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Tag: Brand Positioning

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. But many high-growth 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?

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 northstar. 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.

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 important to sustain 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 agency in Oakland, California. Curious to see the results of our brand positioning work? 

Eight Questions to Evaluate the Strength of Your Brand

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Do you ever wonder about the strength of your brand? And its impact on your business? Do you monitor it and measure it? Do you evaluate it like you do for your business? If you wanted to know how it’s doing, would you even know what questions to ask? We’ve put together a quick diagnostic test to help CEOs assess when it’s time to for a strategic brand check-up.

Eight Questions to Ask Yourself to Evaluate the Strength of Your Brand

  1. Does your company have a purpose that your employees live up to every day? Is it meaningfully activated in your corporate strategy, inspiring how your business behaves, driving your brand, and most importantly, emotionally resonating with your employees?
  2. Does your brand have a distinctive brand positioning that sets it apart from competitors?
  3. Have you defined the right category for your brand that is right for today and tomorrow?
  4. Do your brand and product messaging cut through the clutter and resonate with your target audiences beyond just features and benefits?
  5. Does your company have a corporate narrative that tells your story to all your target audiences in a clear, compelling way? Is it still aligned to the business strategy and vision for the future? Is everyone in the company able to tell the same story?
  6. Does your company deliver on a clear and compelling brand promise to customers, employees, shareholders, and the world that they experience in a meaningful way?
  7. Does your company communicate in a characteristic brand voice that’s consistently applied by your people at all levels?
  8. Does your company have a visual brand identity with clear guidelines for consistent use at every touchpoint?

If you answered no to any of these questions, your brand might need a check-up.

It doesn’t hurt to check the strength of your brand, but it could hurt if you don’t.

For more information on how to evaluate the strength of your brand and understand its impact on your business, check out Fast Forward, an agile way to address your brand at the intersection of your business strategy, marketing efforts, and sales.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Move On: The Magic Quadrant Should Not Guide Your Brand

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

If you’re a startup CEO/Founder/Marketer, 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 who’s 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 building your brand on winning the Magic Quadrant, you will miss many opportunities to develop a truly unique and compelling brand.

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 positioning. This is 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, 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 gravitates towards product benefits. For instance, we recently worked with a startup 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 agency in Oakland, California.

Entering Your Growth Stage: Position Your Brand, Not Your Product

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

You just closed your Series A and you’re ready to share your story with the world. You built revolutionary technology that will be better, faster, cheaper—or all three—than anything else in the market. Now you need to hire top talent, build brand awareness, and equip your sales team to drive revenue. You know how innovative your technology is and you’re ready to create a new category.

With customers in beta and limited clear competitors, you’re likely tempted to focus solely on your product and how much better your product is than anything else on the market. But a strong product vision, budding features, and benefits aren’t enough to cut through the competitive space, lure top talent, and enable something more important to build. Leading solely with your product—even the most disruptive—is a mistake. We’ve seen this approach fail, time and again.

You’ve got to give people something bigger to believe in.

If you want to connect with your customers, partners, and prospective employees, you need to differentiate yourself with a well-developed brand. Lead with this brand and then punctuate with your product.

Positioning Beyond the Product

Positioning, the first step in branding, is about the space you carve out 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.

When we meet with founders, however, they often are focused only on the product. Product positioning is not the same as brand positioning. Product marketing focuses on features and benefits, speeds and feeds, and even ROI.

That is not enough to compete today.

Bringing the Outside In

Your brand positioning is an articulation of you as a company and your product: who you are, what you do, how do you do it better and different, why you matter, and—importantly—why anyone should care.

If you try to articulate your brand positioning by just looking at your product and direct competitors, your brand will fall short. You need to bring the outside in. The most important outsider to focus on first? Your prospective customer.

Yes, you’ve spent time with your customers. You’ve probably talked about the competitor offerings they’ve bought or considered. But do you have empathy for them? Many prospects say they’re interested in a “better” solution but when it comes down to purchasing, are they ready? Do you understand what it takes to displace a legacy solution? What does your buyer need to know and feel to have the confidence to do a rip and replace? To earn this confidence, you need a brand that stands for something meaningful and different.

Don’t limit your discovery work to how your brand compares to entrenched competitors. Empathy means understanding all of the demands on a customers’ time and wallet; it’s about a wide-angle view. The people in your target buyer audience have a long list of priorities for the year. Cloud migration, data replication, security—these corporate initiatives all vie for their attention and budget. Your brand needs to not only reflect the reality of your direct competitors but these other players too.

Additionally, take the time to look outside of your category. Learn from other technologies that have succeeded in similar situations—displaced legacy technologies, created net-new infrastructure, used AI or ML to solve the toughest of challenges. Data analytics, cloud migration, and modern data infrastructure plays are changing the technology landscape. You can learn a lot by extending your competitive evaluation beyond your expected primary competitive set.

Finally, tap your investors as a resource. If you‘ve made it to the launch date, your investors are a great external resource you can tap. They’ve seen many companies in your space—including direct competitors and adjacent players. Test your positioning and messaging with them and use them as you build your brand.

Pay Attention to Voice

What you say is important, but how you say it matters just as much—if not even more critical. Voice is an extension of your brand; when your voice matches the kind of brand you are building, magic happens. Take Snowflake, for instance. Snowflake came onto the scene with a product they marketed as a ”cloud data warehouse”. While this product name was new, the category “data warehouse” was not. Snowflake made a splash with cheeky messaging and a differentiated but predictable brand voice. They put up billboard messages like “Love at first petabyte”, “Mi Data Es Su Data”, “The Data Sharehouse Has Arrived” and “Ghost Your On-prem”. This voice strengthens the brand and creates more connections between the company and its audiences.

Make an Emotional Connection

Even if you are selling deep tech, you can’t ignore emotions. Customers don’t connect with features; they connect with an emotion that a product drives. Think about how a netops engineer will feel when they learn that your security product can stop 99% of all phishing scams. Will they experience relief? Will they feel powerful? Drill down to that idea and make sure your brand and your messaging reflect that emotion.

Give Them Something to Believe In

We’ve worked with many Series A companies that go to market with a solid brand but without a fully realized product. The company leads with an initial use case but, longer-term, they have much larger ambitions. Even so, their brand works for today and for the future.

Your brand can—and should—be aspirational. It should enable early adopters to buy into what you offer right now and communicate what customers will receive from you over time. A future-facing brand will also help attract talent; candidates want to work for a company with technology that has the potential for impact. And, an overarching brand can ignite a tribe of people who share your beliefs and will follow your brand as you grow and expand your offering.

Branding is not the time to be introspective. When you look outside, you develop empathy for your customers, understand their emotions, and take a wide view of your industry. An outside-in perspective helps you build a brand that can cut through the clutter, grab attention, and differentiate with meaning.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Branding for Internal Alignment

Posted on by Imri Larsen

Much has been written about the power of brand and its role in successful businesses. Brands can help a business build relevance and loyalty, but the process of brand building has value in and of itself. One of the most overlooked advantages of the process is how it can create internal alignment along the way.

Uncovering Difficult Truths 

Whether we are creating a new brand or refreshing an existing one, our first step is to gain a deep understanding of its dynamics among both internal and external audiences. We examine the various perspectives that exist within an organization through stakeholder interviews. We then talk to customers, read analysts’ reports, and dive deep into the reality of the product experience. Based on the learnings from this process, we land on a diagnosis.

This research often uncovers previously unknown and difficult truths that need to be faced about a business’s brand. Most of the time, the learnings will give voice to issues that everyone knows but no one has found a way to properly address. Recognizing this misalignment is where the real work begins.

Reconciling Differences 

A crucial part of creating a powerful brand comes from clearly articulating what your company does, how it provides value, and why it should matter (to customers or the world)… Sounds like it should be a pretty simple task, right? If it is easy for you, consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, the branding process highlights different, opposing perspectives.

As organizations grow and mature, it is natural for groups to become laser-focused on their own unique view of the company. Recently we were working with an international company that creates software for project management and visual collaboration. As we talked with the cofounders, head of marketing, and other key stakeholders, we noticed something wasn’t matching up. We quickly realized that there wasn’t a clear mission statement that employees could point to when asked about their purpose as an organization.

Before moving forward with articulating their positioning in the market, we worked with the CEO to express the company’s mission in a way that would help unify efforts across departments. Despite everyone’s best efforts to do their job and build success for the company, teams were getting caught in our own echo chambers. Sometimes it can be helpful to get an outside perspective.

A well-known case study of a brand with internal misalignment is Uber. In 2016, the ride-hailing company launched a new visual identity that left many users scratching their heads. The new design system had different app icons depending upon whether you were a driver or a passenger. Every city had its own system of colors, patterns, and photographic style. For those of us who were watching from the sidelines, it looked like they were saying nothing by trying to be everything.

In 2017, Uber’s dirty laundry was exposed for all to see. The company was accused of misleading regulators and taking advantage of customers with surge pricing. At the heart of the problem was a culture where mismanagement and competing interests threatened the future of the company. After purging leadership and thoroughly improving their culture, the company signaled its change by introducing the clean, simple, and transit-informed visual system they continue to use to this day.

Alignment Fosters Empathy

Once you are able to identify the different views that contribute to the misalignment, the first result is increased empathy. Maybe executive leadership didn’t understand how the broader organization was resistant to their vision for the future. Maybe product teams felt uncomfortable with claims being promised in-market. Whatever the case may be, this newfound understanding creates an environment where teams can start creating a better path forward together. Empathy proves to be the most effective way to communicate and foster change.

Once teams are on the same page, work like brand positioning, messaging, visual identity, and other programs can come to full fruition. More importantly, aligned teams create a singularly-focused brand that gets expressed consistently on the outside. And the more consistent the brand is externally, the more powerful it becomes.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Photo Credit: https://icons8.com

Positioning Testing: Is It Worth It? 

Posted on by Paige Lansing Valle

Now that data-driven decision making has become the norm in marketing, it’s shocking when a brand misses the mark so badly. As the Twitter-sphere implodes, everyone is wondering ‘What happened? Why didn’t they test with customers?’ Most brands do rely on some form of testing before launching an advertising campaign…and the ones that don’t pay the price.

But what about brand strategy? Is testing necessary before deploying a brand positioning? The answer isn’t one that data-driven organizations like to hear: it depends.

For some brand teams, it’s absolutely necessary to pause and gather external feedback before transitioning from positioning strategy to creative. With others, it’s better to wait until campaign creative is developed to engage in customer testing.

Before evaluating the pros and cons of testing, it’s important to consider what testing will and will not achieve so that you’re making an informed decision about whether or not to allocate budget and resources to the endeavor.

Clarifying the Role of Positioning Testing

Positioning is not copy. Positioning is not an externally-facing language. So, testing should not be about wordsmithing and linguistics. It should be about validating a concept. Ensuring it rings true and motivates your target audience.

Positioning isn’t everything about your brand. Positioning is a concise statement that expresses the most differentiated and relevant aspect of what your brand stands for and why it matters. It isn’t designed to encompass every brand attribute, value or differentiator. Testing needs to be evaluated through the lens of what the positioning is, not what it isn’t.

Quality over quantity. Although quantitative research is often thought of as the gold standard for measuring customer sentiment, positioning testing is more informative with qualitative research: in-depth, high-quality conversations. But some organizations are looking for hard numbers and qualitative data may not be valued.

Testing Benefits

For organizations that are data-driven, testing may be a necessary hurdle to create leadership buy-in around a new brand positioning. Testing can be particularly helpful if it’s used to gather validation data points that will move a leadership group or board forward.

It’s also a great opportunity to connect with existing customers and show that you value their input. Because existing customers are already sold on your brand, testing will help identify whether the new positioning comes across as authentic and believable compared with the brand they already know and love. Customers are also likely to be aware of competitive options and will be a good sounding board to ensure the positioning is differentiated.

And, while they won’t be asked to examine specific language, most people can’t help themselves. Although you should take feedback on semantics with a grain of salt, you will gain insights on the type of language they are attracted to or repelled by, which you can then consider when it’s time to translate the positioning into external copy.

Testing Risks

The biggest concern with testing is that gathering impartial feedback (and not just validation) can become expensive and time-consuming depending on the scale of the research. Sourcing participants who aren’t existing customers may require incentives and an external research partner for recruitment. But, if you just stick with existing customers, you’re likely speaking to your brand evangelists who are inherently biased. Sticking with existing customers means you’ll miss out on learning whether the positioning sets your brand up for growth.

Finally, positioning is conceptual and it’s hard to get definitive results. It’s no guarantee that your customers are conceptual thinkers. Most people respond with neutral feedback, which doesn’t really help you understand if you’ve got a winner or not.

There’s no wrong answer

While it may strain your timeline and budget, deployed under the right circumstances, testing can make your positioning stronger or more credible. As you progress along the brand strategy journey and into creative development and eventually execution, there are many opportunities for testing. Ensuring that you allocate the resources at the right points should be a collaborative process with your strategic partners from day one of your engagement.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

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 slow-down. 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 return on investments 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 who you want to reach, you allow your brand’s value to ring true and deposition 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 agency in Oakland, California.