The Beginners Guide to Brand Positioning

TL;DR:

According to Qualtrics.com, “brand positioning is about owning a unique position in the mind of the target consumer, and it’s an articulation of what you want your brand to be to consumers.”

Hubspot says, “Brand positioning is the process of positioning your brand in the mind of your customers. More than a tagline or a fancy logo, brand positioning is the strategy used to set your business apart from the rest.”

The Branding Journal says, “Brand positioning has been defined by Kotler as ‘the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market’.”

What these definitions all have in common is that brand positioning is about trying to figure out how you can occupy a unique space in the mind of consumers. But what does that mean? It means that people don’t look at your brand as a commodity. They don’t look at a nike shirt and think oh its just a t shirt, I’m not going to pay more than $10 for it. They look at the nike shirt and they say I want that shirt, I don’t care about how much it costs.

Singer Vehicle Design is a company that does restoration mods on the 1989 -1994 Porsche 911 Coupe or Targa. If, by some odd chance, you actually happen to have one of these cars and want to get a restoration mod done, it will cost you somewhere between half a million to two million dollars. Oh, and you’ll have to wait on the waitlist for a year to just get your turn.

Singer purposely chose to create an unparalleled experience for a handful of people and enjoys margins that will make most companies jealous.

When you’re creating a brand you can choose to create an experience for a handful of people, or try a one size fits all approach. If you’re going for a one size fits all approach your competition will be all the major corporations with massive infrastructure built out already, so good luck. If you’re creating an experience for a handful of people (AKA positioning), you’ll create your own luck.

Ok I get it, positioning is important, but how do I even position? Is that the right way to even phrase that?

I’m glad you asked.

If you’re been in business for a while, look at who your best customers are. The ones that gladly pay what you ask for and they still feel like they’re getting a bargain because they value your product or service so much. Once you’ve narrowed down who your ideal customer is, talk to them and really get to know them.

Get to know their demographics (income, age, career, etc.) along with their psychographics (what keeps them up at night, what are their aspirations in life, what are they most afraid of). Get to know what problems their facing in business and in life in general. You only get this level of information by actually talking to people.

If you’re just getting started with your business and you don’t have enough customers to talk to people to get an informed opinion go out and find people to talk to. Go to the park, go to coffee shops, go to meetups. Talk to people about their problems and see which problems you feel you can solve well. If this is too big of a step for you to take, start with understanding yourself and solving your own problems.

Now that you know what the problems are, create incredible experiences that solve those problems for your ideal clients. At this point once you may be tempted to also start offering solutions to other customer avatars, but don’t give in to this temptation. If you want to occupy a unique space in the consumer’s mind, you have to have a unique service. You can’t just be doing everything decently well, you have to be world class at one thing.

The first two steps are essentially understanding you you serve and what you do to serve them, the last step is to communicate why it is you serve this group in the way that you do. If you’re struggling to communicate why you’re in business, try adding the word “because” into the sentence where you explain what you do.

For example, at Falconnotes, we build productivity systems using notion because everyone deserves a productivity system that works for them.

Nailing down the “why” part is what turns a regular company into a movement. It’s what takes a logo on your clothing from just another symbol to an indication to the world that you’re part of the brand’s tribe and believe in their values.

This is the unique space in the consumer’s mind we were talking about, when they no longer look at your brand as X or Y product, but rather they look at your brand as an expression of their values.

Brand Positioning isn’t a one time exercise. The most iconic brands have spent decades carefully crafting their positions in the consumers minds. When it comes to branding the hardest part of all the work we do is that ultimately the end result of our actions is in the minds of the consumer. We can’t directly do “branding” we can only take actions to try to influence perceptions of our brand. Influencing perceptions takes time and consistent reminders.

Rolex, Ferrari, Patek Phillippe, Louis Vuitton, these brand that have incredible brand positioning have been around for hundreds of years - and they’ve been very cautious of their positioning since the beginning.