A solid brand strategy will heavily influence the success of the overall organisation as has been proven time and time again, and a key component of any strong brand strategy is nailing your brand positioning.
In this excellent YouTube video below our Notepad Founder, Naeem Alvi-Assinder, breaks down exactly what brand positioning is and how to develop your business’s positioning effectively.
If you want to learn more about positioning then it’s an absolute must, and in this blog we’ll also be providing a briefer summary.
Furthermore, if you’d like to define what sets your organisation apart and own that space, or just want some fresh perspective, say hi at: [email protected] .
So firstly, to kick us off, what is brand positioning? That seems like a good place to start. Brand positioning is simply what you want your customers to think about you when they think of your brand. So let’s think of an example, take Amazon, when you think of the Amazon brand in your head, you think about speed, convenience and a wide range of choices.
This is no accident, and is thanks to a carefully developed and implemented brand positioning. Amazon understands their core USPs as a business, and then weave this throughout their messaging and positioning.
The 3 Cs
When you are developing a brand positioning for your organisation, it’s always important to consider the 3 Cs, which are Customers, Competition and Company, as this will help to focus your efforts, speak to the right people and ultimately differentiate your brand.
Customers
The first step in the process is customer profiling, it’s imperative that you know exactly who the brand is for. This means identifying and honing in on a specific demographic then creating an in-depth profile, including age, location, interests and the channels which they can be reached on.
With this in mind, all of your brand should speak to their needs and sensibilities.
Competition
Even if you have the most novel, innovative product in the world, you can still not ignore the competitive landscape. Customers have a choice, don’t let them pick an inferior alternative who communicate their value more effectively.
In saturated markets (in the YouTube video Naeem is speaking about the water brand “Liquid Death” as an example, so that was an incredible pun) the need to differentiate becomes even clearer, or risk getting completely lost in the shuffle.
Most brands think they have a unique proposition but when you check the market you may be astounded at just how many in the space look and sound the same.
Company
Once you have a clear understanding of who your customers are, you know what the markets look like and what your competition is saying, you need to make sure that whatever positioning you land on is true to your organisation.
Any position you run with has to be authentic to who you are as a business and as people or this will feel inconsistent to audiences, and definitely don’t make promises that you can’t keep.
For instance, many businesses feel compelled to feature sustainability in their positioning, but if you are not already carrying this out as a business, implementing this stance on a whim is doomed to failure internally and the public backlash will be even worse if you can’t keep your end of the bargain.
In many cases, you and your people are what make your business special. So capture this uniqueness in your positioning and let your audiences understand what fuels your passion and ambitions.
So there’s the theory, and here’s where you should really really check out the YouTube video, if you weren’t planning on doing it already, as Naeem goes through a fantastic real-world example from Notepad’s previous work with the Whisk case study.
Whisk’s journey began way back in 2012 when founder Nick set out to create a mobile app that creates shopping lists based on recipes.
Fast-forward nearly a decade later and Whisk had grown into a global remote team of 12 employees, with a high number of daily active app users, and a couple of successful rounds of investment under their belt.
However, while the app was proving popular with everyday foodies it was proving difficult to monetise and scale. With this in mind, Whisk challenged Notepad to explore new positioning for the company which could unlock their real growth potential.
This shift in Whisk’s brand positioning tripled the size of the company in just 6 months, leading to an eventual multi-million dollar acquisition by Samsung. Watch from the 17:35 mark to find out how we did it, although we highly recommend watching the whole thing!
Here’s that link again and we hope you’ve enjoyed reading:
