What is your brand about? What’s its essence? How is it different from and better than what people can already get? What do you want your branding efforts to inspire people to do (buy your product, hire you, join your cause, or spend their vacations in your state)?
To answer these questions, you must position, define, and name your brand. Clarify your brand concept in your own mind so that you can clarify it in the minds of others. In this chapter, I explain how to do just that.
Positioning Your Brand
Jockey for position is an old phrase from horse racing that means getting into a better place near the beginning of a race. When you’re building and launching a brand, you need to move your brand to a position that gives it the greatest chance for success. This process usually involves identifying or developing brand attributes that enable you to outcompete what’s already available.
Suppose that you’re planning to open a restaurant in your neighborhood, which already has plenty of diverse restaurants — fine dining, fast food, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Thai, Greek, Japanese, cafés, bars and grills, buffets, you name it. How can you possibly compete? You look for ways to make your restaurant different and better, such as the following:
Higher-quality food
Generous servings
Superior service
Relaxed atmosphere
Convenient location
Lower prices
Free entertainment
Then you can begin to market these attributes to build brand recognition and awareness. (Brand recognition involves the ability to identify a brand by its logo, colors, slogan, tagline, jingle, or other brand attribute. Brand awareness is deeper knowledge of the brand, such as its mission and the products or services offered.)
In this section, I lead you through the process of positioning your brand.
Choosing a brand positioning strategy
You start the brand positioning process by choosing one or more brand positioning strategies. A brand positioning strategy is an approach to differentiating something from what’s already available. A brand positioning strategy could be to offer the lowest prices or the highest-quality product in its class.
When choosing a brand positioning strategy, think about your brand’s unique selling proposition (USP) — what makes your brand different, better, and more attractive to customers.
In this section, I highlight several brand positioning strategies, but this list isn’t exhaustive by any means.
Product/service features and benefits
Brand positioning often focuses on the product or service itself, specifically on the following attributes:
Features: Characteristics of the product or service that make it different from and better than what’s already available
Benefits: How what’s different and better about the product/service is advantageous to the customer
Consider a hybrid gas–electric vehicle. The feature is a vehicle that uses gas to create electricity that powers the vehicle. The key benefits are that it enables the driver to travel farther on a tank of gas and save money on fuel, it’s cleaner for the environment, and it requires less engine maintenance.
Product class
A product class is a category of products. Videogames is a product class with several subclasses, including action games, adventure games, role-playing games, and strategy games. You can compete within a product class or subclass or outside it, but you’re competing by product class only when you compete outside the class or subclass — positioning a strategy video game as a better alternative to a strategy board game such as chess, for example, or positioning video games as a better alternative to other forms of entertainment, such as movies.
Application or use
When a product or a nearly identical version of it has multiple applications or uses, brands often develop around the different uses. Consider Gatorade and Pedialyte. Both beverages are used for rehydration and replenishing electrolytes. But Gatorade is higher in sugar and is marketed as a sports drink for teens and adults, whereas Pedialyte is lower in sugar and higher in potassium and sodium and is marketed to prevent dehydration in children suffering from fever, diarrhea, and vomiting.
Customer service
Some businesses pride themselves on delivering superior customer service. Examples that come to mind include Nordstrom, Visa, and Trader Joe’s. Providing quality customer service is a priority for any business or organization, of course, but you must decide on the degree to which you want to market superior customer service as one of your brand’s essential qualities.
Convenience
In some industries, such as fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, meal-delivery services, and banks, convenience is essential. Convenience may involve choosing an accessible location, making it easier or faster to do something, eliminating a time-consuming or onerous task, rearranging items in a store, or streamlining the purchase process (online or in stores).
Quality
If you’re making a conscious decision to offer premium products or services, quality is essential to your brand and something to prioritize in your marketing.
Cost and value
Many brands choose to compete simply by offering the lowest prices, and some are successful at it — Walmart, for example. This strategy generally undermines the purpose of branding, however. It’s the right approach if you’re selling a commodity (something that’s pretty much the same regardless of who’s making it or selling it), but it’s usually the wrong approach for a brand (something distinct that people are willing to pay more for).
Competing on value is usually a more effective strategy as long as you consider the cost to you. With the value strategy, you’re offering people more for their money. But adding value doesn’t necessarily cost you more. You may be able to introduce a superior product or service that doesn’t cost you more to produce but that you can charge more money for.