Positioning is, without a doubt, the most important element of brand strategy. Is the art of strategy and it can be defining the difference between the success or failure of a brand and the business that is attached to it. Everything from here comes on outcomes from the audience you identify and the position that you take to best attract and serve that audience which is your position strategy.
Positioning is the art and strategy of designing a brand’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of your audience.
Positioning is also based on the context of who the audience is and what they feel about the position term that you want to own. Position happens in the mind of your audience. Those are not the brands that position themselves in the mind of their audience. The audience does that independently. what brands attempt to do with their positioning strategy is to influence where their audience positions their branding their mind through their messaging.
Based on their demographics and psychographics, their lifestyle and adventures along with the experiences that they have had with your brand, your audience will place you in a position in their mind.
The objective of positioning is to get your audience to remember your brand based on the one thing you want to be known for. As a business, you might want to do a lot of things for different people but as a brand, you want to be known for one thing, not one product or one service, but one idea.
Now that inside that idea there will be many layers of what you do for your audience but you want to be remembered for that idea. Hopefully, that idea is based on the one thing that you better than any of your competitors but is that idea that you want to be remembered for.
Now, looking at the market, you might like the competition is fierce especially if your brand is new. But that there is a gap that you can call your own and that’s affection positioning is. If your brand goes to the market and offers the same products and services at the same price in the same manner through the same offer, your brand will get lost in the noise of the market and competition. The goal of positioning is to separate yourself from that noise so you don’t need to shout. You can simply say what you do differently compared to the screaming pack of competitors and if it is unique enough, you might end up in the position of their mind of your targeted audience.
The tree key elements of positioning
Audience
if you want to position your brand effectively, you need to first understand your audience. Understand who they are, the lives they lead, the emotions they go through on a day-to-day basis, especially when it comes to your brand and the problem you solve. Understanding your audience, their problems, their fears, desires, etc is critical, not just for your position but for the overall brand strategy.
Competitors
You need to understand your competitors and understand in great detail what they are doing well and what they are doing not so well. When starting out, many brands and entrepreneurs look at their competitors seeking inspiration for what to do and they look to emulate what is working for them. When you are looking at your competition from a position standpoint, you are looking at what they do from the point of view of your shared audience. You want to know from your audience’s perspective, what options they already have in the market and where the marketing is being under-serviced. You need to find the options that your audience would like to have and that they don’t have. You also want to see what your competition is doing well and their customers are happy with them. We can always learn from that and use it to improve our products and services.
Differentiator
When it comes to the position of our brand, we want to be different and we are looking for gaps in the market, that’s the differentiator.
With the differentiator, we look at what makes your brand different from other competitors. Chances are that your competition is doing something in the marketplace that your audience quite likes but just as likely, they are doing something that your audience doesn’t like so much. They might be frustrated with the lack of options around the product or service, around the customer service on support, or around the billing structure. Identifying our differentiator is all about seeking the gaps in the market to find a position that we can call our own.
When you have extracted what you need from research and your audience from research and your competitors, and from research and your differentiators, you bring all the information together and make important decisions to form your position strategy which you will later distill into your position statement.
Is very important to highlight how important is to take time to define your position in your market. Finding your market position is one of the most challenging tasks in the whole spectrum of branding. Researching your audience and competitors takes time and identify a differentiator and offer your audience something different that will provide value and enhance their experience takes time as well. Once you have completed this process, you should understand your audience intimately.
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