The brand positioning is the story that you tell your consumers. That story needs to have a point of difference, something to differentiate you from your competitor. A product truth, something that you can credibly say about your product. Also a tone of voice, the personality you want to project to the consumer.
Depending on your agency of choice, there may be a variety of ‘trademarked’ tools (ask them for the trademark documentation 😉) and processes in order to get you to brand Valhalla. These usually consist of levels of varying degrees of complexity and bamboozlement with phrases such as ‘retail safaris’ and ‘brand equity analysis audits’. We think it doesn’t need to be that complicated.
What is a brand?
A brand is what your customers perceive about you and how you make them feel. Brand positioning is about developing a unique perception about your brand in the mind of the consumer.
In order to discover the opportunity, it is important to consider:
1) What your product does well (credibility)
2) How you can be different and unique from the competition (differentiation)
3) Research and analyse consumer trends to understand what your consumer needs (relevance)
Be credible.
We begin by identifying the credibility of your brand. This is about specifying what your brand can do well. Do you have centuries of heritage linked to your brand or product, or a bespoke process of creating your products? What makes your product the best in its category? Is there something hidden away in the production process or recipe that can be extracted and highlighted to create credibility?
Be Relevant.
Secondly, we look at the relevance of your brand to your target consumer or identify new ones. This ensures that consumers will understand the benefit and what specific ‘needs’ it answers for them. This stage is all about looking in detail at the consumer. Identifying the target audience and exploring trends to create insights in order to discover consumer needs and behaviour. Here we utilise insights and trends from established research houses.
Differentiate.
We can then explore how well your competitors meet these needs and discover any gaps in how well the various need states are met so as to ensure differentiation. This is important, when we carry out a competitive mapping exercise to help identify any gaps in the market and ensure that you can hold a unique position to your competition.
All of this comes together to identify the unique opportunities for the brand. Using all this information we craft ownable and unique brand propositions, which build the ‘foundations’ of the brand. These detail the brand essence, core belief, product truth and tone of voice.
This is an important basis to not only guide the design, but also everything regarding the brand moving forward.
You can see some examples of this here. There are some more expanded examples on our Behance credentials page.