Your brand positioning is the unique, relevant, credible and sustainable position you own in the market. It ensures your clients and prospects can clearly tell your brand apart from your competitors. It specifies and expresses how your brand is unique and compelling, providing a reason to choose your brand over others. It also encapsulates your organisation’s purpose, or reason for being, that goes beyond just making money. Brand positioning is also sometimes called brand essence because it’s the essential nature of your brand – its reason for being.
Now, if we were to collectively look back over the course of the past 12 months, it is likely you have adjusted your internal and external processes to meet the expectations of the dramatically changed landscape. For many B2B brands, whether a product or service-based business, this was a largely unavoidable consequence of pivoting to meet the market landscape.
These adjustments were likely made around the periphery, not fundamental changes, but they may have impacted your positioning and the unique and sustainable brand essence that you had been leaning on before. But as we begin to return to more positive economic conditions, its important to reflect and measure the changes made internally and decide what is important to keep going forward, especially as it relates to your brand positioning.
Evaluating and testing the strength of your positioning might seem like a daunting proposition, but rest assured, we’re not necessarily suggesting that your current positioning is fundamentally broken. It’s probably more likely that it needs refinement or clarification so that you can be more focused and more importantly, meaningfully different.
Again, a strong positioning is the source of power in your ability to differentiate yourselves from the competition. Successfully positioned businesses in the B2B landscape find everything easier (including closing the deal) because:
It is important to understand that an accurately defined positioning is a brand strategy and is not a tag line. An effective positioning strategy will drive growth, align your team and provide the entire organisation with strategic direction.
Although the past 12 months of business may have been outliers, it is important to consider your recent strategic decision making and evaluate whether these choices still align with your positioning.
When evaluating your current brand positioning, the first step is to ask your senior management team the following questions:
Asking these questions will not only start the process of evaluating your brand positioning, it will also start to embed its importance to the strategic direction, growth and success of your business.
Make no mistake, these are challenging questions to answer and a great many brands that are well established would find it difficult to evaluate these. Prioritising a specific area or component may help in the short term to realign your positioning to reflect your business intent, especially through a period of significant change in economic conditions.
Positioning a brand is complicated. It is an art and a science and is not likely to be well understood or appreciated by operationally oriented people in your organisation. It is however critical to your organisation’s long-term success and again comes down to executing across the entire business.
At BrandMatters, we are experts managing complex brand conundrums and building unique brand positioning statements that can measure up against the dynamic market we find ourselves in. If your organisation needs assistance in the evaluation of your existing and future brand positioning, get in touch with the BrandMatters team here.
