Part of the branding process is working out your brand position. Brand position is all about where your brand currently sits in your market place and where you want it to sit in your marketplace against your competitors.

By talking to your customers and also relevant focus groups you can build up a picture of where your brand sits within the marketplace. This can be visualised by plotting the results on a graph. The 2 axis used in this example are, value against luxury and traditional against innovation.

Is your product/service a luxury item, or is it more of a commodity (value). Also is a traditional product or a more cutting edge innovative product/service.

Also you need to plot your competitors on the graph, to see where they are in the market place and identify any gaps in the market. Then we can plot were we want to be in the marketplace as part of the overall brand of our product. There are no wrong or right answers, it just a matter of understanding your brand, it’s strengths and then playing to the strengths. You may find through this exercise that your product/service is undervalued in the market-place, your marketing is not getting the message across. You can then address the problem and measure the returns.

Once this is established and complete, we can use it as part of out brand strategy to inform our clients and potential clients on where we sit within the market. This is just one example of brand positioning, there are many other techniques, which can be used and depending on your business, some are more effective than others.

Most marketing uses brand positioning as part of its message, but sometimes we see examples of brand positioning, being the message. Below is an examples of this in practice.

Clover

Below is the clover advert recently launched in the UK. The ad is a great example of brand positioning. In fact is pretty blatant. The ad is all about the product being in the middle between, butter and margarine, taking the best of both and combining them in to 1 product. Positioning it separate from it’s competition (butter products and margarine products) and creating it’s own category, so it becomes no.1 in that category.