Brand Positioning
Dr Sanjay Patro
Principles of Brand Positioning
The art of staking out a particular piece of
mental real estate for a brand in the
consumer’s mind by crafting and
communicating a differentiated positioning
statement.
• Brand positioning provides a strategic
roadmap for creating powerful, resonant,
and unique messages to help a company’s
products and services stand out amid the
cacophony of the marketplace
Positioning the Battle for Your Mind
• Levitt declared that commodity products are
simply failures of marketing.
• Positioning statements distill the brand’s value proposition
into a compelling answer to the all-important question,
“Why should I buy?”
• Consumers in most product and service categories are
bombarded with too many alternatives, with most
seemingly undifferentiated from one another, making the
selection process very difficult
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Rosser Reeves
• Brands often highlight their most important
value claim through the use of a unique selling
proposition.
• A unique selling proposition (USP) is a type
of value claim that offers a prospective
customer a specific, unique, and superior
reason to purchase a product.
Different Brands of Water
• The cleanest, freshest, purest, healthiest,
most natural, most environmentally
sensitive, most socially conscious, most
fashionable—that resonates with a particular type of
consumer.
• Beyond the functional differences each brand tries to tell
its own story
• Each brand tries to stake a particular claim of
superiority.
“Marketing Success through Differentiation—
of Anything”
• by Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business
Review, January–February 1980.
• Positioning statements distill the brand’s
value proposition into a compelling answer
to the all-important question,
“Why should I buy?”
Positioning statements contain four essential
components:
• For whom, for when, for where? An explicit
description of the target market segment
that helps consumers easily discern which
brands directly address their specific needs
and which don’t.
• What value? A simple, straightforward
description of the unique value claim the
brand offers, written from the consumer’s
viewpoint.
• Functional value, experiential value, social
value
• Why and how? Evidence that provides consumers with
reasons to believe the brand’s claims. Supporting evidence
for the product’s value can come from logical arguments,
scientific and technological data, consumer testimonials,
celebrity or expert endorsements, product demonstrations
and experiments, and independent agency seals of
approval.
• Relative to whom: an explicit description of the
competitive set
The four components of positioning statements can
be summarized in this general format:
• For [target market], Brand X is the only brand
among all [competitive set] that [unique value
claim] because [reasons to believe].
3C Model of Brand Positioning
• Reeves felt ( 1940s-1950s)strongly that a
successful product had to actually be better
than its competitors; while clever ads could
move substandard product off the shelf
initially, the disappointing customer
experience thereafter would eventually
doom the product to failure.
• That insight ushered in a new era,( 1960s onwards)
dubbed the Creative Revolution, led by advertising
pioneers David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, and Bill Bernbach,
who believed that successful brand positions were those
that struck a human chord.
• “Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature,
what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his
action,” proclaimed Bernbach.6 Their positioning strategies
used creativity, wit, intelligence, and storytelling to capture
consumers’ imaginations.
Dr.Sanjay Patro XLRI 19
Dr.Sanjay Patro XLRI 21
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• “Avis: We Try Harder.” To make Avis’s
claim more believable, Bernbach wanted to
pair it with a statement about Avis’s market
position (“We’re only #2”).
Two types of strategies allow managers to leverage
their product or service’s points of difference:
vertical positioning and horizontal positioning.
• Vertical positioning highlights attributes
that are shared among brands, but stresses a
particular brand’s superior performance on
those attributes, using words such as
smaller, faster, and cheaper to delineate a
natural pecking order.
• By contrast, horizontal positioning involves
adding new attributes, benefits, or values to
attract customers
Perceptual Mapping
• Marketers can visually represent the
positions of their brands using a tool called
perceptual mapping, which provides a
visual image of consumers’ mental
landscapes. Consumers are asked to compare and
contrast sets of brands across a set of attributes; then their
answers are used to map the spatial differences among
brands. Using these distances, marketers can construct a
two-dimensional or multidimensional graphical
representation of how consumers perceive the brands in a
product category.
Durability
• Kevin Lane Keller advises that “brand consistency is
critical to maintaining the strength and favorability of
brand associations,”
• while Jean-Noël Kapferer warns that “a brand will only
survive in the long term if it can demonstrate its relevance
with regard to the latest changing needs of a market, which
is in a state of constant evolution.”
Determining the Positioning Strategy
Identifying the Competitors
Establishing category membership
Determining the competitor’s position
Determining how competitors are perceived
and evaluated
Positioning starts with a Segmentation
Commitment -Vicks
What are the different bases of segmentation ?
Analyze the customers
Select the Position
Monitor the position
Choosing between
Points Of Parity
and
Points of Difference
Law of Ladder
Positioning Strategies
1. Positioning by Attribute
2. Positioning by Use or application
3. Positioning by Product User
4. Positioning by Price Quality
5. Positioning with respect to Competitor
6. Positioning by product class dissociation
Soaps Vs. Dove
1. Demographic
2. Psychographic
3. Behavioural Segmentation
• A provocative positioning statement can make
the difference between a brand’s getting lost in
the sea of choices and standing out as the best
solution for the consumer.
Laddering Up from features to benefits to values
• Harley Davidson –No Cages Campaign
• Think Differently
• Apple 1984 campaign
Thank you
