Brand awareness, brand loyalty, brand community. Cementing your brand in the minds of the target audience is on the agenda of any successful company. Creating top-notch products and designing a stellar marketing strategy isn't sufficient. To become a household name, you need brand positioning.

Positioning your brand involves implementing a number of tactics to ensure your company's implementation in the audience's thinking. Besides driving retention, this tactic encourages word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) and stimulates growth.

What is brand positioning?

Brand positioning is integrating your business into the customer's mind by emphasizing its unique advantages over the competition. With the right approach, this tactic can associate your brand with a certain category of products, turning it into the most obvious choice for the target audience.

How brand positioning drives retention and growth

A brand is more than a name and a logo. However, a logo plays an important role in brand positioning, hence it has to be unique and related to your brand. Access an online logo maker to have an unlimited predesigned logo that offers a collection of experiences your audience has with your business. By positioning your brand in the right manner, you can achieve a variety of marketing and business goals, including retention and growth.

Brand positioning helps your audience associate your brand with positive experiences in their lives. It nurtures the emotional connection with your existing customers, cementing the belief that your product is the best for their purposes. This increases customer lifetime value (LTV) and encourages WOMM.

By distinguishing your brand from the competition in a meaningful way, you control how the market sees you. This allows you to position your products and services in the most attractive manner for the market, thus stimulating sustained growth.

Other ways brand positioning can benefit your business include:

• Magnified messaging
• Market differentiation
• Proof of value
• Customer engagement
• Improved pricing strategies
• Higher relevance in the niche
• Effective decision-making
• Improved marketing strategy

Overall, by helping your brand take a distinctive place in the customer's mind, you're standing out in the market and gain numerous opportunities for growth, retention, and improvement.

5 most common types of brand positioning strategies

With several brand positioning strategies available, each business needs to choose the best one for its needs. The ideal strategy fits your business goals, delivers quick results, and gives you access to all brand positioning benefits.  

1. Quality-based positioning strategy

Implementing this strategy involves emphasizing the quality of your products and services. You can back the quality of your offering by demonstrating sustainable practices, proving a high ROI, and providing testimonials.

This strategy often involves positioning your product as a luxury offering that your audience ends up desiring regardless of the price.

2. Price-based positioning strategy

A price-positioning strategy juggles the actual quality of your product and the customers' perception of its quality. By lowering the price, you can attract a wider audience or narrow it down by decreasing the cost.

By leveraging the low pricing strategy, you can gain immediate benefits but risk implementing a perception of low quality and starting a price battle with the competition. With a high-price strategy, you can deliver a message of quality and focus on luxury. However, such an approach can be time-consuming.

According to ProfitWell's study using Price Intelligently software, consumers with a positive perception of a brand had a 20% to 35% higher WTP (Willingness to Pay) than the overall medium. Meanwhile, consumers with a negative perception had a 15% to 20% lower WTP.

3. Differentiation strategy

This strategy involves leveraging your product's uniqueness and innovation potential. This can make your products and services attractive to the target audience that values innovations. However, some of these potential clients could be put off by the lack of positive history of use.

Doing things differently than the competition is an excellent way to cement your brand in the customer's mind. However, it requires highly creative and conceptual thinking as well as top-notch execution.  

4. Convenience-based strategy

The role of convenience in today's busy world is growing exponentially. By proving that your offer is more convenient than the competition's,  you can steal market share quickly.

The biggest challenge of this strategy is its cost. Banking on convenience involves substantial investments. One product can be both convenient and inconvenient for two or more customer segments. Making it convenient for all groups can be costly.

5. Competitor-based strategy

This strategy involves demonstrating your brand's superiority over other players on the market. To implement this strategy, you would need to study the competition and attack it in a highly creative and not-too-aggressive manner.

Such an approach requires you to establish supremacy over other products without positioning your business as the offender.

Crafting a powerful brand positioning strategy

By designing a powerful brand positioning strategy, you can take advantage of the related benefits. The main objectives of these strategies involve proving uniqueness, demonstrating relevancy, establishing credibility, maintaining consistency, and providing a competitive edge.

Define your current brand positioning

Unless you are starting from scratch, you're already doing some brand positioning work. You need to identify the direction your current marketing efforts are taking and evaluate their efficiency in relation to new goals.

Once you figure out which strategy you're working on right now, you can make an educated decision about where to go next.

Discover & analyze your competitors

Since brand positioning involves differentiating your business from the competition, you need to run an in-depth competitor analysis.

• Identify your competitors by conducting market research, exploring online communities, asking for customer feedback, using Google Search, Maps, and Trends.
• Analyze the competition by studying their products and services and running a SWOT analysis.

Knowing what you're up against allows you to identify the direction and type of your brand positioning strategy.

Identify your unique value proposition

While you already have a value proposition, it may not be sufficient to suit your chosen brand positioning strategy. Figure out what makes your brand unique when compared to the competition.

To identify uniqueness, you may want to compare your competition's and your brand's SWOT analysis. If you see a weakness pattern in the competitor's offering, you can turn it into your strength.

Draw a brand positioning map

Mapping your brand can help you understand which steps you have to take to achieve brand positioning goals. To map a brand, you need to plot it against axes, where each axis is a quality that drives your brand selection.

By putting the competition on the same axes, you can gain insight into what your unique value proposition may be. A brand positioning map can also help you understand how your brand's position aligns with the company's strengths and capabilities.

Write an effective brand positioning statement

A positioning statement describes your brand's unique value to your customer. It should include such aspects as:

• Target audience
• Product/service category
• Unique product value
• Proof of value

To create a statement, you can rely on the competitor analysis and a unique value proposition as well as your brand's mission and vision statements.

Reinforce differentiation qualities during the sales process

During the sales process, you need to let the consumer see and understand the unique value of your brand. It's the first step toward cementing your business in their minds positively. This can help your brand stand out while creating a foundation for retention opportunities.

3 examples of great brand positioning

While many companies strive for top-notch brand positioning, only a few manage to do it. Here are a few examples of brands that managed to become household names that drive retention and growth.

Example #1 – Tesla

Tesla is an excellent example of quality-based and market differentiation brand positioning. The company creates innovative luxury products that attract high-paying customers who don't worry about the price.

Continuous innovation, trend-setting practices, a prestige pricing strategy, and high quality keep Tesla's niche market intact, thus driving stellar retention and creating growth opportunities.

Example #2 – Nike

Nike took advantage of the competition-based brand positioning and mixed it with a differentiating strategy. By implementing psychological segmentation, the brand emphasized a specific sport-related lifestyle thanks to working with renowned athletes and promoting quality.

Nike positioned itself as a premium brand for a specific niche, attracting clients who are already wired for loyalty thanks to a strong influencer campaign. This keeps retention levels high while creating new growth opportunities. A strong strategy helped the brand go from selling running shoes to athletic attire and equipment.

Example #3 – HubSpot

By implementing a customer-focused and convenience-based brand positioning strategy, HubSpot managed to grow from an email marketing tool into one of the biggest online marketing tools and resources worldwide.

While entering the online marketing arena early played a big role, the convenience the company created for the audience put the brand well ahead of the competition.

Brand positioning FAQs

What is the difference between a brand positioning statement vs tagline?

A brand positioning statement is an internal tool that helps you build a successful brand positioning strategy. A tagline is an external marketing tool that is aimed at catching your audience's attention.

What are the elements of a brand positioning framework?

The key elements of a brand positioning framework include awareness, value proposition, differentiation, and emotional connection.

What should be included in a brand positioning statement?

A successful brand positioning statement should include target audience differentiation statements, proof points, and value propositions. An example looks like this: For (target audience), (brand name) is the (differentiation statement) that delivers (value proposition) because (brand name) is (proof points).

What are the 4 C's of positioning?

The 4 C's of positioning are: Clarity, Consistency, Credibility, and Competitiveness. They demonstrate that the positioning strategy has to be transparent (Clarity) to the target audience, be consistent (Consistency) through all aspects of products, be in line with the company's vision and mission (Credibility), and has to be different from the competition's (Competitiveness).