Chapter 5

Profiling and Positioning Your Brand

In This Chapter

Determining your brand’s point of distinction

Researching your customers and your competition

Finding the available, meaningful market position only your brand can fill

Depending on who’s counting, consumers face up to 5,000 promotional messages every single day. And guess what? They ignore most of them. They tune out anything that doesn’t appeal to their interests, wants, and needs. And they brush off messages for products and services they already buy from trusted brands — unless the offering being presented is one that seems to be meaningfully and attractively different and better than their current choice. And that’s the whole point of finding and protecting a position for your brand.

It’s your job as a brand-builder to figure out who is likely to want or need what you offer, how to reach that person, and what to say to motivate interest, purchases, and loyalty. If you have ESP, you can divine the answers. If you’re like everyone else, this chapter helps you take the steps and do the research to learn what you need to know about your customer description, target market, purchase motivations, preferred purchase channels and experiences, competitive alternatives, and why people would choose your brand over all others.

In the process, you’ll find your market niche — the select group of customers who share unique interests and needs that your offering alone can address. After you find your market niche, presto! You’ve discovered the open position for your brand in the crowded marketplace around you.

Branding expert Walter Landor, the creative and strategic force behind many of the most famous brands you know today, is widely quoted for his assertion that “Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.” This chapter helps you find an available space to create your brand in the minds of your customers.

The Marketing Muscle of Positioning

You can’t force a square peg into a round hole. You also can’t force a square peg into a space already filled by another square peg, right? From your puzzle-playing days, you know you need to find an open space and fill it with a piece that matches up perfectly. When you do, the piece drops securely in place. The same principle applies to the human mind. You can’t fit an idea into a customer’s mind unless it matches up with an interest, need, or desire that isn’t already fulfilled by another idea or offering.

Positioning involves finding an unaddressed interest, want, or need in customer minds and filling it with your distinctive and ideally suited offering.

Successful positioning approaches

In some ways, branding is like a construction project. Before you can build, you have to select and prepare the site. That’s the role positioning plays in the branding process. (Flip back to Chapter 2 for an illustration of the branding process and a description of how positioning paves the way for your brand definition and identity.)

Following are the most common positioning approaches.

Fulfill an unaddressed interest or need

This is the find-an-itch-and-scratch-it approach. You study your customer, see a need or desire that isn’t addressed by an existing product or service, and move quickly to beat competitors to the solution. The result? An offering that slides into an available slot in the customer’s mind — as long as you seize the position before anyone else stakes claim to it.

WeightWatchers is a great example of fulfilling an unaddressed need. Founder Jean Nidetch turned a conversation about how to lose weight into a brand that’s now 50 years old and known around the world for its weekly support group meetings that help customers shed weight and keep it off.

Challenge the status quo

Challengers take on market leaders and business category norms with innovations ranging from new forms of distribution to innovative pricing and promotion approaches. By presenting themselves as torchbearers for the next generation, challengers disrupt norms and win interest and followings that result in marketplace upheaval and, sometimes, market leadership.

EasyJet, now the United Kingdom’s largest air carrier, set out to revolutionize air travel by announcing flights priced “as cheap as a pair of jeans” and catering to cost-conscious, plan-it-yourself travelers with self-proclaimed “cheap flights” on “the web’s favorite airline.” Another example: Airbnb now fills more room nights annually than all Hilton Hotels combined, without owning a single room of their own. Instead, by playing matchmaker between travelers and owners of spare rooms, boats, and even castles, Airbnb has become a prime player in what’s called the “sharing economy — and racked up a brand value estimated at $10 billion-plus dollars along the way.

Specialize to serve a new market niche

Rather than trying to compete with the pack, specialty brands serve a narrow segment of the market — winning interest and followings within a market niche and sometimes achieving market leadership as a result.

SPANX is a good example of a specialty brand. In owner Sara Blakely’s own words, “My footless pantyhose idea evolved into a super niche product category: new-and-improved and comfortable footless pantyhose with super control and body-shaping support.”

Transform an established solution

This is the evolutionary approach to positioning. Examples include the transformation of computers into laptops into tablets, cars into electronic or hybrid or self-driving machines, American coffee shops into upscale European-style cafés, and — on the horizon — package deliveries into doorstep-drops by unmanned drones, to name a few.

Creating a transformational solution takes enormous insight into popular culture and plenty of marketing power to get the word out. It also takes plenty of money — both to create innovations and to promote new products with such velocity and strength that you can lay claim to the first position in the category before competitors have time to leap into the arena.

Introduce an all-new solution

Product discoveries come from innovators who see the same problems everyone else sees — or who notice problems no one else notices — and who move on their insights to come up with never-before seen solutions. Some solutions involve altogether new inventions; others transform existing solutions into new product categories.

Recent examples of innovations include fitness bracelets, cloud computing, language-learning apps, and the Segway Human Transporter, introduced to “transform a person into an empowered pedestrian.” Older examples include car radios, TV dinners, and Saran wrap.

Gaining awareness and adoption for a brand-new idea requires patience and a massive marketing investment. After all, you’re not just introducing a product, you’re introducing a whole new paradigm for which the market may or may not be ready. Prepare your nerves — and budget — in advance.

Major positioning strategies

The key to your market position is your point of difference, also called your point of distinction or your unique selling proposition (USP).

The following sections in this chapter guide your assessment of your unique distinctions and the marketplace position you want to hold and defend in your customer’s minds. To get your thinking started, take a look at Figure 5-1. It illustrates major brands that follow each of the major positioning strategies.

Positioning around marketplace opportunities

The only way to keep your brand alive and healthy — that is, to maintain its position in consumer minds — is to keep it attuned to the wants, needs, interests, and opportunities that exist in the world not just of today but of tomorrow.

Your brand is a player in pop culture, so the more you tune in to the changing world around you, the more your brand will remain current and relevant.

To keep your brand on top of marketplace opportunities, you don’t have to be a seer who forecasts the future. You just have to look beyond the known environments of your business and social arena for new ideas, needs, products, fads, trends, and market frenzies. To put yourself in position to seize opportunities, follow these suggestions:

• Stay close to your customers. Only by listening and observing can you know what they want but can’t find or what new needs they’re dealing with that marketers haven’t yet addressed.
• Get close to noncustomers. It sounds counterintuitive, but you need to keep an eye on what people who are the polar opposite of your customers are into. Urban youth certainly didn’t fit the customer profile of high-end fashion boutiques, but it didn’t take long for the grunge look to affect haute couture anyway. To keep your brand current, widen your marketplace view. For example, tune in to what teenager are talking about even if your market is comprised of senior citizens. Read technology publications even if your business arena is in the professional services.
• Be ready to update and align your brand and its position to adapt to the changing environment. Check out Chapter 17 for help with this task.
• At all times, watch for unmet needs and unserved market segments. A branding success opportunity may await you if you can fill a hole in the market. See the sidebar on DOS For Dummies for a prime example.

Finding Your Position: The Birthplace of Your Brand

Without clearly defined and communicated distinctions, people basically view products (or people) as commodities chosen simply for their availability or lowest prices — and easily passed over for any similar offering that seems to fill the same bill with less effort or expense. (See Chapter 2 for plenty of information on commodities.)

By staking your market position based on a unique and valued point of difference, you find the open space in consumer minds where you can build your brand, and you also avoid the one-is-as-good-as-another trap.

The next sections help you find the positive point of difference that you’ll reinforce every time people encounter your name, your product, your staff, or any other aspect of your brand experience (which is the topic of Chapter 13).

Zeroing in on the strengths of your brand

Being different isn’t enough for an attractive positioning strategy. A car that burns gas at a rate of one gallon every two miles has a point of distinction but no point of attraction.

To position your brand, you need both attraction and distinction:

• Attraction comes from providing values and attributes that customers genuinely want or need.
• Distinction comes from providing values and attributes that customers can only receive by selecting you, your business, or your product.

So what are your most attractive distinctions? To conduct your self-assessment, use the worksheet in Figure 5-2. (If you need help digging up the information you need, check out the research section later in this chapter.) Enter your greatest strengths in the left-hand column. Then use the next columns to enter assessments of how well others feel that your offering distinguishes your business and sets you apart from your competition. When you see a resounding “best” across the board, you know you’ve landed on an attribute of that give you a compelling point of distinction.

Distinctions only matter if they are meaningful and desirable to those in your target market. As you complete the Figure 5-2 chart, repeatedly ask yourself: Does this attribute truly matter, and to whom?

Defining your point of difference

Your point of difference determines your position in your competitive environment. It defines the precise segment of the market that you serve best and how your offering is distinctively unique from that of businesses or products that provide similar but different solutions and experiences.

Many businesses that want to ramp up sales in a hurry try to make their products attractive to anyone and everyone. They’re afraid to pinpoint distinctions or market segments for fear that they’ll miss sales opportunities. In fact, the reverse is true. If you can’t tell customers what you do best and for whom, you can’t give them a credible reason to choose your offering.

Before you begin the process of putting your brand into words (see Chapter 6), define your point of difference in your competitive environment. Use the following template:

[Name of your business, product, or service] is the [your distinction and the generic term for your type of offering] to provide [your unique features or benefits] to [your customer profile] who choose our offering in order to feel [your customers’ emotional outcome].

In this statement, your distinction may be along the lines of best, first, only, most-recommended, or highest-ranking. The generic term for your type of offering may be gluten-free bakery, language-learning mobile app, low-sugar energy bar, or whatever else describes what you promise to deliver to customers. A few examples of customer profiles include local residents with global mindsets, upwardly mobile young professionals seeking enhanced status, or parents wanting to provide their children with opportunity and enrichment. Finally, your customers’ emotional outcome may be secure, successful, self-confident, or indulged.

Dealing with brand misperceptions

In a perfect world, what others believe about your offering would match precisely with what you believe to be your brand’s distinguishing characteristics and attributes. But you’re branding in the real world, not a perfect world. In fact, if you’re working on a strategy to strengthen an existing brand, you’re probably reading this book because you sense there’s a gap between what you think makes your brand different and better and how you think it’s perceived by those in your marketplace.

Part of the positioning process involves knowing whether or not people you want to reach and influence already have you slotted into a position — possibly the wrong position — in their minds. If so, you have to move strategically and help them connect the dots from the position your brand currently occupies in their minds to where you want it to be. The upcoming section “Digging Up the Info You Need” guides you through steps to conduct research and collect facts about your customers and their beliefs.

Be aware that moving your brand to a new position isn’t like moving furniture. You can’t just pick your brand up and slot it into a new space. Your customers — not you — move your brand to a new position. To change your position, you need to build on what people currently believe by conveying messages, making impressions, and delivering experiences that logically move your brand toward your desired competitive position. The chapters in Part III help you get the word out.

Mapping your brand’s position

To position your brand, start by looking at how it fits within your competitive landscape. Create a positioning matrix like the one illustrated in Figure 5-3, following these steps:

1. Choose two attributes that matter most in your competitive environment. Those will become the axis lines for your positioning matrix. For example, a specialty food products brand might choose food preferences (ranging from traditional to gourmet) and pricing (affordable to premium). A ski resort may choose type of ski experience (one-day recreation to destination resort) and pricing (affordable to premium). In Figure 5-3, you see that the owners of a bakery café chose as their attributes the type of customer experience (global to local) and the café atmosphere (old world to contemporary).
2. Within the framework of your two sets of attributes, plot where your competitors fit. In the Figure 5-3 example, Starbucks is the most global and contemporary brand. So that position is taken. Other competitors fill positions ranging from very to somewhat contemporary or old-world, and from somewhat local or global in character. When you find the slot on the map that’s unfilled and that aligns with the attributes of your offering, you’ve located the birthplace of the brand.

When creating a strategy to strengthen an existing brand, doing this exercise twice is worthwhile: once based on the position you want your brand to hold and once based on the position you think it currently holds in consumer minds. The difference between the two positions will guide your efforts as you adjust your offerings, develop communications, and improve your customer experience to support the image you want customers to believe, adopt, and embrace.

Aligning Your Brand’s Position with Customer Wants, Needs, and Desires

Branding involves positioning and positioning involves focusing on not just what you do best but also on the market segment you serve best. Instead of trying to please all people in all ways, great brands position themselves to please some people — a defined market segment or market niche — in an extraordinary way because of the unique and meaningful attributes and experiences the brands offer.

To define the target audience for your brand, complete the Customer Profile Worksheet illustrated in Figure 5-4. If you’re not sure of your answers, turn to the later section “Digging Up the Info You Need” for advice on how to conduct research about where your customers are, who they are, what they value, and how they prefer to buy products like the ones you’re offering.

What do your customers care about?

When you know a description of the people you’re trying to reach and where and how to reach them, you’re armed with the knowledge you need to address their values, motivations, and purchasing patterns. The following questions can help uncover useful facts:

• What motivates your customers’ purchase decisions? Put differently, what needs or desires are customers trying to address when they purchase your product? Realize that the answer isn’t always obvious. A couple may say that they like the design and quality of a particular new home, for example, when really they’re motivated by the prestigious feel of the house or neighborhood.

  To get to the root of your customers’ purchase motivations, find out how your offering makes them feel. By uncovering the emotions your product evokes, you learn the basis of their motivation and which attributes to highlight in your branding strategy.

• How do your customers approach your business? Do they buy in-person, or by phone, mail, or online? Do they decide to buy on their own or based on the recommendation or approval of someone else? Does your brand need to make a promise to the product consumer or to the purchase authority or referring agent? Or both? By knowing how customers reach your business and the factors that influence their decision, you can create more effective messages, communications, and experiences.
• How do customers purchase your products? By studying buying patterns, you discover brand attributes that matter most to customers.
  • Do most customers buy on impulse or after consideration? The answer may indicate a need for trust and reliability assurances.
  • Do they pay cash, charge, or buy on payment plans? Payment plans may indicate a greater sensitivity to price.
  • Do they sign contracts, subscribe, or opt for multipurchase or bulk deals? Long-term commitments indicate high trust.
  • If you offer an add-on warranty or service program, do most customers take the offering or decline it? Acceptance may indicate concern over ease of use or reliability.
  • Are they interested primarily in price, or are their decisions made based on quality, prestige, convenience, or other values?

What sets your ideal customers apart?

Ideal customers are the ones who buy the most from your business, cause the fewest problems, say the nicest things, and recommend you the most often. To determine if your most ideal customers have geographic, demographic, or behavioral traits in common (see worksheet in Figure 5-4 to develop your customer profile), answer these questions:

• Do your most ideal customers tend to buy the same kinds of products or request the same kinds of options, and are those tendencies different from those of other customers?
• Do they buy from your business simply to obtain your product or service, or do they think that your offering fulfills additional needs or interests — such as the ability to socialize, to feel the prestige of joining your exclusive or trendy clientele, to enrich themselves educationally through product samples or seminars, or to enjoy the level of your expertise or the safety of your trustworthiness?
• What attributes of your business do you think your most ideal customers value most highly: product quality, available features, convenience (your location or your purchasing options), reliability, staff expertise, customer support and service, price (high or low — some people are attracted to bargains and others to the highest level of premium offering), or other aspects of doing business with you?
• How do your most ideal customers buy? For example, do they buy on impulse, in bulk, on sale, when shopping with others, when shopping online, on the recommendation of others, and so on?
• Do your most ideal customers share any of the same demographic or lifestyle characteristics, such as gender, age, income, ethnicity, geographic location, beliefs, or values?

Studying the buying patterns and motivations of ideal customers helps determine which attributes and approaches to feature in your marketing.

Why do customers buy from you?

Take all that you know about your customers and answer this final question: Why do they choose to buy from you?

Commit your thoughts to words using the template shown in Figure 5-5. Complete the exercise twice: once for your average customer and once for your most ideal customer. Use the information in the average customer form to determine how your brand must appeal to your current clientele. Use the information in the ideal customer form to determine which brand attributes to emphasize in order to shift your clientele to include more customers like those you currently consider the cream of the crop.

Digging Up the Info You Need

A few huge companies are responsible for the vast majority of all the time and money spent on market research each year. Hmmm … a message is probably in there: Big businesses get bigger by knowing and responding to customer wants and needs.

You can do the same, even without a huge research investment. You can start by looking for telltale signs within your own business and sales records. You can talk directly to customers (something that smaller business owners do on a daily basis anyway), and you can conduct do-it-yourself research.

Putting your brand through a self-exam

A successful brand strategy results in an accurate reflection of what you are and what you promise to those who come into contact with you or your business. That’s why it’s important to define your brand as it exists right now. Start using your own opinions and knowledge to answer these questions:

• What does your business do best? What makes you a great choice for customers? If you were to close tomorrow, what attributes that you offer would customers have the hardest time finding elsewhere?
• What do customers buy most from your business? Customers vote with their pocketbooks, so if most of your revenue comes from a single product or service line, that line probably represents the offering your customers value most highly.
• What aspect of your business gets the most internal attention? Most businesses prioritize efforts in one of the following areas: research and development, operations, marketing, distribution and delivery, management, organization, and customer service. What is the major emphasis in your company? Your answer probably points toward your business strength and a brand attribute.
• What services do you offer or promise that your competitors don’t? Does your company make a promise — a promise that may feel like a minimal standard within your organization — that causes customers to choose and stick with your business? Look hard. Something as mundane as consistently putting jewelry in a robin’s egg-blue box could be the factor that makes you the Tiffany of your category.

Tuning in to customer insights

If you’re working on a brand for an already established offering, conduct research by meeting with customers face-to-face — at the reception desk, at the customer service window, in the complaints or returns line, and on the sales floor. Or place yourself in a position to watch customers in action. What do they like? What attracts them? What confuses them? What causes them to look more closely? What causes them to turn away?

As you tap into customer insights, look for answers to these questions:

• What customer requests are you currently not fulfilling? Do they wish you offered same-day delivery, easier parking, additional product features, streamlined service, or a real person on the other end of the line instead of your voicemail system? Ask everyone in your organization to add every request they hear to a customer wish list. You can’t fulfill all requests — doing so could cause you to veer away from your brand identity — but you at least need to know what customers want so you can better position your offerings when appropriate.
• What complaints do customers register? Establish a complaint log where employees can list customer complaints they receive or elements they believe lead to customer departures.
• What hints of dissatisfaction do your customers give? According to research, for every complaint you hear, 26 customers have issues they don’t mention. Unstated complaints can take the form of compliments that customers share about your competitors, wistful mentions of how things used to be (“Oh, for the good old days when a real person answered the phone”), or an end to the compliments you they used to hear frequently. They also can take the form of questions. If customers consistently ask about prices or bills, be ready to reassess your pricing or billing procedures. If they ask to see samples of your work for other clients, they may have doubts about your offering and need better reassurances than you’re currently presenting.
• Which products are on back order? And which frequently get returned? The answers to these two questions reveal what your customers want and don’t want.
• Which displays, web pages, or offers get the most attention from your customers? There’s an old saying in marketing: “Sell what people are buying.” Branders might translate the concept to something like this: “Brand the attributes people love.” To discover their preferences, watch people move through your business. Watch where they spend time on your website, the promotional offers that win the greatest response, the carpet on your retail floor that’s most worn from foot traffic, and, especially, watch to see what’s being bought, reordered, and raved about.
• How do they arrive at your business? Online, use analytics to track the paths they take to and through your website. If they arrive in person, notice what kinds of cars they drive, what kind of clothes they wear, whether they arrive alone or with others, what times of days they arrive. If they arrive via a phone call, monitor how long they remain on hold, how many call directly from your website, how many layers of automated responses they have to go through.
• What do they do upon arrival at your business? Do they ask about the nature of your business (if so, work to improve brand awareness)? Do they bounce from your home page or seem confused about where to go after physically arriving (if so, enhance your menu options, reception techniques, or directional signage)? Do they wait for slow page loads, on-hold messages, or checkout bottlenecks? Unless you’re building a brand image as the busiest business in your category, interpret waits as a reason to seriously improve your customer service.
• What do they do while they wait? Go to the normal collection points in your business and see what your customers experience during wait times. Are they presented with brand messages? Are they encouraged to make add-on purchases? Are they asked to share their input about your business? If they do nothing but look around for what to do next, you’re missing an opportunity to promote your brand or to collect information that allows you to make your brand stronger.

Conducting customer research

This section helps navigate the realm of interviews, surveys, and focus groups.

Just ask! Interviews and surveys

Before you take up your customer’s time with an interview or survey, be clear about what you want the research to accomplish. Most research is intended to discover who your customers are and how to reach them, what your customers think of and want from products or services like the ones you offer, and how your customers may react to possible product or marketing innovations or revisions you’re considering. As you collect information, follow this advice:

• If you’re collecting information to clarify your customer profile, you don’t need an in-depth interview or survey. You can collect information through online or in-person customer registration forms, you can host contests that include the requested information on entry forms, or you can issue a customer information update request on a regular basis, perhaps accompanied by a small thank-you gift for those you count among your valuable customer base.
• If you’re working to assess levels of customer awareness, interest, or satisfaction, customer opinion surveys are a good tool for the task. You can conduct short surveys in-person at the point of purchase, or you can collect more extensive information through questionnaires delivered via phone, mail, e-mail, or by using the free online survey and polling tools offered by sites such as SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang.

  For surveys that involve more than a few questions, don’t go it alone. Enlist professionals who can help develop a survey instrument that collects information about your offerings without spotlighting shortcomings or unduly imposing on your customers’ time. They’ll also help you gain insight without leading customers to the answers you’re seeking, a mistake that makes the research basically worthless. To balance your dueling desires for customer input and customer satisfaction, keep this advice in mind:

  • Keep the survey short so it only takes a few minutes of your customers’ time unless you’re dealing with highly loyal customers who are willing to invest more heavily of their time.
  • Ask specific questions that are more likely to elicit thoughtful and accurate responses. For example, instead of asking, “On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being best, how do you rate our service?” ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being best, how satisfied were you with the service you received during your last visit to our business?”
  • Ask questions that help you understand how customers relate to your product. For example, you may ask, “How closely did our product live up to your expectations?”
  • Ask questions that reveal how you stack up against competitors. For example, ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how convenient is our location compared to the location of other businesses where you can purchase similar products or services?
• To see how customers react to a product or marketing idea, or to learn subtleties about what they think or feel, consider talking one-to-one in personal or phone interviews. When conducting interviews, keep the following points in mind:
  • Be open to any customer response to your idea. If you (or those in a leadership position) already know what you’re going to do and are simply seeking validation, save your time and money.
  • You may not be the best person to conduct the interview. Generally, people don’t want to burst bubbles or hurt feelings. If a third-party researcher asks for customer opinions, the answers may be 180 degrees different (and more accurate) than what customers would admit to you directly.

Table 5-1 later in this chapter can help you determine when to seek professional help with your research program and when you can just go it alone.

Just listen! Using focus groups

Focus groups are best left to the professionals. A focus group is a gathering of customers, prospective customers, or even customers of competitors who share input about a product or marketing idea with a moderator who guides the conversation, prompts input, and manages the discussion so it isn’t dominated by one person or opinion. Hold a focus group when you want to seriously weigh opinions, reactions, and risks before proceeding with an important product or marketing decision. If you’re seeking input from a far-flung group rather than meeting in person, participants can meet in an online chat room or web conference. Your social networks are a good place to issue the invitations. Before the focus group session, be clear about the information or idea you’re presenting, the kind of impressions you’re seeking to collect, and the token of thanks you’ll offer in return for participant time and ideas.

Knowing when to get research help

Table 5-1 lays out information-gathering approaches, along with advice regarding when to involve professional assistance.

Table 5-1 Information-Gathering Approaches

Where else to turn for facts and figures

Thanks to the Internet, information-gathering resources are virtually without limit. Following are a few ways to focus your research efforts.

Hit a search engine

Start with these recommendations:

• Visit the websites of your competitors. To see what you’re up against, check out how they present themselves, brand attributes they highlight, and new moves they’re announcing.
• Check out the websites for your industry association and for major media groups that serve your business arena. They’ll probably contain research reports and analyses about customer and business trends.
• Use government resources. Start with www.census.gov for information on population and resident characteristics in practically any U.S. community. Then move on to the websites of business development departments that serve your market areas, from your state’s economic development department to the business resource center at your local chamber of commerce.
• Search for industry studies and research. Just enter the name of your business arena plus the word “research” or “statistics,” and results should lead to all kinds of industry facts and figures.

Hit the library reference shelves

In addition to reference materials specific to your industry, check out these marketing sourcebooks, available for free use in many library reference areas:

• ESRI Community Sourcebook of ZIP Code Demographics: This source is updated every five years with current demographic, business, consumer spending, and segmentation data for every U.S. ZIP code. The information is valuable as you forecast demand for your products based on market area composition and population trends.
• The Lifestyle Market Analyst: Published by Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS) and Nielsen, this guide provides demographic and lifestyle data organized by geographic market area, lifestyle interests, and consumer profiles.

Putting Research in Perspective

Use research findings to fine-tune your brand strategy and message. Knowing all you can about who you’re trying to reach and what your target customer wants, needs, and currently believes will help as you make essential decisions that align your brand with customer preferences. But beware: People can smell a fabricated fake. You have to be what you say you are. If your customers want cool and trendy, you have to be cool and trendy before you amplify that message in the marketplace. You have to be able to walk your talk.

Start with passion, and build your brand from there. If your brand doesn’t have your heart and soul in it, no amount of research can make it successful.

People with strong personalities, aspirations, and passions create powerful brands. An example is Martha Stewart. On an episode of the show The Apprentice, she reprimanded a contestant for relying too heavily on research findings. She said that rather than creating products in response to customer desires, her company created unquestionably great products and then created customer desire. The same statement applies to most every other great brand leader, from Steve Jobs to Walt Disney to Oprah Winfrey. All started with strong opinions and clear brand visions. Even when told that their ideas wouldn’t fly, they proceeded — and built branding case studies in the process.

Defining and Testing Your Position

As soon as you’re clear about your customer profile, your place in your competitive environment, and the point of difference that sets you apart and provides customers a reason to buy from you and you alone, you’re ready to write your positioning statement.

Your positioning statement defines the niche that only your offering fills in the marketplace. It isn’t a public announcement; rather, it’s an internal marketing compass. After you establish your positioning statement, use it within your company to guide all your branding and marketing communication efforts.

Before writing your positioning statement, answer these questions:

• Is your point of difference unique and hard for a competitor to duplicate?
• Do your distinctions or differences truly matter to your customers?
• Does your offering sync well with economic and cultural trends?
• Will customers believe your claims about your offering? Can you support or prove your claim?

If you can answer “yes” to these questions, sharpen your pencil or hit your keyboard to write a positioning statement covering the following points:

1. Your customer profile
2. Name of your company or product
3. Your business description
4. A summary of your point of difference

Here’s a positioning statement template to get you going:

For [a description of your target audience or ideal customer ], [the name of your brand ] is the [your point of distinction, for example, the only specialist in, the most recognized, the highest-rated] [a description of your offering, for example, café bakery, micro-home builder, hometown brewpub] that provides/delivers/promises [a description of the value and benefit you promise and deliver to customers] because only [the name of your brand] [a description of facts that give people a reason to believe your positioning claim].

After writing your positioning statement, evaluate its accuracy by asking

• Is it believable?
• Is it consistent with what people who know your business believe to be true about you, the way you operate, and the benefits you deliver?
• Can you consistently deliver the distinct attributes as they’re stated?
• Can you package and deliver your point of difference with such consistency that every single time customers encounter your brand, your distinction is reinforced and the experience reminds customers of why they chose and remain loyal to your brand?

Steer clear of these positioning landmines:

• Don’t try to claim a position already held by another brand.
• Don’t base your position on a point of difference you can’t protect. For instance, don’t base your position on having the lowest price, because a competitor can always best you on that front.
• Don’t build your position around an attribute you can’t control, such as being the “only provider of XYZ service.” Unless you establish a barrier to entry by competitors through a license or other protection, you leave yourself vulnerable to having the very attribute you built your brand upon eroded by a quick move by a new player in your game.

When your positioning statement passes these tests, you’ve found a place to build your brand. Congratulations! Now you can start putting your brand promise and brand definition into words (see Chapter 6).