How to Leverage Research Insights In Brand Positioning
At Campos, we always say strong brands have to be authentic to the institution, compelling to target customers, and differentiated from the competition. So our brand strategy projects are typically designed to collect insights related to each of those three C’s: the company, the consumer, and the competition. Only when we have these insights can we begin developing a research-backed brand position.
What Is Brand Positioning?
Brand positioning is the effort to “own” a unique space in the minds of your target consumers. In other words, it’s the process of defining how you want your brand to be seen by your audience, relative to competitors. The concept was popularized by Jack Trout and Al Reis in their classic 1981 book of marketing strategy, Positioning: The Battle of Your Mind.
Why Is It Important?
Brand positioning forms the core of marketing strategy—and business strategy overall. The brand positioning filters down into a marketing plan by serving as the platform on which all creative and communications are built, but it’s not just about messaging. The brand positioning guides the entire customer experience the organization is trying to deliver as well. It serves as the North Star toward which the entire business is working.
Every brand has a positioning, whether they know it or not. In some companies, it exists only as a hazy and inconsistent concept in the minds of its employees and its consumers. But going through the process of brand planning, including explicitly defining a research-backed brand positioning, is critical for creating discipline and consistency across the enterprise.
What Is a Positioning Statement?
Brand positioning is often expressed through a brand positioning statement, a sentence or short paragraph that concisely expresses the unique benefit the brand provides to a particular market segment.
It’s important to keep in mind that a brand positioning statement is not a tagline or slogan. A positioning statement is for internal use only. It serves as a guide for external communication, as well as all decisions about the company, but it is not itself the advertising copy.
This is easier to understand if we look at a few examples. Amazon’s original positioning statement (back when it primarily sold books) was “For World Wide Web users who enjoy books, Amazon.com is a retail bookseller that provides instant access to over 1.1 million books. Unlike traditional book retailers, Amazon.com provides a combination of extraordinary convenience, low prices, and comprehensive selection.” This position was boiled down into the company’s first tagline: “Earth’s biggest bookstore.”
Or take Zipcar, whose positioning statement when it started in 2000 was: “To urban-dwelling, educated, techno-savvy consumers, when you use Zipcar car-sharing service instead of owning a car, you save money while reducing your carbon footprint.” This translated into the consumer-facing tagline: “Wheels when you want them.”
How to Develop a Brand Positioning Statement
Creating and articulating a brand positioning is part science, part art. It comes from combining insights into the three C’s:
Company: Who are we? What do we / can we do? What can we claim believably and authentically?
Customers: Who is our target audience? What do they really need or want?
Competitors: How are we different from everything else out there?
Some brands might be confident in their answers to all three of these questions and be able to construct a brand positioning statement (or three) of the tops of their heads. If you’re like most organizations, though, you will have multiple competing ideas of who the brand is, who it’s for, and how it’s different (or should be). These organizations will want to undertake a brand exploration process before settling on a positioning.
That’s where we can help. Campos’s brand strategists have been through the brand planning process with dozens of clients, fusing qualitative and quantitative research methods to bring together insights on customers, stakeholders, and competitors.
Testing Brand Positioning
Once you have several different positioning options, it’s time to test these with actual consumers. Whether you’re establishing a completely new positioning or repositioning an existing brand, testing is the only way to validate whether you’re taking the brand in the right direction.
For positioning testing, qualitative methodologies such as interviews or focus groups often provide useful diagnostic feedback, because they allow the researcher to probe into the reasons why respondents like one option over another. However, quantitative research, such as online surveys, are useful for validating the qualitative results with hard numbers on key performance indicators. The ideal methodology is often a combination of qual and quant, combining rich conversational depth with numerical rigor.
Typically, a brand positioning test consists of showing several brand positioning statements to survey-takers or qualitative interview respondents and asking questions to gauge their perceptions of these in terms of motivational force, uniqueness, accuracy/believability, etc. A slight variation on this method is when respondents are shown drafts of actual brand creative, or “ad-like objects,” that represent the different brand positioning options. This is often referred to as “brand concept testing;” it’s effectively a hybrid of brand positioning testing and creative concept testing.
Keep in mind that, when testing a brand positioning or concept, the focus should not be on wordsmithing, because positioning isn’t a tagline or ad copy. Rather, testing should aim to answer whether the positioning resonates with the target audience at a conceptual level, expresses benefits that are attractive and believable to them, and differentiates the organization from competitors.
Partnering with Campos on Brand Positioning Work
Developing research-backed brand positioning statements and testing them are our bread and butter. It’s some of our favorite work to do because it combines the rigor of research with the art of brand strategy. Whether you’re looking for nuanced qualitative conversations with customers to help you hone your core message, or for large-scale quantitative survey data to validate the choice of one brand positioning over another, we’ve got you covered. Reach out to talk about how we can partner with you and your brand!
