It's All In The Brand Positioning Strategy...Duh

March 18, 2008 by anne

More often than not, when a brand struggles, it’s because they’ve strayed from their brand positioning strategy or constructed a faulty one. Unfortunately, to inexperienced marketers, that fact isn’t always obvious.

Why is a positioning strategy so important?  Because they’re a tiny little business plan boiled down to one sentence. Granted, sometimes it’s a long sentence. But it succinctly defines the target, their ‘pain point’, the category in which the brand competes, their differentiated benefits, and what the company must do to ‘prove’ those differentiated benefits to the customer.

Assuming it hasn’t just become a wordsmithing exercise (grrrr) developing a brand positioning strategy forces the company to consider what they need to do to be successful. Philip Kotler, one of the world’s foremost experts on marketing, calls the practice of brand building “the art and cornerstone of marketing.”

Experienced marketers know that when a brand is struggling, one of the first things to examine is the brand positioning strategy. That’s likely why Sears CMO Richard Gerstein commented in a recent article, that a key aspect of his plan to revive the Sears brand will be to “make sure that the overall customer experience—merchandise, in-store, service and marketing—are the best that they can be and working together to create a differentiated proposition that makes someone come to Sears versus going somewhere else.”

It’s also why Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz recently shut all U.S. stores for 3 hours to retrain staff to properly execute Starbuck’s unique positioning.

I’m not sure why positioning strategies are so often overlooked by companies. Maybe it’s because positioning strategies aren’t easy to create. After all, when they’re done right, a whole lot of research and thinking goes behind the construction of that one line positioning statement.

Maybe it’s because so many terms are used to describe the same thing. Brand positioning strategies are variously referred to as positioning strategies, brand strategies, and positioning statements, but they all mean the same thing.

Maybe it’s because using the term “brand,” sounds fluffy, or maybe they are confused about what ‘brand’ means. It’s not unusual for some people, when they talk about brand, to refer to the brand identity: the logo, name, tagline, etc.  It’s easier to define something when you can see it.  But focusing on the visual identity alone overlooks the critical importance of the strategic elements of a brand.

Companies who take the time understand and construct a brand positioning strategy won’t necessarily find that their challenges disappear. But they will have a better understanding of what to do to achieve their objectives.

brand – what is it?
positioning statement
point of difference
pain point
target audience
frame of reference
reason to believe
brand essence
portfolio architecture
commoditization

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