Effective Brand Positioning depends upon identifying and communicating with brand’s uniqueness, differentiation and verifiable value. The question is, what makes a particular brand preeminent, compared to other competing brands. It is important to note that “me too” brand positioning contradicts the notion of differentiation and should be avoided at all costs. This type of copycat brand positioning only works if the business has to offer something that may be not as good or appealing, but significantly cheaper, compared to the other competitor(s).
The process of brand positioning usually involves:
- Identifying main competitors to the business.
- Getting to know how identified competitors place their products and position their business at the moment.
- Defining your own brand positioning as it is today, although it may not exist at the moment.
- Comparing the company’s positioning to its competitors’ to search for space to improve or differenciate.
- Creating a distinctive, differentiating brand positioning statement, based on product values, producing key messages and customer propositions.
Adapted from wikipedia
What is brand positioning? It can be described as identifying a market niche for a brand, product or service utilizing traditional brand marketing placement strategies. In marketing, brand positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization.
Re-positioning is described as changing the identity of a product, relative to the identity of competing products, for variuos purposes in the collective minds of the target market.
De-positioning can be described as attempting to change the identity of competing products, relative to the identity of your own product, in the collective minds of the target market.
The original work on brand positioning was consumer marketing oriented, and was not as much focused on the question relative to competitive products as much as it was focused on trying to somehow distinguish itself from other similar products and making way to the mind of the recipient.
The growth of high-tech marketing may have had much to do with the shift in definition towards competitive brand positioning. An important component of hi-tech marketing in the age of the internet is positioning in major search engines, which can be accomplished through Search Engine Optimization , also known as SEO. This is an especially important component when attempting to improve competitive positioning among a younger demographic, which tends to be web oriented in their shopping and purchasing habits as a result of being highly connected and involved in social media in general.
One should agree, that brand positioning is something that happens directly in the minds of the target market, nowhere else. And this process can be both explainable and paradoxical. It is the aggregate perception the market has of a particular company, product or service in relation to their perceptions of the competitors in the same category. It will happen whether or not a company’s management is proactive, reactive or passive about the on-going process of evolving a position. But a company can positively influence the perceptions through enlightened strategic actions.
Adapted from wikipedia