical to the success of an overall marketing strategy. Through effective positioning, businesses can establish their key differentiation and communicate their unique values to target customers.
Successful brand positioning fosters customer loyalty, drives business growth, and enables companies to stand out in a crowded marketplace. By following the steps outlined in this article, exploring various brand positioning strategies, and continuously evaluating and adapting their positioning efforts, businesses can create a strong and enduring brand presence that resonates with their audience.
Working with the top branding agencies can make these steps easier, too.
Brand Positioning FAQs
1. What is the goal of brand positioning?
The goal of brand positioning is to establish a unique and favorable position for a brand in the minds of consumers. This differentiates it from competitors and creates a strong, positive perception of the brand's identity, value, and offerings.
2. How to write a brand positioning statement?
To write a brand positioning statement, focus on identifying your target audience, understanding their needs and desires, and articulating how your brand satisfies those needs. It should succinctly convey your brand's value proposition, key points of differentiation, and the emotional or functional benefits it provides.
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