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brand-positioning

When companies face the challenge of reaching new customers and markets, it’s best to consider a new branding position to drive growth. Brand positioning provides persuasive methods your business development team needs in order to cultivate and close out sales. Today you’ll learn how to create a brand positioning statement. First, though, we must understand the key aspects of it.

Understanding Brand Positioning

Account planners help make sure the brand is properly positioned. They must carve out a position that no other brand can occupy.

When creating your brand positioning, it must be something that the consumer wants, thinks is special, and the brand must live up to it and maintain that vision. It is also crucial to use brand positioning to turn a consumer’s wants into a need.

Defining a Target Market

When finding your target market, you must think about who you want your brand to reach, business and consumer wise. Create a brand persona, where you create fictional characters based on real aspects of your customer base. With that being said, paint a picture of who you’re targeting, understand their mindset or motivation, and define them in a way that helps the brand position themselves differently than others. The more detailed your analysis can be, the better.

Key advice: Research is vital when identifying your target market. For instance, we might initially believe that Demo A is perfect for our new brand of widget, but after doing some market research, we learn it’s Demo B. The only way we’ll learn this, though, is by doing the research.

Frame of Reference

Another key aspect is to know where your brand stands category-wise and who the brand must compete against to win market share. These things may change over time, which is why it is best to stay updated with market trends.

consumer-benefit

Consumer Benefit

Think about what the consumer takes away from your brand positioning. The big idea is to get the target market to see the brand the same way that the company sees the brand. Make sure your brand positioning is compelling and distinct – so unique you can’t substitute your brand name with another. What is something that you can confidently provide to consumers that no other brand can provide or replicate?

Reasons to Believe or Rationale

Explain the brand and product attributes that benefit the consumer and make sure it’s not only fact-based and compelling but also understandable and believable for consumers. Provide evidence for the claims made and show your process or share data and statistics to ensure legitimacy.

Here is a quick brand positioning statement template:

To (ie: Target Consumer)_________________.  *Brand X* is the (Frame of Reference)_____________that (Rational/Emotional Benefit Promise) _______________.

That’s because *Brand X* is (Reason to Believe) ____________.

Now that you see how things are laid out, let’s look more in depth about how you can easily fill in those blanks!

Here is a brand positioning statement example that I drafted up after following these steps:

To businesses looking to expand their growth and sales through digital advertising. Boxcar Creative is the full-service digital advertising agency that treats their client relationships like partnerships. That’s because Boxcar Creative is committed to providing top-notch services to their clients.

Editing your brand positioning statement:

When editing, make sure that you are writing your statement correctly. A brand positioning statement should not sound like a slogan, tagline or pitch, but as a belief of who you are and what you want to be.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself when considering your brand positioning statement:

  • Can our brand attest to the claims we have made?
  • Does another brand offer these benefits to this market better than your brand?
  • How can we use our target market and values to our advantage in order to position ourselves in the best way possible?
  • Will we see future advancement with our brand as a result of this?
  • Is there one component that we can change to reach different angles, or would we have to write a completely different positioning statement?
  • Is the rest of our company confident with this position?
  • Are we fine with being the affordable and reliable choice or would we rather be an exclusive specialty brand?
  • Are we positioning ourselves in line with our brand’s essence?

After answering all of these questions, I hope that you’ve revised your draft and now have a flawless brand positioning statement!

If you are interested in achieving the best brand positioning in the marketplace, it’s essential to do a full brand audit. We’d be happy to help you take your company to new heights! Feel free to drop us line on our contact page if you’re interested.