What do your potential customers want? How can your business fulfil that desire? What sets your business’s offering apart from the competition? These are all questions you need to ask yourself to clarify your brand positioning.

Rather than being printed in your marketing material or strewn across your website and packaging, brand positioning is established internally and defines the who, what, why and wheres of your business. It marks where your business stands in the market, how it differs from your competitors and how it is perceived in the minds of your consumers.

Why it’s important

Effective brand positioning is incredibly important as it correlates directly with how loyal your customers are to your brand and how willing they are to buy from you. Unless you stand within an incredibly niche industry, your audience will likely be faced with many different options when they’re shopping around. When your customers are faced with unlimited choice, you need to prove your value and show them why your company is worth their time. Not only that, but you also need to show that you can substantiate your claims or risk them moving on.  

Establishing a connection

To form a true connection with your customers, you need to appeal to them on an emotional level, while still demonstrating practical characteristics.When someone from your target demographic sees your product or service, they should understand that you have correlating values, simply based on what is expressed through your branding. Your brand will then be positioned in their mind as one which stands above the competition.

Brand positioning vs. product positioning

When you position a product, you are telling consumers why your product is better than the competition through marketing and messaging strategies.By focusing on the customer’s wants, needs and preferences, you can demonstrate the key features of your product or service, including the benefits and key features. Yet, even if your product benefits a consumer and they have loved using it in the past, if they don’t agree with your company practices or ethics, they may steer clear nonetheless.One example of this is if a person boycotts their previously favoured make-up brand having discovered they test on animals.

Unlike product positioning which appeals to a person’s practical requirements and their immediate needs, brand positioning appeals to their core beliefs, including their ethical, emotional and moral standpoints.It shows them why they should use your business, rather than simply telling them.

Crafting your brand positioning

To position your brand effectively, you need to understand the values of your target consumers, as well as the core values of your business, ensuring the two marry up. These values should then define your every move going forward — not just within your marketing strategy — but within every decision you make. This could be anything from where you sell your product to who you work with. If you go against your brand positioning, your consumers will quickly lose faith in your company. By living and breathing your brand’s core values, you are demonstrating to your audience that you can be trusted above the competition.

At Skein, we are branding experts with a strong network of freelance designers, developers, copywriters, marketers, photographers and animators. We will collectively help your business to create a strong brand identity and ensure this communicates effectively across both printed and digital collateral. To talk to us about a project, get in touch here.

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Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash