Products are made in factories. Brands are created in the minds of consumers – Walter Landor

THE BRAND POSITIONING STATEMENT

Articulating Your Brand Position Brand management starts with a well-considered brand positioning statement; everything else flows from that concept. A carefully grounded, insightful brand positioning statement:

  • Summarizes what your brand stands for – what it is and what it does for those who buy into your franchise.
  • Clearly describes your brand’s character– its personality, its values and the nature of the relationship it maintains with it loyal fans and followers.
  • Traces the marketing terrain your brand occupies – the familiar territory it currently occupies as well as the new horizons it wishes to conquer.
  • Serves as the basic operational agreement among members of the marketing team to guide both actions and communications programs, internally as well as in the broader market place.
A 360 PERSPECTIVE

The Discovery Process The discovery process is designed to align the consumers’ conceptualization of the brand with management’s aspirations for growth and development. Through an extensive review of primary and secondary research, coupled with a series of in-depth executive interviews, we seek to:

  • Determine – or verify – how consumers conceptualize your brand: its functional and emotional benefits, its character, its history, and how and where the brand intersects with their lives.
  • Identify which brands consumers see as your key competitors and determine how consumers structure the competitive set.
  • Probe those areas where brand-aware consumers would give the brand permission to evolve and grow – incremental steps as well as potential giant leaps.
  • Determine how key players in management and other stakeholder operations (e.g., sales, distribution, service, etc.) view the brand and how those occasionally divergent organizational viewpoints fit with those of the brand’s consumers.
  • Highlight the areas where consumer- and management-perspectives converge as well as those where significant divergence is apparent.

Brand Character & Market Position One of the defining traits of a strong brand – as compared to a good product – is the target customer’s ability to stretch their imaginations and conceptualize the brand in metaphorical terms:

  • To invest the brand with character traits, motives, a personality and a role.
  • To associate a brand with a well-defined set of activities and the social interactions they typify – a dinner party, a typical vacation, a family meal, etc.
  • To imagine the brand as having a home, as driving a specific type of vehicle or as living in a stereotypical neighborhood.

Brand character is arguably a brand’s most valuable asset. Packaging, product formulation, competitors and social trends may change, but properly managed, a brand’s character remains a stable, enduring touch-point over time. Learn more here…

A JOINT EFFORT

Immersion & Collaboration Once the discovery process is completed, the background information about the brand is collated, condensed and packaged for review. Through a series of joint workshops, with members of management and the marketing team, we mold both the consumer and the organizational perspectives into a positioning platform that serves as the foundation for a comprehensive marketing program with attainable objectives.