Positioning a Brand in the Marketplace
May 6th, 2008 by S.A. Habib
How do you position a brand? How do you write a positioning line? How do you decide what your brand means to consumers? Well, it’s really quite simple. You don’t.
You don’t get to tell consumers where your brand is positioned, what they find acceptable for your brand extensions, what promise you should make to your customer. You don’t get to tell them what you want them to believe. Instead, they’ll tell you.
Your brand position should be a promise that you can reliably deliver to your customer. And no more. Because they won’t believe you anyway and will walk away from your brand when they are disappointed. Of course we want our customers to believe more about us than just the average, mundane story of what’s real but they will appreciate your honesty and your ability to do well what was promised.
We also want to write positioning lines that meet the expectations of what our customers aspire to be. Those lofty goals that we all dream about getting to some day. Are they really real and won’t you be disappointed after you don’t attain those unreachable goals?
“Be thin again like you were in your teens”
“Lose 10 pounds in two months by healthy eating”
We all want to believe the first line but know and believe we can achieve the second. A company that helps me do the second is one I can live with and stay with. I know the first is only for the supermarket tabloids.
We helped H. G. Hill, a 100-year-old grocery chain in Nashville, position themselves for their second century. They had nice, medium-sized stores in all the best locations but were unable to compete with the new, shiny mega-chains promising everything they were unable to deliver. The big stores had better prices, more merchandise, flower shops, lawn mowers and sushi. They were big and BIG and BIGGER. And they were a real pain to get in and out of when you just wanted to shop for groceries. So we did some quick research and found that people, especially their older, loyal, longtime customers, loved the fact that you were in and out in much less time, people carried your groceries to the car and used paper shopping bags with handles.
We came up with a simple promise, one that Hill’s could deliver on and one that resonated with our customers: “It’s just easier.”
Positioning a company can sometimes be just that easy too. Let the customer tell you.
—————About the author: S. A. Habib, founder of Locomotion Creative in Nashville, Tennessee, a.k.a. The Big Brown Man. He’s big and brown, thus the title. He’s been doing smart advertising/marketing thinking for smarter clients for 30+ years. Find your center!
