How To Create Strong Brand Positioning In Your Market
Strong brand positioning in your chosen market is integral to your brand’s success. It should be considered the raison d’etre of any self-respecting marketing team worth its salt.
Brand positioning is, in essence, about winning the hearts and minds of the customer—how you make your brand visible and appreciated above all the competition; it is about reputation and what your brand means to the customer.
We find that companies with strong brand positioning have products that differentiate themselves from that offered by the competition. They achieve this by utilising a unique and desirable selling point. The importance of brand positioning to a company’s overall success, or indeed failure, cannot be overstated: a consistent marketing campaign can witness an average revenue increase of to 23%.
Companies utilise a slew of strategies in their bid to secure a strong brand position. There are however some steps that should be seen as indispensable in making a strong brand position a reality.
Identify Your Target Audience
Establishing what we would considered a ‘strong brand position’ is largely contingent on the appreciation the customer or prospect has for your product. It is therefore important a company builds and develops a comprehensive customer profile. Merely aspiring to sell to every man, woman and child out there is unrealistic. You need to break the market into segments.
Market Segmentation
Customers have a plethora of different needs, wants and levels to their purchasing power, for example. identifying specific psychographics like lifestyle preferences, desires, interests, and also demographic variables such as age, gender and other soci-economic information, will help you identify which customers’ minds you can effectively place your brand in—a clarion call from you to those you’ve identified as having a demonstrable proclivity for what you have to offer. A healthy 19-year-old, for example, probably won't be interested in the latest mobility scooter innovation, but a 60-year-old with health issues might well be! Equally, an individual earning £30,000 per annum won’t be looking to buy a £2 million Bugatti Veyron, but they might be interested in a smart car or the latest hot hatch.
Create A Mission Statement.
Now that you‘ve identified your target audience it is time to get all your ducks in a row. Creating a mission statement will give your marketing team direction and guidance—get everyone singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak. Mission statements express your purpose in the world as a brand and detail what goal you hope to achieve.
Some questions you should ask yourself while creating your mission statement are; what need do you hope to fulfil in the market? Are you marketing your product as different from what’s already out there? Or are you providing the same bog-standard, generic product everyone else is?! While you may not answer all these questions directly in your mission statement per se, thinking about them will, at the very least, help define who you are; who you’re gearing your product toward and who your competition is, or will be.
Create A Positioning Statement
It is common practice—and arguably good practice—for the product‘s name, target customer and benefits to said customer and product, to be conveyed in a positioning statement. An internal statement designed to align the company’s marketing strategies with a specific product or service. This brief statement outlines what the product is; how it caters a specific niche in the market e.g., your product may be luxury; it may be cheaper; eco friendly, etc.
It is not uncommon for a company to have multiple positioning statements for different products, e.g in the automotive industry where a company sells a range of different car models, each with a unique selling point. Or perhaps the brand is being sold internationally and how the brand is positioned in one country will be positioned differently in another country.
5. Create a catchy Slogan or Tagline
One way companies make an emotional connection with consumers is by creating a catchy slogan or tagline which encapsulates a unique ideal, aspiration or feature of a product or service.
Successful taglines, often memorable, are becoming synonymous with a specific brand or product: taglines like Just Do it, by Nike; Because You’re Worth It, by L’OréaL or M&Ms’ Melt In Your Mouth, Not Your Hand, are not only immediately recognised as belonging to their respective companies, but they all say something compelling. The consumer wants to be affiliated with such a brand or they buy into the message being espoused. Definitely a desirable plus for your brand positioning.