The process of positioning your brand in the minds of your clients is called brand positioning. Company positioning is more than a slogan or fancy logo, it is a strategy designed to make your business stand out among your competitors.
The online retail model lets shoppers differentiate goods and services from their desktop computer or mobile phone. There are social media platforms, word-of-mouth recommendations, and marketplaces like Amazon that impact a buyer’s purchasing choice.
Table of content:
- The Brand Positioning Definition
- Why Is Brand Positioning Important?
- What Are the Brand Positioning Strategy Types?
- How Can You Craft a Brand Positioning Strategy?
- 10 Branding Tips on Amazon Positioning
- Successful Brand Positioning Examples
- Final Word
The Brand Positioning Definition
Successful brand positioning means customers perceive the brand as favorable, valuable, and trustworthy. The combination of these three factors becomes exclusive to your brand, and consequently, your clients keep a place in their minds for you.
It is essential since being ‘different’ from the competitors is not enough to beat the market. You can only position your brand when you do something outstanding. Everything else is just a comparison.
Why Is Brand Positioning Important?
You have a reputation whether you cultivate it or not, so you can build a brand positioning model to help you take control of your reputation and brand image.
Brand positioning lets a business stand out from the competition. Such differentiation allows a company to build brand awareness, communicate value, and justify pricing – all of which affect its bottom line.
However, all brand positioning strategies are different and have various goals. Based on the nature of your offering and business domain, your positioning and messaging will vary.
What Are the Brand Positioning Strategy Types?
When you think of how to position your brand in the market, you have multiple options to select from. You want to adjust your strategy to underline your product’s competitive edge and showcase your competitors’ weaknesses.
We will further review some popular positioning strategies that you may leverage to make your brand stand out in the marketplace.
Customer Service Positioning Strategy
It is likely that you have chosen a retailer, restaurant, or other service provider at least once thanks to their customer service.
Brands in verticals that are recognized for careless support win over by emphasizing their heart-warming customer service. Other businesses with particularly complex goods may highlight their comprehensive support systems to drive new clients.
The most substantial advantage of this strategy is that excellent customer service may help you justify a higher price. For instance, Apple’s items are costly but their support team is friendly and responsive.
These service interactions are also essential parts of the flywheel – an initially dissatisfied client can turn into a promoter if they get a positive customer experience.
Be careful with this strategy. If you advertise extraordinary customer service but do not deliver, you will spark negative feedback, callouts on social networks, and other complaints.
Convenience-Based Positioning Strategy
A convenience-based positioning strategy emphasizes why brand’s goods or service is easier to use than competitors’ products. Such convenience depends on factors such as locations, user-friendliness, wide availability, and omni-channel support.
Positioning your goods or service as the most convenient will automatically drive busy customers. And like the former strategy, it may also justify the higher price.
However, in some cases, offering convenience might be expensive. For example, if you are a B2B SaaS and you offer your item on several operating systems, you will likely require a robust, always available development team to fulfill a promise. These developers would need to be in touch to fix bugs and other problems for this strategy to be efficient, and their support expenses can get out of control.
The last thing you should check is if your goods are indeed easy to use. Besides, you may offer auto-refill or subscription programs to meet your buyers’ expectations of convenience.
Price-Based Positioning Strategy
A company leverages a price position strategy to introduce its product or service as the most reasonable option. When you position your item as the most affordable on the marketplace, you can create an extensive customer base since no one likes to spend more than necessary. Offering the lowest price is a sure way to attract potential buyers to convert.
However, this strategy has its risks and disadvantages, namely giving potential customers the impression of poorer quality goods.
You may also encounter financial problems that can hinder your brand positioning further. Price positioning might also provoke a price war, although it is mostly the case for particular industries like air travel.
Quality-Based Positioning Strategy
Businesses integrate this strategy when they want to highlight the quality of their goods – a quality that typically comes at a cost.
The product quality can be demonstrated by extraordinary craftsmanship, small batch manufacturing, premium quality materials, and even sustainable practices that make it more costly to produce. Service quality can be judged by good results, high ROI, and rave from customers.
Budget-conscious buyers might sidestep your company in favor of a more affordable option. However, it is where buyer personas come into play. The income levels and buying habits of your target audience will specify if focusing on quality is the relevant approach for your brand.
Differentiation Strategy
A differentiation positioning strategy is based on the uniqueness and exceptional qualities of a product compared to proven competitors. Tesla is an excellent example.
If you use this strategy, customers who value innovation will be attracted to your business or product. One possible limitation is that the public may be bewildered by the lack of usage history. If your product is brand-new, make sure you do the research and testing. Often, innovation-driven customers want to know how the new technology or product operates.
Social Media Positioning Strategy
This positioning type is distinctive because it focuses on a set of channels but not just a single tactic. And the channels your brand works with say as much as your messages.
Surprisingly, your brand does not need to be displayed on every platform. When adopting this strategy, the key is to select the platforms that your target market values the most. Factors to note when selecting a social media channel for your brand strategy are:
- Where do your prospects spend their free time?
- What do they spend their money on?
- Where do they browse for information and advice?
You can most likely find these three areas on the same social media channel, but they may also spread across multiple of them. As soon as you determine where your brand should appear, you may work out your messaging to satisfy the customers where they are.
Other Positioning Strategies
These are not just strategies. You can position your brand as the leader, the first of its kind, or the most well-known. And you can position your goods as a solution to a pressing issue.
Another approach is to compare your brand with competitors. This strategy means you directly call out your competitors in your advertising campaigns and emphasize the benefits of your product over theirs.
How Can You Craft a Brand Positioning Strategy?
Working out your brand positioning strategy implies delving into the details of your brand and finding out your strengths over others. Following steps will assist you with devising a brand positioning strategy that is unique to your brand.
Define Your Existing Brand Position
Begin with looking at your target audience and identifying who they are. Then, define your mission, values, and what sets you apart from other major players in the market. In the end, summarize your value proposition, current brand image, and brand voice.
Create a Brand Essence Chart
As soon as you determine your brand’s position in the market, it is time you delved deeper into what your brand means to clients. A brand essence chart can assist with streamlining those ideas in a way that is clear and concise.
The brand essence chart has seven components. These include attributes, advantages, personality, source of authority and support, what it says about the client, how it makes a client feel, and brand positioning.
Identify Your Competition
Once you analyze yourself, it is important to do the same with your competitors by doing a competitor analysis. You should know who you are dealing with, and this research will help you discover how you can improve your strategy to gain an advantage.
Do Your Competitor Research
After you have pointed out who your competitors are, it is best to do some in-depth research on them. You will need to analyze how your competitors are positioning their brands to compete. Simply put, your research should include:
- What goods or services they provide;
- What their pros and cons are;
- What marketing strategies they are adopting efficiently;
- What their position is in the market.
Determine Your Unique Value Proposition
You will most likely start to notice patterns when you do your competitor research. Also, you will see some brands that have common benefits and drawbacks. When you compare your goods or services to theirs, you may notice that one of their disadvantage is your advantage.
Build a Brand Positioning Framework
This framework takes a top-down approach, beginning with a big idea and ending with sample touchpoints that you may leverage in social media captions, blog post titles, and advertising copies.
Create your Positioning Statement
A positioning statement is a brief declaration that describes the unique approach of your business to your clients compared to your major competition. Before you create a positioning statement, you need to answer four questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What is the category of your goods or services?
- What is the most substantial advantage of your goods or services?
- What is the evidence for this benefit?
From there, you can create a simple yet convincing positioning statement.
Evaluate If Your Positioning Statement Is Efficient
Taking the time to position your brand to attract a specific client is just the beginning. As soon as you craft your positioning statement, it is time to test, experiment, and collect reviews from your clients on whether your positioning is fulfilling its purpose.
Establish an Emotional Connection with Prospects
Connecting with your prospective buyers on a human level before embarking on push sales builds trust and helps your potential clients have a better experience with your brand. For instance, at the initial stages, your sales reps should spend enough time learning about your potential customers and the issues they want to tackle with your product.
Strengthen Your Brand’s Distinctive Features During the Sales Process
With a robust brand position, the distinctive features of your business offering should be simple and easy to use. Make sure your potential customers understand what makes your brand stand out throughout the entire sales process.
Create Value
Your primary aim should be to help the potential client settle the issue or deal with a challenge they encounter. It would be best if your brand’s offer partly solved it.
Make Sure Your Customer Service Staff Embodies Your Brand
Customer service staff are the most valuable assets of your company. Potential customers should have an experience that incorporates your brand’s core values and corresponds to your company’s brand. For instance, if you use a light and fun approach to branding, consider including that language in your sales conversations. An overly serious or harsh tone is not in line with your company’s brand.
10 Branding Tips on Amazon Positioning
Succeeding in a competitive niche is not easy. For brand owners, building brand value to beat stiff competition is likely the primary business challenge. Let’s further review 10 tips on how to improve your Amazon brand positioning.
Tell Your Story to Connect with Your Audience
The most astonishing point about good stories is how they involuntarily drag us to the last word.
Good stories are never written after companies become the best. Instead, they were written in the process of becoming.
Your brand story will be written and developed gradually. And you should connect emotionally with your customers. Clients purchase goods due to emotional attachment. Therefore, proper and specific positioning of your brand and goods will make it much more difficult for third parties to fake your brand story.
Define Your Selling Point
Understand your target customer. Last but not least, your target customers should understand your brand and business. It is what drives your ads, presence of social networks, and helps you achieve clarity on how to brand and promote to your selling point.
Understanding your clients will return customer loyalty and help you define your selling point.
Listen to Your Clients
For better or worse, clients ‘tell it as it is.’ Customer reviews and buying patterns reflect how your brand is perceived. And undoubtedly today’s buying behavior is heavily influenced by reviews, so modern buyers affect significantly on the next prospective buyers.
Whether it is product development, customer experience, packaging, or tech support, customer input is a sure way to improve brand performance across multiple categories.
Less is More
Often brands want to expand their product range in the constant search of new buyers by giving them more choice. Nonetheless, it has the potential to lead to brand confusion and scare away customers.
If you have multiple similar products, it makes sense to look at poor-performing products to see if it might be better to remove slow turnover goods to focus on growing higher performing items. It can be applicable for goods with multiple options, sizes, or feature options.
Customer Experience is Crucial
One way to gauge customer experience is to leverage Amazon Account Performance metrics in the Seller Central to view factors like shipment and delivery times, responses to clients’ messages, all A-to-Z claims or some other negative feedback from the seller.
Also, consider thinking through the customer experience journey. Consider the experience from the moment they see your listing and decide to purchase, to the moment they receive the product, and to any email sequence from you not only asking for feedback, but also providing support for any problems.
Optimize Your Amazon Brand Content
You cannot overstate the significance of well-optimized content. As a rule, content optimization is discussed in terms of enhancing product visibility with Amazon’s A9 algorithm. However, it is also crucial to take a step back and view your brand’s overall representation through product listings.
Leverage Omni Channels
If you are selling your product on several platforms, leveraging information from multiple channels is integral to developing your brand. Access to customer data is limited on Amazon. However, if you have a website, you should have analytics collected from purchases and buyer accounts. And chances are, your buyer profile on Amazon is very similar to the buyer profile on your other channels.
On top of that, if any of your email or marketing campaigns through other channels have performed well, consider using elements of this in product listings or copies of email feedback series for your Amazon store.
Trademark Registration and Amazon Brand Registry
In a huge marketplace like Amazon, violations are bound to occur, and counterfeits, especially of your goods, will also appear quickly. Being proactive saves you from shutting down the market due to fakes or multiple legal battles, and you do not want to waste money on negative moments.
Being proactive implies enrolling your brand with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Your trademark is any primary indicator of your brand like design logos, slogans, text or standard marks, colors or packaging. The Amazon Brand Registry and other AI software may provide a “watchdog” system on Amazon regarding their registered trademarks.
Test Amazon DSP
You don’t need to sell on Amazon to take advantage of its rich data capabilities. Amazon DSP is the organization’s display advertising software solution. Those ads target buyers who purchase your or similar goods on Amazon. Clients are selected based on their behavior, context, lifestyle, and other factors.
Stay on Top of the Latest Trends on Amazon
Amazon offers several features and programs to help brands scale on Amazon and beyond. You have Amazon Moments, Amazon Attribution, Amazon Influencer Program, and many more ways to gain the trust of your buyers. Try beta testing options and see how your brand can benefit from Amazon positioning strategy.
Successful Brand Positioning Examples
Some of the most famous examples of brand positioning have also led to famous advertising campaigns.
- AVIS vs Hertz
Avis lived by the motto “We try harder” for 50 years. They enjoyed being a challenger brand, which made them try their best. This positioning helped Avis rise despite being the second largest car rental company. The brand stood out in the market through thoughtful partnerships and brand placement.
- McDonalds vs. Burger King
The competition between McDonalds and Burger King is a fantastic example of two styles of brand positioning.
Burger King is a brand challenger with a brash tone of voice and subtle gimmicks aimed at McDonalds and their products. Their messages have won fans, awards, and customers around the world.
McDonalds is known to be the leader in its category and refuses to respond to Burger King because once they acknowledge them, they do not distance themselves from their competitors.
- Apple vs Microsoft
Apple personalized its product offering with an ad campaign called “I’m a Mac”. By positioning the Mac as newer, cooler, and more casual than the old PC, Apple was able to position its product and brand as more modern, trendy, and user-friendly than Microsoft.
Final Word
Whether you are creating a new product, updating your product line, or improving the way your customers perceive your brand, you should definitely redefine your brand. A well-positioned brand can influence every aspect of your business, from employees to customers.
Seize every opportunity you get, learn about your customers’ interests, showcase your brand, and stand out from the competition. Feel free to contact us for help in running A/B tests, impressing your customers, and including Amazon in your overall marketing mix.
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