Criteria for effective brand positioning

Brand positioning is a way to stand out among competitors and occupy a specific place in the minds of the audience. A competent positioning concept strengthens customer loyalty and creates a strong connection with the brand. Every contact between the client and the brand becomes a thread that connects them and evokes emotions. In this article we will look at how to stretch this thread, develop a competent concept and avoid mistakes. 

What is brand positioning

What is positioning? This is why they choose you. What does your brand mean to the consumer, what place does it occupy in their life, what emotions and feelings does it evoke. If you want to be noticeable and in demand, you need to communicate correctly with the audience. 

Key goal brand positioning - take a special position in the minds of the target audience. Good positioning allows you to turn a casual buyer into a regular customer and build a strong relationship with him. 

Well-known brands are building a whole strategy to create a bright image of their products. Any strategy begins with studying the market and customer needs. This helps to find those characteristics that make the brand special. The features found are then turned into a unique proposition that is communicated through advertising and other tools.

For example, IKEA associated with affordable and comfortable furniture, Aviasales - with ease of selecting trips, and Wildberries focuses on ease of returns and convenient logistics.

Positioning helps people choose you among millions.

The importance of brand positioning

Every day thousands of new products and services enter the market, and customers make a choice in favor of one product or another. As a result of these choices, some companies are thriving and increasing profits, while others are just struggling to stay afloat. What is the criterion for this border and what helps brands win hearts? The answer is clear - this is marketing positioning. It sets the brand apart from the crowd and helps build strong relationships with customers.

What does marketing brand positioning provide:

• Emphasizes benefits and values. Explains why your product is unique and important to customers.

• Allows you to control perception. This strengthens the brand's reputation and positive attitude towards it.

• Stands out among competitors. Helps customers understand why they should choose you over a competitor.

• Builds strong connections with clients. As a result, people turn to your product again and again. 

• Increases awareness and loyalty. Over time, people begin to remember you at the right moments thanks to the associations and triggers created.

Brand positioning in the market needs to be updated, as the needs and conditions of the market change, and new players arrive. It is important to be relevant in order to remain in demand.

What stages of positioning do you need to go through?

Positioning helps create a clear image of the enterprise in the eyes of the target audience. But for excellent results you need to go through a number of steps:

1. Determine the starting point. What brand image is currently formed, what do people think about you? 

2. Audience and competitor analysis. An in-depth study of the market will help you understand what customer problems need to be solved and how to differentiate yourself from competitors. 

3. Unique Selling Proposition. Find your brand's strengths. Formulate how you differ from others, what problems you solve and in what way. Your USP should clearly communicate your value. 

4. Positioning design. Capacious phrases, design elements and a unique communication style will help you convey your ideas.

5. Defining a Communication Strategy. Select the channels and formats through which you will promote your brand. For example, social networks, advertising, website, PR. All types of communications must be coordinated with each other and convey a single image.

6. Testing and refinement. Test the concept with small audience groups and collect feedback. This will help you understand if the strategy is working as planned. Make adjustments if necessary.

7. Launch and monitoring. At this stage, positioning is introduced into all processes: sales, service, corporate culture. Once launched, monitor your results regularly. Positioning is not a static process. You will constantly have to adapt to changes in the market and audience needs.

Criteria for successful positioning

Effective positioning always meets a number of criteria:

Value

Here we are talking about how potentially important and necessary your brand, product, and your activities are for people. Show what problems you can solve and how you will do it. The product must arouse genuine interest and sincere emotions, and most importantly, satisfy the needs of the consumer.

Difference

This criterion follows from the first point. When you provide real value to the audience, you are useful, you make the world and people's lives better, people will pay attention to you. Now you need to show what you are good at that others don’t have, but you have. And people will follow you.

Constancy

Views, interests, values are not formed by clicking. Also, people will not remember and fully understand the brand in an instant. All aspects must be thoroughly worked out and the brand must always adhere to its positions, without a sudden change of course.

Simplicity

Positioning should be clear to the audience. You need to understand what categories people think in, what questions they ask, and convey your position in their language.

As a result, it is important that people understand you, share your brand philosophy, form the right associations with your brand in their minds, and take your side. Then the company will not have fleeting popularity, but stable success over the long term.

Company brand and personal brand - differences in positioning

Corporate and personal brand positioning have their own characteristics, although they have the same goal - to gain the trust and loyalty of the audience.

Brand basis

A corporate brand is built around the values, mission and uniqueness of the company. Teamwork and the reputation of the business as a whole are important here. A company's brand positioning focuses on the benefits of the product.

A personal brand is based on the charisma of a particular person. Personal achievements, views and expertise are used. 

Positioning aids
A corporate brand uses logos, colors and a clear tone of communication. A personal brand is formed through opinions and personal stories.

Connecting with the Audience

A personal brand is more flexible, quickly creates deep relationships with the audience and builds authority. Positioning a personal brand involves a strong emotional connection. However, such a brand is strongly tied to one person and is subject to the so-called “cancellation”. 

The company's brand builds a connection based on trust in the quality of the product and creates a feeling of stability. But it's harder for the company to connect with customers because employees have strict boundaries: they can't open up through the brand's social networks or use overly emotional techniques.

However, customers are more pleased to see a person behind the product, rather than a soulless company. Therefore, many companies mix elements of the two approaches, including their leaders in their strategy.

HR brand positioning

An HR brand is how a company is perceived in the labor market. Positioning aimed at applicants and employees makes the company attractive to specialists. A good brand reputation as an employer helps to attract and retain talent. 

There are two directions in HR brand positioning: 

• External HR positioning. Aimed at attracting new employees. Brands collaborate with universities, participate in employer ratings and social events. Ambitious specialists strive to get into such companies, seeing new horizons in them.

• Internal HR positioning. Works to retain and motivate its employees. The strategy used here is comfortable working conditions, decent pay, training, and a healthy atmosphere in the team. All of this impacts employee engagement and performance at work.

An example of a powerful HR brand is a company Google. It is known for allowing employees to express themselves, providing career opportunities and benefits.

As a result, employees become brand ambassadors and form a positive image in the labor market. A strong HR brand not only reduces staff turnover, but also makes the company attractive to partners and clients.

Brand positioning: what not to do

The results of activities depend on how the positioning strategy is built: economic indicators, competitive advantages, popularity and attention to the company, audience involvement - potential buyers. In the variety of products and ideas for their promotion, a brand with an unclear position may not even be in the background and get completely lost. 

Which positioning strategy is right for you is a question that needs to be analyzed individually; this can only be understood after in-depth study, market research and analysis of brand positioning and company data. But we will now outline in general terms what not to do when developing a positioning strategy. 

Very wide range

To build an effective positioning strategy, you need certainty: in what way we, as professionals, will be most useful to people. And pay all attention to it. Do not try to launch dozens of additional products or related services from the start. Later, to develop the company or improve customer comfort, there may be a need for additional product lines, but first, work on key competencies must be fine-tuned. 

A huge range of products or attempts to provide many services at once “in a one-stop shop” may turn out to be a failure for a new brand. It seems that you want to satisfy as many customer needs as possible and thereby become more in demand in the market. But in such a pursuit of everything at once, there is a very high risk of losing control over the main processes, a noticeable decrease in the quality of work and a blurred brand position.

Only benefits

To create a positioning strategy, advertise and sell goods or services, you need to know your strengths and be able to demonstrate them correctly. But at the same time, you shouldn’t hide your shortcomings as if they don’t exist in principle.

When a brand speaks exclusively about successes, victories and new records, the audience may doubt the sincerity of communication: “we all live this life and we know that it doesn’t always happen that everything is just a plus sign, they don’t tell us something.” It’s a paradox, but the level of trust in the “ideal” brand is falling.

But another company was not shy and shared a real story, for example, about what difficulties arose when working with one of the clients, how long they could not come to an agreement, agree on the details and the project was on the verge of failure. This is where the audience gets into it. There will be no thoughts that the company is performing poorly. There will be empathy: everyone can face difficulties, not everything depends on us, we are all human. 

Yes, or just divide it: we do this flawlessly, but we are still gaining experience in other areas. A brand that not only proves its best qualities, but also admits its weaknesses, will be closer to the audience.

The product is useful to everyone

At the first stages of creating a brand, an idea like this is possible: “what if we launch a product that will be needed by any person?” And further arguments about versatility and that greater coverage will create a constant flow of buyers. But, unfortunately, this is an illusion. 

Firstly, there is probably no such product that is interesting and useful to everyone. Even vital products in their varieties are aimed at different audiences. Secondly, an attempt to create a “product of mass utility” and please everyone will only make the positioning incomprehensible: you need to present yourself somehow, but all people will not perceive one sales offer in the same way. 

If the idea of a universal product seems to work, it means the market, audience, competitors have not been studied and, as a result, there is no own position. And this is, perhaps, the main mistake on the way to creating a brand: without positioning, you will not get a solid visual image or communication with the audience.

Will help you determine a positioning strategy and find your buyer marketing study: 

• Where will we sell and on what scale?: online or offline, within a microdistrict, throughout the city, country or world.

• What price range is our product?: budget offer or high quality.

• Who are our competitors: you need to identify your advantages and use them in the competition.

• How a buyer will find out about our product and buy it: what sites are visited by the audience we need - we will place advertising there; Which stores do they go to? We’ll place the product there.

• What makes our offer unique?: we determine the features of the product, why they will choose it, and why it appeals to the target audience. 

When there are clear answers to all these questions, an understanding will come of how to organize work in the market. When you have warned against all possible mistakes in the brand formation process, the emergence of your own positioning strategy will not be long in coming.

Conclusion

Creating an effective brand positioning strategy requires a lot of research and experimentation. It will require experts in various fields, observation, time and nerves. This is a long and difficult path.

But you can choose a short one. We know how to develop a company image that will attract your people. Veonix studio provides services for the promotion and positioning of brands throughout Russia. If you want to strengthen your brand, leave a request on the website. During a free consultation, we will discuss your project, identify tasks and select services to implement successful positioning.