Brand positioning

Nick Liddell
Warc Best Practice
November 2013

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Brand positioning
Nick Liddell
Warc Best Practice
November 2013

Brand positioning
Nick Liddell
Dragon Rouge
Great brand positioning requires inspiration, bravery, a future vision and don't be afraid of alienating people, says
Dragon Rouge's Nick Liddell.
In theory, brand positioning can be an immensely useful tool for creating growth. But in practice, it is often a complete waste of
time, money and effort.
There are very few examples of great brand positioning. Truly awful brand positioning is equally hard to find. The vast majority
of brand positioning ideas are neither terrible nor remarkable. They neither inspire nor appal. They are average. Inoffensive.
This is a problem. A brand positioning that doesn't inspire people is like a blunt knife. People won't feel threatened by it and it
can't do its job properly. In a Fortune magazine interview, Patagonia founder, Yves Chouinard, observed that "if you're not
pissing off 50% of the people, you're not trying hard enough". The same rule applies to great brand positioning. Some people
should love it. Some people should hate it. This is why so few truly great brands exist, despite the best efforts of a multi-billion
dollar branding industry. Here are some of the most common pitfalls we've observed:
1 We are unclear on the difference between brand strategy and brand positioning
Great brand positioning should delight some people and frighten others. So it's important to be able to identify who you want to
target and why they should care about your brand, as well as when and where they will encounter it. Broadly speaking, this is
brand strategy: defining a target audience; understanding their needs and motivations; being clear about the occasions and
channels through which your brand will influence them. This is an analytical, rational, insight-led process. Brand positioning is
the creative response to such a strategy. It should be creative, emotional and inspiration-led. Strategy and positioning are not
substitutable terms: they are complementary activities.
2 Brand models focus people on strategy at the expense of positioning
The vast majority of companies employ some form of template to capture their brand positioning. These templates usually take
some whimsical shape or other. An onion. A key. A keyhole. A pyramid. A bridge. I've even encountered a 'brand fox'.
Whatever form they take, their ostensible purpose is to ensure that the creators of a brand's positioning have followed a
rigorous thought process. The positioning process becomes a box-ticking exercise, rather than a creative enterprise. Great
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ideas shouldn't be forced into boxes.

3 We worry too much about today and not enough about tomorrow
People worry a lot about the credibility of a positioning idea but there is little point investing time and money in positioning your
brand, simply to produce a summary of how it currently works. Nothing will change as a result.
So why position a brand if it won't result in meaningful change?
At its best, brand positioning is an articulation of the future you intend to create. It sets a direction for your organisation. It
inspires people to find new and better ways of working. This requires you to stretch credibility as far as it will possibly go.
Understanding what people expect of your brand is only important to the extent that you can think creatively about how to play
with, challenge or even subvert those expectations.
4 We design for the average
Few brand owners aspire to a niche positioning. Big brands appeal to the masses. It's more profitable to be liked by a lot of
people than to be loved by a few. It's also important that internal stakeholders are happy with the positioning. All of them.
There's no point in developing an idea that 50% of stakeholders love if the remaining 50% of stakeholders hate it. Brand
positioning needs to be brought to life across the entire organisation, so the entire organisation needs to like the idea. It's
better to be liked by the many than to be loved by a weird minority.
Or is it? Committees don't create great brands. Great leaders create great brands. Steve Jobs at Apple. Howard Schultz at
Starbucks. Thomas Watson and Thomas Watson Jr. at IBM. Bill Gore. Michael Bloomberg. None of these people cared much
for the average. They designed their businesses and brands around some of the rarest and most extreme people in the world
themselves.

Developing a brand with mass appeal doesn't require us to design for the majority. It requires us to design for different
extremes. If your most demanding target audiences like your idea, the chances are others will follow.
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5 Positioning is approached as an intellectual problem, rather than a practical exercise

I once worked for a consultancy that had been employed by a well-known service organisation to develop its new brand
positioning. The client loved a particular concept: invisible service. The theory was that their service would be so seamless as
to be rendered practically invisible to their customers. An interesting idea. It was swiftly signed-off by the board but then people
started to ask awkward questions:
How can a visual identity based on the idea of invisibility result in greater visibility for our company?
How can we create moments of surprise and delight for our customers if our ambition is for our service to go unnoticed?
These questions did not lead to any practical solutions. Invisibility may have been an interesting idea in theory, but it turned
out to be useless in practice. Brand positioning should create a pleasurably simple idea that can be readily understood and
applied across an organisation. Clarity beats cleverness.
These pitfalls are so commonplace they have practically become standard operating procedure. But the marketing community
is tiring of the old approach. Brand models aren't being binned, but they are now being complemented by manifestos, videos
and statements of purpose. Diageo is 'shooting for 10' and Unilever has appealed to its agencies to lose some of the logic and
to bring back some of the magic to marketing. These approaches to brand positioning provide some clear lessons to create a
brand people might actually care about:
Start with a clear definition of the value you want to create
There's no point being in business if you're not going to make money. Profit is imperative in the short-term for survival and in
the long-term for innovation and growth. Profit aids bold decision-making. But brands can create value beyond the balance
sheet. They affect quality of life for employees and their families. They affect surroundings and the environment. They
influence us culturally, subjecting us to language, images, products and services that effect how we think, feel and behave.

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IBM is making cities smarter. GE has created over $100 billion of incremental value through Ecomagination. Thinking broadly
about the type of value you want to create will open up new and interesting audiences and opportunities.
Foresight matters as much as insight
Great brand positioning is a statement of ambition, not a reflection of the current reality of a category. Insight can only take a
brand so far. According to ESOMAR, global market research turnover grew to $33.5 billion last year. We've spent a lot of
money trying to find out more about what motivates people to buy crisps, why they hate banks, why they sample new brands
of beer and why they talk to their cats.
We've invested billions to understand the world as it is today. How much do we spend trying to understand the future? What
will 2030 look like? The crisp category as we know it, may no longer exist. Banking will have changed beyond recognition.
These changes will be the result of deliberate actions undertaken by ambitious brands, armed with an appropriate balance of
foresight and insight. Brands ahead of the curve now base their positioning ideas on an interesting vision of the future, not an
insight-laden view of the present.
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We spend less time speaking to 'consumers' and more time talking to experts, weirdos, geeks and the occasional 'ordinary
person'. In the past few years, we have spoken to addiction clinicians, journalists, teachers, psychologists, nutritionists,
hackers, musicians and art dealers. They have far more to say about the future than the present.
'Why' and 'how' matter more than 'what'
Brands have an uncanny ability to transcend time, location and the business models they were born into. Nokia began life in
1871 as a paper mill. Originally a British brand aimed at women, Marlboro was founded in 1847. Nintendo sold playing cards
during the early 20th Century. The business you're in today matters less than the businesses you might be in tomorrow. It is
better to have a clear purpose that will help you to question which areas to stretch into, as well as a distinctive personality,
which will inform how you do so the 'why' and the 'how' of your brand.
Apple's share price has recently rebounded following rumours of an expected move into smart watches. Even before the
device exists, investors, analysts and potential owners already feel they know what it will deliver. It will connect seamlessly
with their iPhones, iPads, iPods and iTunes. It will most likely be called the iWatch. It will be delightfully simple to use. It will
have the battery life of a mayfly. Within two years of buying one, we will hanker after the newer model. We have such a clear
understanding of Apple's signature style that the brand has permission to stretch into almost any category where confusion
and frustration reign supreme. Virgin used to have a similar swagger about it.
Invite interpretation
An old boss of mine was fond of telling people that brands provide a 'central organising principle' for the businesses that own
them. It's an alluring idea. But people aren't directed by brands in such a way. Brands don't tell us what to do. Brands are
better suited to inspire than to inform. Strong brand positioning encourages thought. It is a challenge to an organisation to be
better.
Google wants to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Allen & Overy wants to be
seen as the world's most advanced law firm. BASF wants to create chemistry for a sustainable future. These are broad,
visionary statements. It is up to the people employed by these businesses to translate these statements into action across
different markets and business units. These are the types of challenge that great leaders rise to.
Sweat the detail
Big ideas are fun to create but eventually they need to translate into meaningful change. They should follow through into small
details. When working on a brand positioning for one of the world's biggest beer brands, the marketing director I worked with
used a simple test to tell whether a positioning idea was weak or not. It involved asking the following question when confronted
with a positioning idea: "What would the beer mat look like?"
If our project team of designers and strategists couldn't come up with a convincing beer mat, then we rejected the positioning
route. Even if it was intellectually interesting, it clearly wasn't practical enough to inspire a branded beer mat, let alone a 360degree branded experience.
Mood boards and written concepts can't tell you if a positioning idea is great. People don't go to supermarkets to buy concept
boards. Ask yourself how a candidate positioning idea would affect your business. What would you stop doing as a result?
What would you start? How would you act differently? How would you look different? What sorts of products and services
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would you launch?

Visualise your future and see how excited people get. Then you'll know if you've found a great brand positioning idea.
Further reading on warc.com
How To Write Brand Positioning Statements, Melanie Puddick, Best Practice, Admap, September 2012
Brand Positioning: Create Brand Appeal, Kim Cramer and Alexander Koene, Admap, January 2011
How To Use Brand Positioning, Laurie Young, Warc Best Practice, July 2011
Managing Media Planning And Brand Positioning Across Media Platforms, Fredrik Nauckhoff, Per Asberg and Carl
Hemmingsson, ESOMAR, Worldwide Media Measurement, Stockholm, May 2009

About the Author

Nick Liddell is strategy director at Dragon Rouge, he has worked on some of the world's biggest brands, including AmEx, BP,
Samsung and Unilever. He is author of Interbrand's Most Valuable Brands study and Clear's Brand Desire Index.

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