What is Brand Positioning?
The word โBrandingโ is heavily used currently to define โPositioningโ, but in reality, the prior has little impact on the latter, that being said, luckily it is steerable if proper planning and practical assessments are put in to create the desired brand positioning.
Decoding Brand Positioning & the Impact it provides
Most people have different misconceptions about brand positioning and what it needs to achieve, here we clear them all up in a simple concept of mapping. Brand, being the face, and positioning is whatโs its opinion, how penetrable the opinion is? and how it distinguishes from the market? makes for the likes; approval from the potential audience. As opinions shape our personality perceived by people around us, likewise is the case with brands and seen by consumers lens through a perpetually mapped position. Resonating with customers is only achievable by identifying the pre-checklist concept of STP (Segmenting, Targeting, and Positioning) proposed by Philip Kotler.
What are the Different Strategies Used when Positioning your Brand?
We put forward some of the most used brand positioning strategies, with examples of giant multi-national brands that utilize these to perfection in terms of relevancy, so it might be smart to see which one suits your brand better.
Expressing and influencing has become convenient yet challenging in the age of digital media, platforms like Fb or Google Ads have given birth to digitally positioned brands, one-upping their incumbents.
Celebrities have their moods in the world of glamour, whether itโs through traditional means or virality, different brands resonate with them to shape their position.
Brands have always something in common with another brand, cobranding is a popular strategy whereby two distinct entities join hands in a venture, hence creating this exchange of positioning as well as inducing trustworthiness.
As litigations and alertness concerning Corporate Social Responsibility, tighten every day, the consumer wishes to feel responsibly good about themselves when choosing a brand, this boosts consumer loyalty and cements the position of a brand.
Brand Positioning or Branding, Whatโs the difference?
A lot of blurred lines between these two terms, much of it is usually because theyโre commonly used interchangeably in the Bizz but now we try to make your life easier by explaining them separately. From color pallets to Typography, branding is the initial layer of the onion but positioning is the process of marketing, promoting, managing, and influencing to create recognition and trust.
Steps to Producing a Perfect Brand Positioning Statement
Here we discuss the entire step by step process of constructing an immaculate Brand Positioning statement to be the most resource efficient and minimize any potential risks.
The first step is to capture your perpetual map of the consumer end and segregate it by providing the very uniqueness which is exclusive to your brand, this is the part where you construct the very means whether itโs through social media or mainstream TV to aware and familiarize your first impression sort of assumption in the mind of your potential audience.
Itโs the process of market analysis, using different models like SWOT & PESTLE, to compare with data and determine the potential of our brand positioning which is achieved by the prerequisite research conducted in this step to determine the best spot for your brand in the current market according to the past track record or response.
According to the analysis and conceptualized position we select the most relevant as well as relatable brand positioning strategies for our sector of business, to go forward within our quest in creating a suitable brand positioning statement.
Things get interesting, as this is where we make fine-tune our strategies in terms of their productiveness and longevity of each strategy based on the initial experimentation of them, especially when comparing them to the other ones to see which is the nearest in line with our goals.
Putting the theories into practice to seek fruitful results is our goal here while still maintaining cohesiveness amongst them to run this step like a well-oiled machine rather than mistiming everything.
This is where everything is given its role, source, and practicality within the due time limit, and predictions are provided in this step, it is probably the easiest yet crucial step, considering all the required work already done in the previous five steps.
Implementing and measuring progress, then selecting either singular or multiple brand strategy, which means if weโre going adopt the classic one brand strategy or the dynamic multi-brand setup.
Finally, we evaluate and measure our results, their accuracy and make the crucial decisions to reduce our shortcomings, if any.
Digital Marketing and its Relationship with Brand Positioning
Now we know as a lot of things nowadays, from groceries to a brand-new flat-screen TV is now a day ordered through the means of digital marketing done by different companies on a lot of social media channels to meet their consumer needs more precisely and quickly
Similarly, the virtual world has actions and reactions on which brand positioning is massively influenced these days but what are these so much important actions that organizations need to ensure they do, sere we discuss them in detail.
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Every brand has a section of the audience that retains successfully, they seem to be satisfied with the product or service theyโve experienced, the notion of grouping these loyal customers so they can digital village of similar purpose, then becomes an elusive sort of a setting, where thereโs a sense of privilege amongst the members and rather increases the attachment towards the position of the brand so much so as a self-proclaimed stakeholder.
This method is super helpful, especially in an industry thatโs been powerfully saturated, this is where advertisements are directly or indirectly targeted at the potential competitors to upraise assumptions of your brand positioning from both ends of the consumer base, a nice example of this would be the not so long ago tussle between Lipton and Tapal, two top tea brands in Pakistan, where they kept claiming that their tea tastes more strong and flavourful hard-hitting rather than bland, in a region where most of the customers like their tea super strong, this was a necessary brand positioning setup and an initial jab that Lipton (a foreign tea brand) took against Tapal (local darling).
With the help of social media, a brand can easily position itself in a top tier, mid-tier, or lower tier of the price spectrum by connecting with its customer base, this is usually seen between exemplary slogans of โqualityโ or โvalueโ.
This is the standout and relatable marketing technique used by many upstarts, where a brand connects with their consumers in a highly accessible way usually done region-specific for example Careem (ride ride-hailing) offered hair cutting services near a religious holiday known as Eid to solve the rush hour problem for their customers.
This also relates to the Cut on a digital platform so it intercedes quickly, the prime example of this would the Seaview branch of McDonaldโs, which set up a beach cleaning drive with a promotional video on their Facebook page to promote the cleanliness of the area which was of great concern as well as portraying a responsible image of themselves.
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