Brand positioning Increases Buyer Responses
How do you achieve it? Buyer response increases when brand positioning and compelling messaging are aligned.
Success comes when you bring the brand characterisation and customer’s understanding together to create what is often considered a confusing aspect of marketing – positioning.
Throughout a company, there are contrary interpretations of what brand positioning is, and it often leads to some very unproductive conversations and misinterpretations. To provide some clarity to the debate, this explanation may assist.
Brand positioning is not a claim, and it’s not a promise. Nor is it a tagline, either. A tagline is the nearest thing in the marketplace for many that are potentially attempting to communicate it.
Despite its intrinsic confusion within the company, positioning is potentially the most important aspect of building the brand experience. It is not a tagline capturing what you internally assess your ideal place in marketing to be. It is the summation of all the steps taken in establishing a brand: brand definition, target market, competitive assessment, etc.
It starts and ends with an excellent understanding of the customer. It works when an effective brand positioning strategy is in place.
Brand positioning often becomes one of those nebulous concepts that are kind of hard to pin down. Often created by people believing they have a flair for marketing, not understanding the process required to establish a real position. With such a whimsical approach to the success of the brand, it is often why companies fail to achieve success.
For some business people, it can be seen as a superfluous marketing buzz. This thinking usually happens when there is has been an extensive debate on a brand change or marketing campaign with no measurable outcome.
What many people fail to appreciate is that it is a fundamental aspect of the process of marketing, and you really cannot have a business plan without it.
It is essential to understand the importance of brand positioning, and what it is, and have a clear way of defining it for you.
In its simplest of terms: brand positioning is the space that we want to inhabit in the customer’s mind about your products and services. It is how we want our customers to understand the brand. It is the first thought that we want customers to think about when they hear your brand name.
Why is Brand Positioning Important?
Positioning is at the heart of what the brand is all about, as it captures everything known and understood about your customer. The branding strategies are the product of market research and the developing of a positioning map based on consumer perceptions. Establishing a brand positioning statement that resonates with the target audience and creates the brand’s uniqueness is imperative.
A well-positioned brand can lead to significant opportunities when you get them right. Well-positioned branding that connects with the customer opens the doors ready for sales. Sales must then seamlessly follow to develop those opportunities ensuring the customer never leaves the motivation for your brand.
For this to occur, the selling messages must be carefully aligned with the brand position. This requires input from the sales department to fully understand the customer and their buyer behaviour.
Often we see sales and marketing have meetings, but there is still a disconnect. Potentially a lack of understanding of each side’s role in contributing to brand positioning and selling messages.
For many years the selling messages designed by marketing were gimmicky, and they read well within marketing materials. However, translated into a conversation, they were out of place and highly unnatural to say. Marketing needs to learn a new language that aligns with buyer conversations.
After working through the brand-building process, sales needs training in how the position came to fruition. They must be informed of brand definition, target market, competitive assessment, etc. They need to get their minds into the same space as where the target customers will be.
Sales are then well-positioned to interview potential customers in this mindset and find the interest and priorities that will keep the brand position at the forefront of their minds.
As part of their marketing strategies, marketing can then create selling messages that are continually developing the emotional connection of how customers feel about your brand. These messages are shared through sales collateral such as case studies and technical papers and shared through social media.
Well-crafted messaging that is engaging to read and can be spoken by salespeople to create a seamless experience from marketing to sales.
Creating a strong brand position will open doors to the right customers leveraging your growth and increasing market share through equally well-positioned sales conversations.
To find out more about brand positioning and the value it can bring to your company, please contact the office.
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- Why Great Products Fail to Sell
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