Do you know what really sets your business apart from your competitors? Successful entrepreneurs like Band-Aid and Coca-Cola have a single thing in common: they have a strong brand. These brand names are so popular that they have become generic terms. For example, if you get a slight injury, do you look for a bandage or ask for a Band-Aid?
Building a solid brand name is a priority for fast-growing businesses. The proof for this is in the numbers. Companies that strive to create a strong brand name can shoot up their sales and build a large customer base faster than others. Brands known to work on their positioning see, on average, a 33% rise in revenue.
Firms offering B2B services perceived as having a strong brand can generate a higher profit margin than others. These are firms with good brand positioning. These organizations enjoy the numerous benefits of brand positioning, such as increased customer loyalty, improved brand image, and recognizable brand identity.
Before getting into the details of brand positioning strategies, let’s define what brand positioning is.
What is Brand Positioning?
Brand positioning refers to the process of building a strong brand so that it has a high perceived value in the minds of your targeted customers. A brand positioning strategy goes beyond creating a fancy logo or coming up with a creative tagline. It is the strategy used to establish your brand as unique, fun, problem-solving, reasonable, and high quality.
Good brand positioning sets your business apart from the competition. If your customers see value and quality in your products and services, they will not easily switch to substitutes if you increase your prices a little bit.
In The Branding Journal, brand positioning is described as how a particular brand is perceived as being different, favorable, and credible in the customers’ eyes.
Importance of Brand Positioning
Every brand and business has a perceived reputation in the eyes of its audience. Whether you cultivate it and strive to improve it or not is a different story. Creating a brand positioning strategy means taking control of your brand image and reputation.
Many decades ago, a soda manufacturing firm developed a product that nobody had ever seen before. This was the first-ever cola drink that came into the market. Because this company was the first to launch such a soda, it established itself as the original. Today, Coca-Cola has the benefit of making millions of dollars in sales revenue from all over the world. It is also a household staple, which means it is positioned as the grand standard of sodas.
Brand positioning differentiates a brand from all other brands offering similar products or services. This, in turn, helps the organization increase its brand awareness, justify its pricing strategies, and communicate the value of its products and services.
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Different brand positioning strategies have different objectives. The way you position your brand will depend on your product or service, the industry you operate in, the niche you are targeting, and the phase your business is at.
We will be discussing below a few different ways of doing brand positioning. If you want to know how to create a brand positioning strategy, make sure you read until the end.
Types of Brand Positioning Strategies
To decide how to create a brand positioning strategy, you need to choose first the type of strategy you will be using. Your selection depends on certain factors, such as the following.
- What strategies are being used by your competitors?
- How would you like to highlight your unique selling proposition?
- Would you position your brand through your customer services?
- Do you want to pinpoint your products’ features to show your brand value?
Based on these factors, let’s discuss the different types of brand positioning strategies that you can develop.
1. Customer Service Brand Positioning Strategy
Customers always prefer the retail outlet, restaurant, office, website or app that offers good customer service. No matter what industry you are in, which niche market you are targeting, and what kinds of products you are selling, providing good customer service is the key to establishing a good reputation for your brand.
Companies often highlight their friendly and readily available customer services to position themselves in the market. Brands that sell technical products, or have gone through a complicated product testing phase, like to highlight their strong customer support system and encourage users to get in touch with them if they have any inquiries.
Good customer service helps you to justify the prices that you charge for your products. For example, Apple’s products are expensive, but they offer super friendly support and are always quick to respond.
If you are diligent with your customer service brand positioning, you will be able to gather many positive reviews and impressive testimonials for your products and services. These will further boost up your sales.
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However, if you just promote your brand as having good customer support, but your support team is actually lousy and inattentive, your brand positioning will backfire on you. If you don’t deliver what you promise, you’ll end up getting bad reviews, complaints on email, and angry tirades on the phone. It is, therefore, necessary that before implementing this strategy, you carefully train your customer support staff.
2. Convenience Based Brand Positioning Strategy
This approach to brand positioning points out to your customers why it is more convenient for them to buy and use your products compared to those of your competitors. The highlighted convenience is based on your store locations, wide accessibility, easy availability of stock, ease of use of the products, and support from multiple platforms.
Sometimes the convenience is based on the product’s design. Here’s a brand positioning example for this category. Using a Swiffer mop is more convenient than a traditionally designed mop because it has disposable mopping pads.
This brand positioning strategy works best on those who have a busy lifestyle. They don’t mind spending a few extra bucks to purchase from a certain brand that can save their time and ease the process of getting a task done. If you offer convenience, it might cost you more. But the added costs can usually be covered by raising your prices a little bit.
If you are selling products online, you might need a team of expert developers to continuously resolve bugs and other issues if you want this brand positioning technique to work.
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3. Price based Brand Positioning Strategy
If you want your customers to perceive your products as the most affordable in the industry, you need to do price-based brand positioning. When your product is positioned as the cheapest in the market, you will get many new customers buying from you quickly. Thus this is an effective way to penetrate new markets or build a quick customer base in the initial phases of a product launch.
A disadvantage of positioning your products in this manner is that you might not maintain high standards and quality in your products. Offering lower prices often leads to lower production quality. In certain industries, such as air travel, reducing your prices might even initiate a price war.
4. Quality-Based Brand Positioning Strategy
If you want to emphasize the quality of your products, use quality-based brand positioning. You can produce high product quality by using high-quality raw materials, hiring exceptional craftsmanship, doing small batch production, and implementing sustainable quality control practices.
Do check with your buyer persona before implementing this strategy. If your target market includes a large portion of budget-conscious shoppers, they might bypass your brand to favor the cheaper alternatives. Your target customers’ shopping habits and household income will help you determine whether you should focus on the quality or the price for coming up with the most effective brand positioning strategy.
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5. Differentiation Based Brand Positioning Strategy
If you highlight your product’s innovative qualities and unique features, you are using differentiation brand positioning. A brand positioning for this is Tesla. Tesla manufactures attractive and fully electric vehicles - the kind that did not exist in the market before Tesla started making them.
Differentiation-based brand positioning works best on those who value innovation and creativity. These are the people who are always curious to know how a new technology or product works. Those with a primitive mindset would not be attracted to this technique.
Whichever brand positioning strategy you use, you need to have a brand website to showcase your products and services. The benefit of building a website on Strikingly is that we will take care of your site’s technical side and maintenance issues while you can focus on your marketing and branding techniques.
The templates available at Strikingly allow you to develop creative web designs and enjoy our drag-and-drop feature to insert your web content easily without having to write any code.
