Branding Strategy Insider

The Importance of Brand Positioning Research

We conduct one-day workshops in which we facilitate leadership team consensus on brand positioning.  In those workshops, the participants agree to target customer definitions and priorities and the brand’s essence, promise and personality. We strongly recommend conducting brand positioning research prior to the workshop. Why? It is important to…

1. Understand what your brand’s strengths and weaknesses are from your customers’ perspectives
2. Know how your customers perceive your brand vis-à-vis competitive brands
3. Understand which benefits are the most important to your customers and which of those benefits your brand could uniquely “own” in your customers’ minds
4. Know which benefits are believable for your brand
5. Understand how different customer groups perceive your brand’s product/service categories (and the brands within them) differently

Most product categories are mature with (a) numerous competitors and (b) most of the viable brand positions taken. It is not a trivial exercise to position brands within those categories. It requires significant and nuanced customer insight informed by well thought through research. The days of choosing brand positions such as the following are long since past:

Brand Positioning And The Consumer Mind

There's the key and the lock. The bolt and the nut. The button and the button hole. So, too, there's the position and the hole in the mind the position is trying to fill.

Except, of course, many marketers seem to have forgotten about those holes in the mind.

Which is strange. If there is one constant in the communications chatter about the marketing function it's this one: The consumer owns the brand.

True enough. But where in the world is the consumer going to put the brand except in his or her mind?

To file something in the mind is conceptually no different than filing something in your home or apartment. Clothes in the closet. Books in the bookcase. Food in the refrigerator. The car in the garage.

"A place for everything and everything in its place," goes the old saying.

Today, we have many well-known brands with no places in the mind to put them.

Brand Positioning For A Better Night's Sleep

A Hilton senior vice president for brand management and marketing was recently asked by a reporter, ‘So what is a Hilton?’

‘People can’t necessarily articulate it,’ conceded the senior vice president for brand management and marketing. The brand is defined, he suggested, “if we collectively give people an experience that says, yes, I’m proud of what it says about me to stay here, it makes me feel good; I’m in charge of my stay.’

‘I’m proud of what it says about me to stay here?’ That’s a Hilton? That’s what differentiates a Hilton from a Hyatt, a Marriott, an Omni, a Radisson, a Ramada, a Sheraton, a Westin or a Wyndham?

Mind you, this is the response from a senior vice president for brand management and marketing of an organization that is spending $45 million a year on advertising.

What is the role and function of marketing anyway? To collectively give people an experience that makes them proud of what it says about them? I thought that was the role and function of the hotel itself.

Sure, you want your product to give people a good experience. Without that, most marketing programs are certain to fail. But beyond a good experience is the need to position the brand in the mind of the prospect.

Brand Positioning and Perceptual Maps

A brand’s position is the set of perceptions, impressions, ideas and feelings that consumers have for the product compared with competing products. Marketers plan positions that give their products the greatest advantage in selected target markets, and they design marketing mixes to create these planned positions.

In planning their positioning, marketers often prepare perceptual maps that show consumer perceptions of their brand versus competing brands on attributes that are important to the consumer, whether functional or symbolic.

Perceptual Maps are useful for these key reasons:

    * Assessing strengths and weaknesses relative to competing brands along certain criteria important to the customer.
          o This is revealed by the positions of the marketer's brand and competing brands along the axes.

The Unique Selling Proposition Defined

Possibly the three most famous letters in advertising, the USP made great ads and made Rosser Reeves famous.  In his book, Reality in Advertising, he laments that the popularity of the USP does not reflect a wide-spread understanding of the term.

He defines the USP in three parts:

    * Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer.  Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising.  Each advertisement must say to each reader:  ‘Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.

    * The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer.  It must be unique -- either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.

    * The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product.

Reeves recommended thinking of the USP as something the consumer takes from the ad, rather than as something the copywriter puts into the ad.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Brand Positioning Basics

Positioning is something (perception) that happens in the minds of the target market.

It is the aggregate perception the market has of a particular company, product or service in relation to their perceptions of the competitors in the same category.

It will happen whether or not a company's management is proactive, reactive or passive about the on-going process of evolving a position.

But a company can positively influence the perceptions through enlightened strategic actions.

In marketing, positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization. It is the 'relative competitive comparison' their product occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market.

Re-positioning involves changing the identity of a product, relative to the identity of competing products, in the collective minds of the target market.

De-positioning involves attempting to change the identity of competing products, relative to the identity of your own product, in the collective minds of the target market.

The Process of Positioning

Generally, the product positioning process involves:

• Defining the market in which the product or brand will compete (who the relevant buyers are)
• Identifying the attributes (also called dimensions) that define the product 'space'
• Collecting information from a sample of customers about their perceptions of each product on the relevant attributes

Discovering Brand Personality

I have helped organizations position their brands through consensus building brand positioning workshops since the mid-1990s.  As a part of that process, I have the workshop participants (mostly organizational leaders) select the brand personality attributes for which they want their brands to stand.

The organizations with which I have worked span a wide range of sizes and industries. They include manufacturing companies, consumer products companies, aging services firms, wealth management firms, medical supply companies, real estate investment trusts, municipalities, high schools, environmental conservation organizations, public service organizations, professional associations and many others.

I thought it would be interesting to identify the most popular personality attributes across all of these organizations.

Following are the most popular personality attributes (in decreasing order of popularity):

•    Innovative (45%)
•    Professional (41%)
•    Responsive (36%)
•    Caring (32%)
•    Reliable (27%)
•    Customer focused (27%)
•    Trustworthy (23%)
•    Service oriented (18%)

Others with frequent mentions:

Employee Alignment: A Brand Positioning Mandate

It will hardly be big news for readers of Branding Strategy Insider, but we now live in the era of the brand. Most marketers are fully aware that the ultimate factor that will determine their personal career progression and the general health of their organisations will be their ability to build and protect their brands.

But despite a plethora of debate within the industry on the topic, most organisations are still struggling to get to grips with their own specific brands. The problem for most managers comes when they attempt brand positioning.

Look across any strategic activity - marketing communications or packaging, for instance, and it's clear that all of these and many more activities depend on having a clear and concise brand position. What is our brand?

How does it behave? What does it stand for? These are all questions that must be answered if a brand is to succeed.

The problem with most companies is that they miss the central tenet of brand positioning: less is more. Most marketers are driven by their large capital expenditures on brand positioning and the enormous amount of personal time they devote to the project to produce an elaborate and complicated multiple slide presentation.

Consensus: Heart of Brand Positioning

Frequently, the brand design is not embraced by the organization because the leadership team was not actively involved in the process at every step along the way. Typically, outside experts will design the brand based upon separate interviews with key stakeholders. This input does not allow for disagreement, debate, discussion or consensus building among the stakeholders. For this reason, The Blake Project offers what have proven to be highly successful and intensive brand positioning workshops for organizations.

These are highly facilitated, very well prepared sessions in which all the key stakeholders (typically organization leaders and marketing executives) are “locked in a room” until they reach a consensus on all of the key elements of brand design: the target customer and the brand essence, promise and personality.

As part of the process and in tandem with brand research we ask key stakeholders (and ad agency personnel, front-line employees, salespeople, customer service reps and marketing researchers with first hand knowledge of you customer’s perceptions) in-depth questions about the brand and its market to serve as stimuli for the brand-positioning workshop. In addition to stimuli this questionnaire ensures that key personnel with a stake in your brand and those you wish to have input from (that may not be invited into the workshop) are involved in and rallied around the positioning process.

The power of consensus in brand positioning cannot be over-emphasized. Consensus serves as the 'glue' in the coming weeks, months and years after the exercise is conducted. Without it brand focus can be lost.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Successful Brand Repositioning

You follow the same steps and address the same brand design components when repositioning a brand as you do when first designing the brand. But, brand repositioning is more difficult than initially positioning a brand because you must first help the customer “unlearn” the current brand positioning (easier said than done). 

Three actions can aid your success in this process: (1) carefully crafted communication, (2) new products, packaging, etc. that emphasize the new positioning and (3) associations with other brands (co-branding, co-marketing, ingredient branding, strategic alliances, etc.) that reinforce the new brand positioning.

You should not rely upon an advertising agency, a brand consulting company, or your marketing department to craft your corporate or organizational brand’s design. This exercise is so critical to your organization’s success that your organization’s leadership team and its marketing/brand management leaders should develop it, preferably with the help and facilitation of an outside brand-positioning expert.

We have more to share on Repositioning here and Brand Positioning here.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid