Brand Positioning Exercise

She votes for the Liberal party and she’s in favour of public transportation. She has an iPod, she has an iPhone, and she has an iMac. The evolutionary stages of marketing will be immensely helpful when you do a context assessment. You know now that each country or region may be at a different stage and even within the https://wave-accounting.net/ same country, some industries and categories may be ahead of the other. Your analysis and research can be as deep as you want them to be. Big companies spend a bulk of market research to get as much detailed and correct insights as possible. However, market research doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg to be workable.

• The goal of the brand positioning exercise is to help your company stand out from the competition and gain a loyal customer base.
• In majority of the cases, the emotional positioning is more critical for a brand’s survival and growth.
• Below you’ll find the exact steps from April’s book as we worked through them.
• Keeping in mind that when you cover a large segment with low margins, that ends up providing the company with a sound total profit, ultimately.
• It’s why people believe one source and distrust another.
• Sometimes, brands choose to have a basic as a differentiator.

It is a statement of what they will get in return for their purchase, such as quality or exceptional customer service. These seem very similar and are often confused with each other. Value propositions set the foundation of a company’s offering. Value propositions are the link between your brand promise and how you provide customers with the products, solutions, and services they want at a fair price point. This type of positioning emphasizes the indirect benefits the prospective customer will get from using the product — benefits that satisfy emotional needs. The emotional satisfaction customers receive from using your product can be self-esteem or self-expression. This strategy aims to build an emotional connection with the customer.

Exercise 3: Brand Values

In biological evolution, gene mutations or irregularities are responsible for the step-changes in development. Before the workshop concludes, it’s best to go back to the beginning and recap everything that’s been discussed. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and cements the decisions that were made. Potential gaps and advantages are revealed by visualizing a client’s market position versus its competitors. Simply ask the participants to trim the keywords they selected in the discovery survey from 20 down to four. Those that make the cut are used to refine the visual direction of the brand.

• In this activity, there is a key pricing decision to be made in the two situations presented.
• I joined a startup early in my career that was founded by a team of database experts.
• If you’re doubting this, think about when you were a kid, when a classmate made some outrageous claim.
• In this step you want to capture what value your unique attributes could enable for customers.
• Now you know what makes you awesome and who cares the most.

⭐ If your audience repeated back these perceptions to you in a year, you believe you’d be wildly successful as a company. 📚 When you think about your most successful content or your best content ideas, they ladder up to these perceptions already. For each perception, list content that you think will help most in driving that perception.

In my database example we chose the database market as our frame of reference and that proved to be a terrible choice. It put us in direct competition with Oracle, a large and very established company. Our core value “fast analysis of a very large amount of data” wasn’t what most companies were buying databases for. Our best target customers had already given up on trying to solve their problems with traditional databases. Using “database” as our market frame of reference only left our prospects confused and unsure of our value.

Position

Every brand touchpoint has a critical role to play, which includes promotions, price, packaging, customer service, retail experience and post purchase experience. A brand positioning map consists of attributes that are important to your target audience. To do mapping right, it's best to have multiple versions of the map based on different sets of attributes. By placing your brand and your competitors on your map, you'll see who's more competitive in a certain area over the rest.

Try and connect it to your product—within the context of the story you’ve portrayed, why would they pick your product, and how it fits into their life. Write down what the story of their life in five bullet points. Include how your product or service connects to their life. Cashapp is most focused on getting money from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

Positioning Strategy #10 Emotional Messaging

In this step you should list everything you have that makes your offering unique. Don’t get too hung up on the value those features deliver — in this step we just want to list things that you have that nobody else has, regardless of who cares about it. For example I worked on a product ages ago at IBM where our key differentiator was that our product was highly customizable.

Additionally, it’s a great way to find out where opportunities lie in the existing market. Next, you’re going to look at the third circle which represents your competitors. The common intersection between the three circles is basically the points of parity. This is what your brand has in common with competition which also satisfies the needs and wishes your customers have.

Brand Strategy & Visual Identity For Layton Preparatory School In Nigeria

Product positioning is a marketing strategy that involves identifying and communicating how your brand’s products or services are different from those of competitors. A brand positioning map puts brands on quadrants based on two attributes. Identify the two most important characteristics to include in the positioning map based on industry knowledge and previous research. Now choose the major players in brand positioning exercise your category and score each competitor against the two attributes. Brands should have an identity that defines them in the minds of their customers. This unique space is called “brand positioning.” One way to do this is by looking at what your competitors are doing and finding a spot on the spectrum to differentiate yourself. The positioning offers contextual information about other market options.

It points you in the right direction for all strategic and tactical marketing and sales activities. Your positioning is the backbone holding together your brand messaging. You simply can’t connect with your audience and create content that converts unless you know who you’re speaking to and what makes you different. Now, since we’ve created the overall target audience profile, now let’s analyze your marketplace to find your differentiator and write your positioning statement.

When not creating content or breakfast food, he likes to mountain bike, play music, and travel with his family. Marketing is about driving profitable customer action, but the best way to do this isn’t by soullessly pushing products and services at anyone with a pulse. It’s about tapping into the powerful reason why you truly love helping your audience.

At this stage don’t worry too much about which customers might perceive this value. Like in the previous step, keep an open mind and focus on the value your unique features might have to any audience. In this step you want to capture what value your unique attributes could enable for customers.

Creative Services

The result will be a list of attributes ranking in order of importance. The next step will be to take the most relevant attributes you have identified and as the participants to evaluate the different brands available in the market according to those attributes. Indirect competitors are the businesses that sell a product or service in the same category as you, but it’s different enough to act as a substitute for your product or service.

• For additional exercises and to learn how to use them with your brand, go to our complete Jobs to Be Done resource section.
• For mature products, it may not be the market that you have always positioned yourself in.
• We also have to understand the challenges they face, when those challenges come about and the state of mind they’re in as they face them.
• Brands that are born when the market is still at this stage have the advantage of having the time to develop when the market is not yet cluttered.
• The mega-retailer focused less on quality-based and customer service positioning — two of the areas Target adopted.
• To create one, think about the tangible and symbolic things you’d like to be known for.

Stripe is building for developers—they have the best documentation, community, and support of any developer product. Great Ideas for Teaching Marketing has been developed as an alternative to long case studies. Hundreds of activities, discussion exercises and tools are provided on this website, with new content added regularly. Once you’ve gone through each item on your list, you’re done. You can kick back and enjoy margaritas for the rest of your career. Narrow your focus as much as possible and resolve any issues that arise between the cards you’ve chosen.

A change in positioning from “email automation” to “customer messaging,” as well as calling out our primary competitors by name, had a magic effect. Now potential customers instantly grasp what we do, and clearly appreciate the value of our tool. Please note, while Emily was at Asana for 4 years, she didn’t know how to make perceptions when she started building the marketing team in 2013, and these are not real. You can even invite them to brainstorm new ways to deliver on the brand promise.

A simple barometer to judge uniqueness is everything the competitors don’t have. However, herein lies the catch – the unique features doesn’t necessarily have to be a plus; it could also be a minus! For instance, if you think the user interface of your product is ‘complex’ in comparison to other, more elegantly packaged solutions, don’t hesitate. On top of making the product’s value immediately apparent, it also helps in evading the ‘how are you better than so-and-so competitor’ question. Most companies around the world have faced the challenge of losslessly translating their idea of their products over to their customers. As a performance marketing agency, this is even more of a steep hill to climb. How many, after all, have we all thrown our hands up in the air, looked around the table with worn-out eyes, and asked the question, “Wait, what is this product for again?

Elements Of Value:

The unique greatness of our offerings often feels obvious to folk inside the company. We have a ready answer to the question — “Why should a customer choose us? ” Yet, if we ask customers the same question, they often find the differences between what we offer and what other companies offer hard to understand. This problem happens because we do not put our unique strengths at the centre of our positioning. Instead we position ourselves in the market we started in, even after our products have evolved well beyond that.

Fill out the form to access 10 free positioning templates. The convenience may also be because of the product’s design. For example, Swiffer advertises its WetJet product as a convenient alternative to a traditional mop because of its disposable mopping pads. Join 5,000+ customers using Drift to connect with their customers NOW. Positioning your brand is about solving your ideal customer’s problem. Messaging, positioning, and copywriting insights, straight to your inbox, every couple of weeks.

The problems with many positioning statements range from boastful ambition, to lack of realism, and inflexibility. Not coincidentally, the key to a strong positioning statement is balancing ambition with realism, and keeping a healthy degree of flexibility.