This is the final chapter of the ‘How to Build Your Brand from Scratch’ series. If you missed the last chapter, you can learn how to Find Your Brand’s Demographics, or start from the beginning to learn the essential basics. From this series, you will learn to position your brand, products and services to maximize your marketing campaigns.
The Importance of Positioning
To establish a strategic position for a brand or product means to provide a platform that both identifies your brand and defines its primary purpose in a way that consumers can relate to. This clarification is necessary as many businesses have multiple-use products that appeal to different demographics. Take, for example, a manufacturer of quality artist supplies. These could appeal to a wide range of users, from professional artists, to students, to crafts persons, even to school children. While not the primary market, the most lucrative demographics for these products may be art school students and school children. It would be important for this manufacturer to identify itself as a leading producer of artist-quality supplies, but to focus some of its marketing spend on reaching the decision makers in schools. As the illustration demonstrates, positioning your brand and product correctly ensures that its identity will be readily identified by its intended audience, however niche, yet not exclude other potential customers and income streams.
David Ogilvy, known as the Father of Advertising, found brand positioning to be so important, that he made it part of his 2nd of 7 Commandments of Advertising. (For those unfamiliar with David Ogilvy, he was the inspiration behind Don Draper from AMC’s popular series ‘Mad Men’.) Ogilvy’s stand on Positioning: Clearly define your positioning: What and for Who?
Brand or product positioning is paramount to the underlying success of a business or strategy. Without proper positioning, the true essence of your targeting strategy might be lost. Performed correctly, positioning ensures that all marketing efforts not only reach the right audience but also create demand. Positioning is to a Marketer what a telescope is to an astronomer. Without this one tool, positioning, there is no effective marketing. There’s a reason David Ogilvy referred to positioning as “The most important decision”.
The Dove Effect
The Dove Effect refers to Ogilvy’s historic decision on positioning Dove soap. Ogilvy stated, “I could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position it as a toilet bar for women with dry skin. This is still working 25 years later.”
Of course, Dove can be used for both (among other) purposes, but Ogilvy’s advertising helped to change consumers’ association, which had a huge impact on their buying habits. This is the very reason why some products are given characteristics and seen as masculine, feminine, durable, sophisticated, etc. They have strategically been assigned personality traits that are intended to influence the publics’ perception.
Positioning Your Brand
Your brand should develop and maintain a cohesive and consistent messaging strategy, which should be reflected through your advertising campaigns, content marketing, and public relations efforts. This will ensure all your tactics and strategies will work together towards achieving the same goal – building your brand.
Positioning Your Advertising
Generating exposure is essential for growing your brand and business. To do this effectively, be certain to perpetuate the same messaging strategies, but remember to keep your audience in mind and segment accordingly.
Your brand’s value can resonate with millions of people, but will one message reach every segment of your demographics? Of course not, so it’s important to conduct extensive research and determine what the pain points are for each demographic. Do not move forward with your positioning if you’re not sure which Demographics is your target audience.
David Ogilvy decided to position Dove as women’s soap for dry skin, but it didn’t end there. Since, Dove has been developing and executing campaigns to reach different audiences. Their ‘Real Beauty’ campaign was highly successful, as it aimed at positivity and countered mainstream beauty products that pushed unrealistic expectations in their ads.
To fully speak to your audience, represent your positioning and branding with conceptual ideas and/or analogies. It’s best to make them see and feel your message so they can understand it in their own terms. Your positioning should represent a solution to the problem(s) that your brand is answering. A position angles a strategy to fulfill a specific purpose, so your advertising and other marketing efforts should do the same.
Be sure to utilize imagery and video content for your marketing and advertising. Conceptual imagery can tell the story, as they convey messages quickly and are effected less by the decreasing attention spans of online users.
Congratulations!
The time has come. You can now begin to create your own brand and to accomplish more for your business than you ever thought realistically possible. Follow our blogs step-by-step and you will achieve your fair market share.
We invite you to contact us with your questions or concerns regarding the branding process. We know there are many steps and details to achieve branding success and will be glad to consult with you to assist you to realize your online business’ goals.
