1. Strong Brand Positioning is What Enables Your Brand to Beat and Keep Leaving Competitors Way Behind

To stand out as the preferred purchase option, a brand needs to be differentiated from its competitors. That can be difficult to achieve whether in a highly competitive B2B service business or in a busy B2C retail environment. But it is even harder to apply effectively in a homogenized online marketplace. For a B2B services firm, it can be even more challenging. Consider honestly, what sets your smart people claiming to have an intangible solution apart from a competitor’s smart people claiming the same thing — in the eyes of a potential client or customer? 

Brand positioning is a demarcation of what your brand offers that makes it unique. It’s a way of setting out your stall differently relative to your competitors because it explains why your brand is credible and valuable to offer that. When target purchasers are making a decision, they ought to be attracted by your ‘differentiation factors’ (achieved through your positioning) in a way which makes them choose you over a competitor. That is the litmus test for effective brand positioning.

For some businesses, pricing is crucial. A lot of brands spend a lot of time optimising their pricing strategy. That can be important, but price on its own is not brand positioning. If you are competing solely on price, you are not a brand: you are competing as a commodity. However, price can be one part of a wider set of elements which comprise a brand positioning.

Walking seems like the easiest thing in the world once you can do it – but it probably took you months in your early life to figure out how to do something which looks so simple from afar! Similarly, brand positioning follows a relatively simple structure. However, it can take time and effort to articulate it effectively. Small differences in direction or tone can have a big impact on what a brand does. Your brand positioning should be what sits underneath and drives your brand activity both from a marketing and design perspective.

Image via © Zespri

To see the power of this, consider as a case study Zespri. Kiwifruit are basically a commodity. By building a brand which positions them as kiwifruit experts, Zespri is able to charge a premium. It’s building on elements which aren’t unique to them, but through careful selection and communication it is able to sustain a differentiated brand positioning.

Related: How to Use Brand Positioning to Build Brand Impact in an Overcrowded Market

2. Brand Positioning Always Starts With an Insight

Think about what you do when you purchase something. You may start with a functional need, for example you need cheese as part of your ingredients to make a meal, you need to service your car or your business needs to print some documents. Or, you may start with an emotional need, for example you are having a difficult day and want to reward yourself with something which makes you happy. 

Either way, you are starting with a need. Brands answer needs, so this is the start of any brand positioning statement. We must first understand what is going on in the mind of the target customer that brings them to a consideration set including your brand.

Related: Branding Psychology in Adversity – 7 Ways You Can Embrace Behavioural Shifts to Grow Your Business

To help brand thinking, we capture this as an insight. In fact, the customer may never articulate the insight in the same words. It is our version of what we understand to be going on in their minds. We can gain this from our existing understanding of a path to purchase. It is also useful to interview customers, as well as possible customers who decided against your brand. This is often easy to do – in a B2B environment, when you pitch to a possible customer, they often proactively offer feedback on their decision process and how your brand performed within it.

A strong insight is firmly rooted in a need and/or want. Note that the customer might not realise themselves that they have this need or want, although it could be discernible from their behaviour. 

These can be simple functional insights such as “I want to quench my thirst” or “I want to protect our workers from hearing loss” to higher order emotional insights such as “I wish I had more confidence at public events” or “I don’t like losing sleep worrying about whether our accounts are in order”. 

The insights sit with the customer not the brand – just because a lot of other brands might have a solution to a particular insight does not mean it can’t be a powerful insight to underpin your brand positioning.

Related: Using Buyer Personas to Increase Your Business Profitability

A B2B case study is business support provider Williams Lea Tag. They clearly understand the power of insights in forming a winning band proposition and even have a customer insights programme where they interview customers to understand their needs and wants in-depth.

3. Brand Benefits are Central to Successful Brand Positioning

What makes a brand positioning stand out from its competitors is how it answers an insight or customer pain point. We refer to the “benefits” a brand offers. These are a sort of call and response mirror to the insight. So in simplistic terms as an example, an insight could be “I wish I had more confidence at public events”, a brand may offer the benefit of “making you feel more confident when you meet people at a public event”.

Related: Boring Brand? How To Create a Unique Brand and Market Positioning

A brand can and typically does offer multiple benefits. Some may be more important than others, but a brand positioning should capture them all. Consider for example a B2B accounting software solution with the insight “I don’t like losing sleep worrying about whether our accounts are in order”. Stopping the loss of sleep is one benefit. But that wouldn’t be enough to sell in a sophisticated solution like this – it would likely also need to deliver on other benefits, for example its usability with client employees, its ability to match up to accepted accounting standards, its price point and so on. So typically a brand positioning will include multiple benefits, although some will be more important than others. 

Image via Little Black Book © Money Super Market

A case study is the personal finance comparison site Money Super Market. The functional benefit of a financial comparison site or broker can be hard to differentiate from that of competitors. Money Super Market elevates itself to the higher order emotional benefit of feeling “money calm”. This is a simple but powerful way to deliver against the insight that even for people who are not actively worried about money matters, there is often a nagging discomfort about the potential risks of financial missteps. This emotional benefit in their brand positioning helps set them apart from competitive brands.

Related: What’s a Brand Guide and How Can it Help Your Business?

4. Credibility is Earned so Brand Positioning Must-Have Reasons to Believe

So far, even with insights and benefits, there still might not be enough to differentiate your brand from another. Think about the benefit “making you feel more confident when you meet people at a public event”. That could be the benefit of a perfume brand, a toothpaste brand, a mouthwash brand, a clothing brand and more. Even within toothpaste, different manufacturers could all reasonably say that this was a benefit their product delivers.

The next step in brand positioning is to identify or generate “reasons to believe”. These are exactly as they sound – reasons for target customers to believe that your brand delivers the benefits you claim. This is where brands can more readily differentiate themselves. 

For example, one toothpaste brand might claim that it has a unique formulation or ingredients. It could also claim that it performed better in tests. It might rely on an endorsement from a professional body or celebrity. Even a claim that it is the market leader could be enough – many customers may think that if so many other customers bought it, that is social proof that it must do what it says. That is not true just for consumer categories – it is reflected in the old B2B adage “No-one ever got fired for choosing IBM”.

Related: How to Build a Premium Tech Brand, so You’re Not Just Competing on Features, Benefits and Price Discounts

Remember, the reasons to believe don’t have to be believable by everyone. You have chosen a specific target market, so you want your ideal target customers to find them credible, so they believe your brand delivers the claimed benefits. 

Whether other people find them believable is irrelevant if they are not your target customer. In specialized markets this can also be important – you need to find out who the decision makers are and likely need reasons to believe that can convince them, even if they are not the actual users or customers. 

© L’Oréal

A simple way to think about reasons to believe is in L’Oréal commercials. The part where the spokesman says “here’s the science” is an articulation of the reason to believe.

A case study is Bennetts, a motorbike insurance broker. Because they specialize in motorbike insurance, they have deeper expertise which makes them more credible as the insurer of choice for motorcyclists. This allows them to focus brand communication on burnishing their bike community expertise so further differentiating them from their competitors.

Related: Profitable Lessons from Luxury Brand Leaders, Brand Positioning for Premium Pricing

5. The Most Successful Brand Positioning is Simple, Consistent and Strategically Sound

As you can see, a lot of listening, evaluation, thinking and fine-tuning goes into successful brand positioning. But that might not be obvious when you see it. An effective brand positioning will be simple and may seem relatively intuitive to the customer. 

However, something that can be obvious looking back on it might not be easy to get to in the first place. Just as sales professionals often have to navigate false objections to uncover the real ones, in coming up with a strong brand positioning, you often have to dig deep to figure out what are the actionable insights rather than insights which are true but don’t lead you anywhere useful. 

© Carlsberg

Similarly, you need to work with what you have or could have. If your product quality isn’t best in class, for example, you need to choose benefits and reasons to believe that reflect that. That’s why some brands lean more on softer benefits such as familiarity, convenience or simplicity – they are crafting a brand positioning in an area where they can win.

Once you’ve clearly identified your brand positioning it then drives brand communication, packaging, design execution and portfolio strategy. So it needs to be consistent over time. If it is soundly considered in the first place, that is easy to achieve. A brand style guide then helps you ensure that the key elements are communicated in the right way repeatedly across all channels on and offline.

Brand positioning is a key part of your brand strategy and should match your brand ambition. Instead of reverse engineering a brand positioning from your current product or service line up, it’s better to take a step back and reevaluate what you would ideally want it to be. 

Brand positioning is an essential strategic process used to help your business achieve stronger differentiation so you higher revenue, stronger customer loyalty and referral, larger market share and bigger brand IP asset value. 

Related: How Branding Strategy is Different to Marketing

Final Thoughts

Brand positioning is critical because it enables a brand to stand out from its competitors, to win and keep winning profitable business, so you consistently achieve stronger profit margins and higher sales. 

It shouldn’t look complicated and doesn’t have to be complicated to get the optimal brand positioning – but it does need to be done right, for maximum impact. 

Start with a clear understanding of what drives your target customers — the deeper insights of what really matters to them at an emotional level, so you can then offer appealing benefits aligned with ‘true’ reasons to believe — all of which must be especially credible for your product or service.

You’ll then be better able to build a resilient business that achieves higher revenue consistently, expand your market share and build brand IP asset value.

Questions to Consider

1. What sets your brand apart from its competitors?
2. What customer needs and wants does your brand answer or fulfill?
3. How does your customer feel as a result of that? What are their emotional drivers?
4. Why is your brand especially well-suited to perform that role?
5. How do you communicate that effectively?
6. Could you use a brand audit to help you re-evaluate your brand positioning, so you can make it more effective?