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Tag: Brand Positioning

The Belief Gap: Why You’re Losing Deals to a Weaker Product

Posted on by Emotive Brand

The losses that bother a CRO are the ones that can’t be explained by the product.

When your team knows where the competitor’s product is thinner, and exactly what the buyer will eventually discover in a security review or a complex enterprise environment, it can be baffling when the competitor keeps winning deals it should’ve struggled with.

The first response usually falls on sales; maybe messaging gets revised and the deck gets another pass. Those changes can improve execution, but they can’t correct an impression the buyer developed before the rep got involved.

At Emotive, we call this the Belief Gap: the distance between what your company has built and what the market is prepared to recognize, believe, and value. In sales, that gap can mean losing to a product you know is weaker.

The comparison is set before sales arrives

Enterprise buyers often do substantial evaluation before talking with a seller. They may have reviewed the company and its competitors, spoken with peers, or used AI tools to organize what they found. By the first substantive conversation, the buyer has a working idea of what each company is and which alternatives to compare your product to.

That comparison is assembled from whichever pieces of your company’s public record the buyer encounters before sales ever gets involved.

That’s particularly damaging in complex B2B technology and AI, where two products can look comparable at the category level and differ materially in architecture, data control, governance, deployment model, or security boundary. Those distinctions are obvious to a sales engineer who lives inside the product. They may be nearly invisible to a buyer forming a shortlist.

One commercial leader we worked with described a loss to a better-positioned competitor with a less evolved product in unusually plain terms: the customer had treated a toy car and a car as comparable products. This is one way the Belief Gap shows up in sales: buyers don’t recognize a meaningful difference between what you’ve built and what a weaker competitor offers. Once the buyer accepted that premise, the rep was fighting an uphill battle—trying to win an argument the company should have resolved much earlier.

An accurate comparison lets the seller move straight into the buyer’s problem. A bad one forces the rep to spend part of the conversation proving that your product is the real car. The clearer competitor gets to spend that time on offence instead of defense .

Good sellers hide the problem

Experienced sellers find ways around a weak starting point. They learn which analogy works with a particular buyer and where the technical distinction needs to enter the conversation. Those local fixes keep deals moving, which is exactly why leadership misses the pattern. Over time, different versions of the company start circulating through the sales organization, one per rep, each invented under pressure.

A buyer can understand a technical difference perfectly and still decide it doesn’t matter. The company’s position has to make clear why differences in architecture, data control, governance, or security change what the buyer can safely deploy, govern, or scale, and the buyer needs enough confidence in that distinction to let it influence the decision.

Start by measuring the correction work

Win rate and deal velocity reflect product quality, price, competitive behavior, and sales execution all at once, which makes them poor first measures of whether the company’s position is doing its job. Start closer to the friction. Listen for how much early sales time goes to correcting what buyers believe the company is. Look at whether reps repeatedly defend against the wrong competitive comparison, and whether they have to invent a new version of the company to can adapt to a complex account .

A bad comparison compounds beyond any single deal, appearing in more shortlists, creating the same objections, and forcing more sellers to spend valuable time correcting the buyer’s starting point.

By the time a rep joins the conversation, the buyer should already have a useful starting point. Every minute spent correcting the comparison is expensive sales capacity that could be advancing the decision.

The Market Still Sees the Company You Used to Be

Posted on by Emotive Brand

A successful company can spend ten years becoming known for one thing. Then the business changes, and the market keeps seeing the company it already knows.

For an established B2B technology company moving into AI, that lag can be hard to shake. The old description has years of reinforcement behind it, from customers, analysts, search, coverage, and the company itself, and it was accurate long enough to become familiar.

Now the company has moved, but the market hasn’t moved with it. Leadership is rebuilding the business around AI using years of proprietary data and knowledge, the customers closest to the company can see the difference, but buyers, analysts, and investors still place the business in a category it’s already outgrown.

An inconvenience in the best of times, the lag gets expensive when the company reaches a moment that depends on the market seeing what changed—and putting a number on it.

Strategy can change faster than market understanding

A company can make a major strategic shift in months, but market understanding moves on its own timetable. An established business has years of evidence attached to what it is, what it does, and where it belongs: old product descriptions remain online, analysts default to familiar language, legacy customers describe the company through the use cases they know, and search continues to show what’s accumulated over time.

AI research adds another layer because systems synthesizing public information don’t inherently know which language leadership has retired or which description best reflects the company today. As long as older descriptions remain abundant, AI will synthesize them.
Customers are often ahead because they experience the change directly, experiencing what the product can do now and how the company has become more valuable. Investors, analysts, partners, and prospective buyers need enough evidence to reach the same conclusion. When customers describe a different company from the one the market sees, it’s a sign you’re moving in the right direction, but still have a ways to go.

One chief executive described the situation plainly: the company was still known for one small piece of a business that had become much larger.

Reinvention theater makes it worse

The tempting response is to overcorrect: lead with AI everywhere, rewrite everything as if the last decade were merely a preamble, and make the change sound more sudden than it really was.

But the market has seen enough companies bolt AI onto an existing story to be skeptical of reinvention by announcement. Trying too hard to look newly AI can obscure the strongest reason to believe the story in the first place: years of customer work built the context that makes an AI integration truly valuable.

The advantage predates the AI—and enables it

Age alone is not an advantage, but if your company has spent its first decade building institutional knowledge and proprietary capability, that can be.

For an established business, years of customer work have created data, workflows, domain knowledge, edge cases, and operating context that can materially improve what the company can build with AI. Even a well-funded competitor can’t reproduce ten years of proprietary context with model spend alone.

That changes the repositioning challenge. The company has to use its history to make the AI credible, showing the depth of what the business has learned and what that knowledge makes uniquely possible now.

The strongest story draws a clear line from years of real customer use to the newly minted advantage, and that line gives the market a reason to fold the company’s old story into an updated understanding. True synthesis.

The market can believe where the company is going when it understands what the first decade made possible.

The Enterprise Growth Problem Nobody Blames on Brand

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Enterprise Growth Problem? Blame Brand (Really)

Has your positioning ever survived a happy hour?

The question is a reframe, inspired by a real conversation. A few years ago, a company with good positioning and real differentiation had just closed a difficult quarter. One of their sales reps was at a conference—late, at the bar, a couple drinks in with his guard down. Asked how he pitched the company to prospects, he shrugged. “Whatever I need to say to get the deal done.”

He wasn’t going rogue. He just never felt the positioning strongly enough to use it when it counted.

The Polite (But Perilous) Fiction

Most CMOs in enterprise B2B already know this happens. They just describe it differently. Adoption was uneven. Sales needs another enablement session.

What they’re actually describing is a coherence problem. And another training session won’t fix this.

In a 50-person startup, you can keep the story coherent through proximity. At enterprise scale, the brand has to survive across thousands of people who weren’t in that room, across functions with their own priorities and vocabularies.

Either coherence is strong enough that people carry it without being reminded, or the story quietly disintegrates into a hundred well-intentioned variations that add up to nothing the market can recognize, nevermind embrace.

That fragmentation doesn’t stay internal for long. When the market can’t find one consistent version of the company to recognize, it can’t fully believe it either—and belief is what gets a company valued and priced for what it’s actually built. Left unresolved, a coherence problem becomes a Belief Gap: the distance between the company you’ve built and the company the market is prepared to recognize, believe, and price.

The Nod That Means Nothing

There’s a moment worth dreading. Leadership team in a room, brand work on the wall, and everyone nods. But nodding is just the absence of objection, not the presence of belief. When people walk back to their desks after that meeting, the nod evaporates because they didn’t feel what they approved, they just confirmed it was accurate, and those are different things.

A CRO at an enterprise SaaS company put it well. “We don’t have a messaging problem. We have a conviction problem.” His team understood the talking points. They just didn’t believe them enough to feel confident improvising with them. And every enterprise sale eventually requires improvisation. The moment a prospect asks a question the messaging doc didn’t anticipate, you find out whether your team has conviction or just compliance.

Why Emotion Is the Rational Move

A Google and CEB study found that B2B buyers are driven more by emotional connection to brands than B2C consumers. That stops most people for a second, but it makes sense when you consider what’s actually at stake.

Emotion is the most rational response to high-stakes B2B decision-making. When a bad recommendation could cost you your standing with the board, you don’t just evaluate the product. You evaluate whether you trust the people behind it. And that trust comes from every conversation with the company feeling like it’s coming from the same place, which only happens when the people having those conversations believe the same thing.

The Pattern of Belief as Accelerant

Over 17 years and more than 200 B2B engagements, one thing has become clear. The companies where brand actually accelerates growth are the ones that treat belief with the same seriousness they bring to positioning.

When it works, you can show up anywhere around the globe—and every employee sells on brand, and builds product on brand. Not because they memorized the messaging framework, but because it captures what they believe really matters.

Customers feel the difference, evangelists show up on their own instead of being manufactured, and top talent arrives because the people inside are proud enough to recruit from their own networks. The company becomes something rarer than a unicorn: an enduring brand.

The Burning Question for B2B Enterprise

The fundamental question for most enterprise B2B companies isn’t whether their positioning is accurate. It’s whether their team could defend it to a skeptic without reaching for the deck.

If the answer is no, you don’t have a positioning problem. You have a conviction problem—just ask your sales rep at the bar.

Stop Confusing Your Spec Sheet with Your Soul

Posted on by Emotive Brand

The Tech Leader’s Guide to Positioning That Actually Positions

Every tech leader has felt that moment when your breakthrough feature becomes everyone’s baseline. If you have built your brand on that feature, congratulations; you have just become a commodity. This is the risk when product positioning and brand positioning get blurred. The smartest tech leaders keep them separate.

The Distinction That Moves Markets

Product positioning defines fit and fight: where your solution exists, who it serves, and how it wins now. It is the sharpened edge you bring to a specific competitive moment.

Brand positioning is about meaning and momentum. It defines the emotional territory you claim, the belief you champion, the purpose that drives you, and the conviction that endures through each release cycle. It is why you exist and why people should follow you.

Mixing them does not create synergy. The result is a house of cards; impressive at first, but quick to collapse under pressure.

Why Tech Keeps Getting This Wrong

Tech has a logic bias. We love specs, comparisons, and charts that say faster, cheaper, or more secure. (We also love an MQ. Guilty.) In categories where feature advantages evaporate quarterly, a brand built on features is a brand built on melting ice. On the other side, a lofty anthem with no product truth is just noise. When your brand says forever and your roadmap says next quarter, customers feel the gap.

The Synergy of Separation

The best tech companies keep product and brand positioning distinct, then make them work together.

Product positioning provides proof. Every feature, launch, and success story becomes evidence for your greater promise.

Brand positioning supplies context. As you expand or pivot, the brand keeps customers oriented and invested.

Nvidia is a prime example. Product positioning centers on GPUs that outperform for gaming and high-performance compute. Brand positioning presents Nvidia as the engine of the AI revolution. Today, Nvidia is the heartbeat of an industry, powering everything from autonomous vehicles to generative AI.

Snowflake’s product positioning focuses on cloud-native data warehousing with separate compute and storage. The brand positioning frames it as the Data Cloud, turning infrastructure into a movement about connecting data. They did not just win a category; they named one.

Databricks defines its product as a unified data and AI platform built on open lakehouse architecture. Its brand makes the bigger promise: democratizing data intelligence. Product credibility through open source, brand credibility through inclusion.

OpenAI keeps product and brand clear. Product positioning is about models that outperform. Brand positioning is about shaping the responsible, powerful future of AI. Even those who never code know what OpenAI stands for.

BlackBerry is the cautionary tale. Its secure, enterprise-ready smartphones once dominated until the market moved on. The brand story was never bigger than the product, and when the feature edge dulled, the brand faded too. If you stand only for a product, you fall with it.

Rational Markets, Emotional Buyers

In B2B, people make high-stakes decisions under pressure. They want partners, not just platforms; confidence, not just specs. Emotion does not replace logic. It focuses it. When a CTO chooses Snowflake, they’re buying performance. But they’re also buying confidence that their data strategy won’t need defending in two years.

Architecture Without Hand Waving

Here is a practical way to align, keeping product and brand distinct:

  • Carve out the brand territory. Name the change you exist to make and the feeling you deliver. Write it so a human would agree, not a committee. If it sounds generic, revise it.
  • Define the product battles. For each product, specify whom it is for, whom it competes against, and why you are the right choice now. Make the competitive choice clear.
  • Build two bridges: from brand to product, translate the promise into proof pillars; from product to brand, roll up feature wins into the promise.
  • Instrument both layers. Track pipeline, adoption, and win-loss at the product level; track advocacy, affinity, and pricing power at the brand level. Different dashboards, shared decisions.

What This Looks Like

Snowflake owns separate compute and storage. But it also owns the Data Cloud. Nvidia makes GPUs. But it is the engine of AI. One wins quarters. The other wins decades.

The Transformation Imperative

Tech loves disruption. Advantage now comes from coherence, evolving products quickly without losing the plot. Product positioning is how you win today. Brand positioning is why customers choose you after competitors copy everything.

Review your current positioning. If it sounds like everyone else in your category, you don’t have positioning—you have a participation trophy.

Write the brand positioning that your competitors cannot say. Then launch the features that prove it.

In technology, real strength is found in the handshake between conviction and capability, proven release after release.

The Unstoppable Rise of Emotion

Posted on by Emotive Brand

Why branding with emotion is the rational choice

Neuroscience and industry research reveal that emotion drives decision-making. Now more than ever, in a hyper competitive marketplace shaped by profound social and cultural shifts, leaning on cut-and-dry logic will only fall flat.

Because no matter the generation or income, sector or product, whether B2B, B2C or 501(c)(3)—all of us are human. And emotion is what moves us. It’s only logical.

Read the white paper to learn:

  • Why emotion is good for business, driving action and outcomes
  • The barriers preventing more widespread use of emotion
  • How organizations can leverage emotion to grow

Emotive Brand white papers aim to ignite understanding of how organizations of all kinds can spark connection, cultural change, and business results through strategic use of emotion.

We hope you are inspired to harness the power of emotion to supercharge your leadership.

Redefining What it Means to be a B2B Technology and AI Branding Firm

Posted on by Emotive Brand

This year pushed us to refine how we work with B2B technology and AI companies to deliver brand positioning that resonates—tight budgets, big expectations, and the ever-present need to differentiate forced us to deliver smarter and stronger. The lessons we learned didn’t just challenge us—they made us better.

They sharpened how we deliver impact and aligned us even closer with our clients. And the outcomes? They speak for themselves. Here’s what we learned about speed, emotion, simplicity, and alignment—and how those lessons are driving real sustainable growth.

The Speed Trap

Speed is non-negotiable these days. Clients demand it, and we’ve gotten pretty good at delivering—getting them what they need, in the way they need it, and at the level of quality we’re known for. But here’s the thing: speed only works when it’s a team effort, and that means getting stakeholder engagement from the start.

What I’ve learned is this: you can’t wheel in your CEO at the end and expect them to be on board with your new brand positioning and strategy. If they’re part of the decision, they need to go on the journey with us. When that happens, speed isn’t just fast—it’s transformative. You get that unanimous “Yes, let’s launch this” kind of moment, where the team is aligned and energized. And that alignment often leads to bigger budgets, more opportunities, and an even greater impact.

The irony? Speed doesn’t mean less input—it means more. It requires buy-in, collaboration, and executive involvement at every stage. When that’s in place, speed becomes a strategy for not just delivering fast but for delivering bold, game-changing brand transformation.

Mergers and Acquisitions is an Emotional Journey

M&A is often framed as a numbers game—valuations, synergies, integrations. But what I’ve learned is that mergers aren’t just strategic—they’re deeply emotional. You’re asking people to let go of what they know, trust new teams, and find their place in a completely reimagined structure and company culture.

Here’s the truth: getting the product architecture right is where it starts. It’s not just a technical exercise—it’s about helping people see how their work fits into something bigger. Driving internal engagement takes empathy, emotional intelligence, and a lot of patience. When leaders and teams go on that journey together, you can move past the fear and resistance that derail so many mergers and acquisitions.

When the product and brand architecture is clear, everything else—company culture, brand positioning, and go-to-market strategy—starts to align. But if you skip this step, the whole thing falls apart. The real work of M&A isn’t just building a unified company—it’s building trust in what comes next.

Emotion as a Strategic Catalyst

For years, emotion was dismissed as soft or secondary to logic. But this year, I saw that narrative change. Leaders are finally recognizing that emotion isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a strategic force that drives brand growth, brand loyalty, and product innovation.

In B2B technology and AI especially, emotion plays a critical role. It’s what builds trust, inspires confidence, and creates the kind of connection that sets your brand apart. Decisions in this space carry personal and professional risk—people don’t just want rational benefits, they need to feel like they’re making the right choice.

What I’ve learned is that emotion isn’t optional anymore. It’s how you differentiate in a crowded market. It’s how you connect with your team and customers on a deeper level. And it’s how you transform your brand from something people notice into something they believe in.

Great Work Comes From Great Partnerships

I’ve always believed trust is the foundation of great work, but this year reinforced just how important it is. The best projects weren’t just about deliverables—they were about partnerships built on trust and mutual respect.

When leaders let us in—when they trust us to challenge their thinking on brand strategy and positioning and push them toward their biggest ambitions to achieve sustainable growth—that’s when the magic happens. These partnerships didn’t end when the project wrapped—they stayed connected. They came back to us for advice, shared their wins, and asked for guidance on new challenges.

The takeaway? The best work happens when you stop treating the relationship as transactional. It’s not just about the results you deliver—it’s about the trust you build along the way.

The Hard Truth About Simplicity

Everyone says they want simplicity. Clients want clear brand positioning, differentiated product positioning, cohesive product and brand architecture, and straightforward brand narratives. But here’s the hard truth: simplicity isn’t hard because it’s complex—it’s hard because it means letting go.

Letting go of old narratives. Letting go of the way things have always been sold. Letting go of the familiar and embracing something new. That’s emotional—there’s fear in leaving behind what feels safe, even when it’s not working anymore.

But when you push through that resistance, simplicity becomes transformational. It sharpens your story, aligns your team, and makes your brand or platform truly customer-centric. Simplicity isn’t a shortcut—it’s a leap of faith. And when you take it, the impact is undeniable.

The hardest work isn’t about strategic frameworks or deliverables—it’s about getting to the heart of what matters. Simplifying complexity, building trust, and leaning into emotion aren’t easy, but they’re where real transformation happens.

It’s Been a Year

This year brought challenges and clarity. For that, I’m grateful—grateful to our team, our clients, and mostly to my ride-or-die business partner and best friend for navigating it all with me. She just knows how to make shit happen.

Why Brand Positioning is Critical to Sustained Growth

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Power of Brand Positioning

Strong brand positioning has a great impact on the success of your business. It’s one of the clearest levers a company has for closing the gap between what it’s actually built and what the market currently recognizes, believes, and prices it as—what we call the Belief Gap. A company can have real product, real customers, and real momentum, and still be misunderstood, undervalued, or compared against the wrong peers if its positioning hasn’t kept pace. But many product-proven companies struggle with how best to position themselves and communicate why they matter. Getting this right is hard, but critical. And if you fail at this, your customers won’t know whether to buy from you or your competitors.

In short, positioning is the process of distinguishing your brand from your competitors in meaningful ways. It’s about what you offer, what value you deliver, and what place you hold in your target audience’s mind. Defining a clear positioning allows you to control how the market perceives you and better positions your product and/or service to be more convincing and attractive in that market.

Dynamic Markets = Shifts in Positioning

Markets, in their very nature, are dynamic—always shifting and progressing. Many businesses spend a lot of time, focus, and energy properly positioning their brand in the current market. And that alone is hard to get right. But what many businesses fail to do is reassess their brand positioning down the road as needed.

Markets change. New competitors enter. And companies develop and deploy new products, features, and benefits constantly. Note that maintaining your positioning doesn’t necessarily ensure your brand will be relevant in the future. Your positioning needs to last in a dynamic environment.

Examining your positioning can ensure you situate your business as the first and best choice in your market. So when you are evaluating your current positioning, ask the following questions about your brand:

Is Your Brand Positioned to…?

Compete? A strong frame of reference helps the people who matter to your success understand, recognize, and embrace your meaningful difference. In order to assess if you need to shift your positioning, look to your competitors. Who do your target audiences compare your brand with and how do you compete? What is the best way to position your brand against the new competition? This is where a specific, recognizable pattern shows up: being seen as a follower—where a company has the capability to lead its category, but a competitor with a clearer, more consistently understood position gets the credit for defining it. Leadership isn’t determined by innovation alone; it also depends on recognition.

Help people value your brand? Once people understand your brand, your positioning should make your brand more meaningful to them. To create meaning, you need to have a deep understanding of your target markets. Have their behaviors, mindsets, values, needs, interests, fears, frustrations, joys, and dreams shifted? Does your positioning still feel right to the people who matter to your business? So work on creating simple and significant positioning that you tailor to your brand’s target markets. Positioning that doesn’t adjust to and predict your customer’s needs will struggle to stay relevant today.

Make informed decisions? Your brand positioning should act as a strategic north star. To make sure of this, consider whether your employees and leaders use your positioning to guide their strategic decisions. If your leaders are not making strategic decisions that are consistent with your positioning, it’s time to shift and get aligned. When you use positioning to make long- and short-term decisions, your brand will be more competitive and adaptable. So keep in mind that positioning that succeeds in the long term always leaves room for growth. Here’s why that inconsistency matters more than it might seem. When your own leaders aren’t pulling from the same positioning, it doesn’t stay an internal problem for long. Sales tells one story about who you are. Marketing tells another. Your website reflects an earlier chapter of the business, while your investor deck reflects a newer one. None of these stories is necessarily wrong on its own—but none of them is the whole picture, either. From the outside, this is what it looks like to be seen in fragments: the market can’t assemble one coherent understanding of your company, not because anyone lied, but because no one inside is working from the same script.

Stand apart? Your brand positioning should provide an understandable, identifiable, and meaningful picture of your brand. This picture is what makes you different from your competitors. What are your points of difference? Have they changed with the market? What do your target markets and internal teams recognize as your key difference today? Is it a sustainable differentiating factor? Make sure you work to own the space that could set you apart.

Positioning Your Brand For the Future

Positioning is a powerful tool for setting your business up to thrive. It will help drive growth and build a business resilient enough to endure shifts in the market. So work to ensure it’s designed to maximize the relevance of how and why your company matters to the people who are important to sustaining its growth and profitability.

Differentiation in today’s overcrowded marketplace is critical for growth and for businesses to cut through the clutter to survive. As a result, you must take the time to get it right. Focusing on it is the best way to ensure your business is positioned for sustained growth. And for your brand, focusing on positioning is the best way to find a meaningful space in the hearts and minds of the people vital to your success.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work? 

Move On: The Magic Quadrant Should Not Guide Your Brand

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

If you’re a CEO, Founder, or Marketer at a B2B technology or AI company, you might have read that headline and thought, “What do you mean I shouldn’t care about the Magic Quadrant? I’ll take a Vendor Briefing call on vacation if I have to!”

Sure, tech companies strive for a mention in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant—or better yet, placement in the top right corner as a “Leader.” Gartner’s Magic Quadrant will tell you whose product sits on the cutting edge of the technology, identify the ankle biters, show who’s falling behind, and identify the leaders in a category. That recognition matters as you develop your product.

But the Magic Quadrant should not guide your brand.

We get it. Placement in the Magic Quadrant means PR, recognition, and—hopefully—bragging rights. But if you focus your brand on winning the Magic Quadrant, you’ll miss many opportunities to develop something truly unique and compelling. The Magic Quadrant can help shape how the market sees you, but it’s only one part of that picture. Your brand has a much bigger job: making sure what people recognize from the outside reflects the company you know you’ve built. When those two things drift apart, you have what we call a Belief Gap.

Here’s the thing. Gartner rates companies on their “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision.” These are product and company measurements. As we’ve written about before, product marketing is not brand marketing. Product marketing focuses on features and benefits, speeds and feeds, and even ROI.

Branding, on the other hand, describes how your company makes a name for itself. It starts with conviction—what’s fundamentally true about your company—and the emotional impact you want people to feel as a result. From there comes positioning: the phase where you carve out your space in the market. Great positioning communicates the one thing you want people to know about your brand and explains how you are truly differentiated, relevant, and singular in nature. Brand marketing, done right, gives people something to believe in. And when done properly, it is tightly connected to your product.

By its nature, brand positioning can’t happen in a vacuum. That’s why when we develop a company’s brand strategy, we consider players in their competitive set. But when we compare all competitors, we don’t just do so in terms of technology, we compare it at a brand level.

We look at each company’s implied positioning, category, brand messaging, and voice/personality. We decipher what the brand says it does, how it does it, and when we can—why it matters. Of course, we don’t get an inside look at their brand platform. We can, however, get a sense of how they want to be understood by the market.

Once we’ve audited all competitors, including companies that play in adjacent markets, we map them. Not surprisingly, we see most companies’ brand positioning gravitate towards product benefits. For instance, we recently worked with a product-proven company introducing AI for network management—one that advanced an older, on-prem solution. A majority of their competitors focus on product functionality. They claim to “prevent outages” and “increase visibility”; several explain how they “facilitate integration” and help “manage digital transformation” and “movement to the cloud.” A few spoke about how they bring “innovation” and “category reinvention” and others mentioned NetOps “empowerment.” But none of them expressed themselves at a brand level.

We, however, had visions beyond functional benefits. And the area where we hoped to own, we confirmed, was white space in the market. This is where the company will focus its positioning. Not only will they appeal to their customers’ emotions but they will also stake a claim as the first company that connects their brand to real business outcomes.

So the next time you’re thinking about brand recognition, let the Magic Quadrant be an input to your work, not the end game. Looking at your competitors’ brands, not functionality will allow you to find white space in the market. From there, you’ll develop a compelling, ownable brand that stands the test of time, regardless of what features you add in the future.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies.

Brand Positioning: Why Now?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Reasons to Invest in Brand Positioning

There are many reasons why a brand might need to invest in brand positioning. In our work, we see businesses thinking about repositioning for many reasons. Sales might be declining. Your target audience may have shifted. You may have realized you’re targeting the wrong people. Your product roadmap has evolved. Competitors may have entered your space and you can’t seem to differentiate your value. Maybe customers even perceive your brand as outdated or irrelevant. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a number of ecosystems overcrowding. As a result, it’s almost impossible to differentiate one brand from another. This makes it hard for continued growth and even harder to get the valuations most companies are looking for.

There is a diverse array of reasons to consider a brand positioning project for your business. Investing in brand positioning can better situate your business to achieve the business goals you are looking to achieve.

So, Is it Time to Reposition?

Even outside the volatile technology world, many companies are repositioning as a result of market shifts, emerging technology, and ruthless competition. It’s hard to know when it’s the right time to reposition. Be cognizant of whether your brand is working hard enough to support the kind of growth you are looking for. Look for early warning signs and don’t disregard a slowdown. Here are some top signs that indicate it might be time to reposition:

  • Your category is outdated or no longer fits the projection of your business.
  • You aren’t reaching the people you need to, or your key audiences have shifted.
  • The market is defining you differently than how you want to be defined.
  • Your business is no longer aligned to your brand strategy.
  • Your messaging is inconsistent and not doing the work you need it to.
  • Growth has stalled.
  • You are being out-marketed, out-branded, and out-sold.

Investing in a brand positioning project could be one of the best returns on investment for your business and your brand—driving growth, fostering alignment, and situating your business and brand to thrive in even the most competitive of landscapes.

Brand Positioning, Done Right

Positioning your business correctly helps separate your brand from its competitors. Because getting to the heart of customers’ rational and emotional needs situates your brand to hold more meaning with the people whom you want to reach, you allow your brand’s value to ring true and de-position even your strongest competitors. Clearly articulating your inherent distinction as a brand is valuable. It enables your business to always be on the offense.

Strong positioning also helps define where you stand as a brand. By creating focus and resolution around where you stand, you elevate your value proposition and drive ROI.

Brand positioning requires understanding your target audiences and their needs, identifying your category, and being incredibly clear about what you do, how you are different, and what value you deliver that nobody else can. So by developing a strong brand positioning, you enable everyone within your company to execute in their roles more easily.

In addition, rolling out a clear brand positioning externally will help your stakeholders understand your value proposition more clearly. You’ll find that this clarity will motivate your sales and marketing teams with a renewed energy. You will see revenues climb again and you’ll meet business goals with greater ease.

Customers’ needs will shift and sales challenges will occur. As things shift and challenges arise (and they will), having a strong stake in the market with your new brand position will help your business keep pace—delivering exactly what your business needs to create a dynamic, adaptable, and agile brand.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm for product-proven B2B technology and AI companies, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.