Brand positioning is the way you distinguish yourself from your opponents and how consumers identify and connect with your brand. It's composed of the essential qualities and values that are compatible with your company.
Brand positioning can be communicated through a variety of means including voice and tone, visual design, and the way your business represents itself in person and on social media.
Brand positioning and marketing have to work together to be successful, and they usually occur in some way, form, or shape without much effort because it is essential to any level of business success.
Here are some key actions that can help you recognize what your positioning in the marketplace is:
· Determine what the current status of the brand is and where it requires to go
· Understand how your opponents are marketing themselves and their tactics
· Compare your processes to your opponents to see how you stand out from them
· Recognize the immediate and most threatening of your competitors
· Develop a value-based and focused marketing idea for your brand
· Test the ability of the positioning statement with customer recall
· Craft a brand positioning statement that plays to your strengths
Over the years, markets have become more challenging to drive and are more fragmented. This has made the task of building and executing effective brand positioning strategies more challenging. If the S.M.A.R.T guidelines are applied to measure brand positioning success, then the following hurdles are identified:
Specific: It is essential to have a highly differentiated positioning in the market, but it is challenging to keep particular positioning principles in today's markets. This is due to more competition and neighboring positioning territories that brand's occupy.
Measurable: Positioning can be formalized through brand visions, brand guidelines, formal positioning statements, and structures, but it is exciting to measure a brand's performance toward its positioning. Various consumer feedback-driven tools can measure performance against crucial positioning attributes, but they have a critical underlying presumption that customers experience a brand's positioning and can explain it.
Assignable: A positioning territory or framework can be allocated to a brand, but it is challenging to occupy the framework or territory alone. This is again due to opponent brands having a high degree of the overlay on different positioning characteristics or due to a brand's positioning being too general by description.
Realistic: Positioning has to be practical for the brand to give against it. In many cases, it is not as brands promise more than they can provide. This is exactly where they come up short and finish their equity in the consumer's minds and hearts.
Time-related: This is presumably the most challenging aspect to perform against. There is arguably no such entity as a point in time when a company can say that its brands have an accurate match on the positioning structure they had linked for the brand in the market.
Steps to Create Your Brand Positioning Strategy:-
Building your brand positioning strategy includes diving deep into the details of your brand and identifying what you do better than anyone else. These steps help you create a brand positioning strategy that's unique to your business.
1: Determine your current brand positioning
Are you currently marketing your service as just another item on the market, or are you selling it as something unique? Your current brand positioning delivers you important perspicacity into where to go next. You'll require to understand your current position to analyze your competition further.
Start by analyzing your target customer and defining who they are. Next, recognize your values, mission, and what makes you different from the rest of the market. Finally, take stock of your value statement and your current brand persona and brand voice.
2: Determine your competition
After analyzing yourself, it's essential to examine your competition by conducting the opponent analysis. Why? You will require to see who you are up against to conduct competitor research. That analysis will help you determine what you can do better in your strategy to increase an edge.
3: Conduct competitor research
Once you've resolved who your opponents are, it's time to conduct in-depth competitor research. You'll require to examine how your competition is positioning their brand to compete.
4: Identify what makes your brand unique
Building an individual brand is all about recognizing what makes you distinctive and what works best for your business.
You’ll begin to see some companies that have the same weaknesses and strengths. As you compare your service to theirs, you might find one of their shortcomings is your strength. This is what makes your brand different, and it's the perfect starting point for positioning your brand in the market.
Step 5: Create your positioning statement
It’s time to take what you’ve learned and created a brand positioning statement.