Branding Strategy Insider

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

Of Success, Strategy and Positioning

Success is not about having the right people, the right tools, the right attitude, the right role models, or the right organization, although all these things help. Having the right strategy is what puts an organization over the top. Strategy sets the competitive direction, dictates product planning, tells you how to communicate internally and externally, and tells you on what to focus.

A great business strategy without proper marketing will often fail in a highly competitive world.

Killer Competition
Strategy is what makes you unique and it is the best way to put that difference into the minds of your customers and prospects. In a world of ‘killer competition’, using good strategy is the best way to survive what I call the ‘tyranny of choice’. Whether the consumer is choosing between 260 choices of car models, 38 choices of tire makers, or even 50 brands of bottled water, there are so many good alternatives for customers that companies pay dearly for their mistakes. Competitors get your business and you don't get it back very easily. Companies that do not understand this will not survive.

Strategy, as defined in Webster's New World Dictionary, is all about "maneuvering into the most advantageous position prior to actual engagement with the enemy." To do this, an organization must first study, understand and maneuver around the battleground - a battleground that is in the minds of consumers and prospects.

Positioning is how you differentiate yourself in the mind of your prospect.

The Positioning Process
A business strategy's success or failure depends on how well a company understands these five elements of the positioning process:

   1. Minds Are Limited. The mind rejects new information that does not compute. It accepts only new information that matches its current state of mind. The mind has no room for what is new and different unless it is related to the old. One way to overcome the mind's limitations is to present a message as important news.

Complexity: Enemy of Brand Positioning

Over the past five years I have observed some outrageously successful brand executions. But for the most part, I have watched large organisations wasting millions of euros/dollars on attempts to position their brands in ways that can never succeed. In this post, I will share one of the great brand positioning lessons I have learned; simplicity - or rather, the lack thereof.

Ultimately, if we are successful, positioning will drive the company's behaviour to such a degree that it will appear in customer research as the things customers notice about that company. Unfortunately, most companies have such complicated positioning at the heart of their brands that there is no chance that this simple process will occur. Instead of a simple, tight definition of what the brand stands for, we find brand keyholes, triangles, wheels and dictionaries - layer after layer of complexity that will only serve to kill the brand's execution.

It's like the game of Chinese whispers. Whisper a complicated word into the ear of the first person in the group and by the time it reaches the end of the chain it has warped into something different. Whisper a simple word and it stays the same along the line. In most companies the positioning is so complex that even the originating brand manager, on closing the laptop holding the presentation, can't remember what it was. What hope, then, for the consumer at the end of a chain that spans strategy, marketing, sales and retail before reaching them?

Why so much complexity? The main reason is that brand managers believe the positioning is so important, and has taken up so much time and resources, that complexity equals greater impact. In reality, less is more. Finding one word for the brand is much harder than finding eight. Positioning is not like throwing shit against a wall - the more you throw at it, the greater the chance of something sticking.

Worthless Brand Values

Visit any FTSE 500 company and ask the first 10 employees you meet about their brand. Not one, barring the brand manager (if you are lucky), will have a clue what values or positioning they should be delivering to customers. Their attention and potential support was lost long ago when a sea of circles, triangles and keyholes containing brand personalities, traits, values and attributes washed over the heads of an unsuspecting workforce.

A correlation exists between the brevity of a brand's positioning and its potential to succeed. That success hinges on ensuring that the positioning is not only tight, but right. It is hard to know whether your positioning statement is right, but it is far easier to determine whether it is wrong.

Most companies use the same tired values to position their brand. Three brand values repeatedly emerge. This unholy trinity is generic, worthless and sadly symptomatic of indolent marketers who apply a branding-by-numbers approach to this most vital and unique of challenges. Irrespective of format or length, if your brand positioning contains any (or all) of the values described below, I steadfastly predict imminent failure to build the brand.

The first is quality. Quality is a multidimensional concept. It can mean hundreds of different concepts: luxury, reliability, rarity, performance, taste, durability, speed and slowness, to name a few. If the point of positioning is to focus the brand, why do it on something that means different things to different people at different times? If you cannot be specific about your brand in its positioning statement, everything that follows will be equally vague and mundane.

Brand Positioning: Remember This

What seven concepts are critical to positioning?

   1. Perception (their’s, not your’s)
   2. Differentiation
   3. Competition
   4. Specialization
   5. Simplicity
   6. Leadership
   7. Reality

To sell concepts, products and services, you have to understand how the mind works:

   1. The mind is a limited container.
   2. The mind creates "product ladders" for each category (cars, toothpaste, accounting services, hamburgers, etc.) There is always a top rung and a bottom rung in each category.
   3. The mind can only remember seven items in a high interest category. Most people remember only two or three items in a category.
   4. On the product ladder, Positions One and Position Two typically account for more than 60 per cent of the sales in that category. In other words, Positions Three, Four and Subsequent are not profitable.
   5. The mind hates complexity. To the mind, complexity equals confusion. People don’t have time to figure out confusion.
   6. The best way to enter the mind is to OVER-SIMPLIFY the message.
   7. The most powerful positioning is to reduce your message to one simple and easily understood word.
   8. Minds are insecure. Most people buy what others buy: this is the "herd mentality."
   9. Minds don’t change—easily.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid