What is Brand Positioning and what does it eat for breakfast?
Before I can share what Brand Positioning is, let’s first establish what a brand is not.
Branding is NOT:
- A logo
- A colour pallet
- A tagline
- A website
- A product or a service
Are all those things part of a brand? Yes, but they are not THE brand.
Branding IS:
- What people say about you when you are not in the room
- How people feel when they buy or experience your product or service
- How people feel about what you stand for and the overall experience that you provide
- Defined by people and emotions
So, now, let’s explore what Brand Positioning is and why it’s important for your bank account.
Whether you’re a solopreneur, small business owner, or head of a fortune 500 company, brand positioning is as important to the health of a business as a heartbeat is to the human body.
Critical to brand building, brand positioning is the place you want to win in your target audience’s mind. It’s about exploring, identifying and refining what makes your brand the best choice for your ideal clients, all the while getting them to say, “I would be a fool for doing business with anyone else but you, regardless of price.”
Having your customers say this takes more than talent, a good idea, or a good website.
Without strong brand positioning, the only option you have is to compete on price which is a guaranteed race to the bottom. Your brand absolutely must make life better for your customers and be positioned as the #1 choice in their eyes, or you will eventually be eliminated.
Here are 3 key ingredients for successful brand positioning
#1 // Your Internal Mission
Far from a lengthy mission statement that lives in a dusty place on the website, your brand’s internal mission is a couple of words that encapsulate how you want to leave your customers, prospects, team members, suppliers feeling. You see, people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. They buy a feeling and a sense of belonging.
Once you have determined this feeling and align everyone in your business in delivering on it, magic happens.
For example, there’s an insurance company in the UK that does a fantastic job of positioning their brand with their mission. In an industry notorious for receiving skeptical backlash, this company set a mission to leave their clients feeling “wowed and delighted.” How did they deliver on this? By sending customers on vacation while they managed the insurance disaster.
Here at LeapZone Strategies, our mission is to leave our clients feeling on fire and unstoppable.
#2 // Your Brand Promise
What do you delivery without fail, rain or shine? What makes your brand the best? What bridges your genius and the needs & desires of your ideal clients?
Measuring your accountability as a brand, your brand promise solves top-of-mind problems for your ideal clients. This, then, is what allows you to charge a premium for what you do. Trust me—money loves clarity and focus.
You want this promise to make your customers say: “where have you been all my life?!”
Let’s look at a brand promise example. After seeing their security system competitors offer 1 hour plus response times, Provident Security made a robust decision to promise their customers a 5-minute response time. It wasn’t easy—they had to invent technology to deliver on this promise—but because they positioned themselves as the first and only in this category, they are now the fastest growing security company in North America.
#3 // Your X-Factor
What separates you from the pack? Why do people choose you instead of anyone else, regardless of price?
Very few brands know what makes them truly stand out or, even worse, how to communicate their uniqueness in a way that resonates and influences. When you can’t communicate your X Factor properly, you lose confidence in your products, services, client acquisition skills and your ability make sales. You then waste potent opportunities for growth and leave money on the table.
For example, Novex is the only delivery company in Vancouver/Lower Mainland that is carbon neutral and B-Corp Certified. They have more hybrids than any other same-day courier company, meaning their emissions are 180 tons lower every year than their competitors. Originally, their tagline read: “Changing the Way We Deliver.” In the eyes of their ideal clients, this didn’t effectively communicate their X Factor. Begging how, why, and what questions, it failed to clearly set them apart from their competitors. LeapZone Strategies helped them better communicate their X Factor by changing the tagline to: “Safest, greenest, kindest, same-day courier driver” to clearly position them as the first, best, and only.
Claim your spot, scream it everywhere, and communicate clearly.
Innovations don’t come from great ideas, they come from fixing problems or dismantling the status quo.
Want to take your brand and business to a whole new level of success and impact? Fill out my Needs Assessment and let’s talk.
To explore working with Isabelle, simply fill out LeapZone’s Needs Assessment here and we will connect to book your free clarity call. You can also find Isabelle on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/leapzone/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/leapzoneleader/