Brand Position Statement

Brand Position Statements provide the most useful function of taking everything you know about your brand, everything that could be said about the consumer and making choices to pick one target that you’ll serve and one brand promise you will stand behind. While we think this brand positioning statement sets up the creative brief, it should really set up everything the brand does–equally important for internal as everyone should follow to what the positioning statement says.

Quality brands know who their customer is and, just as importantly, who it is not. Everything starts and ends with the Consumer in mind. Spreading your limited resources across an entire population is cost prohibitive–low return on investment and low return on effort. While targeting everyone “just in case” might feel safe at first, it’s actually less safe because you never get to see the full impact. Realizing not everyone can like you is the first step to focusing all your attention on those that can love you. It becomes all about choices and you will be much more effective at convincing a segment of the population to choose your brand because of the promise that you have that matches up perfectly to what they want.

This is why we complete the consumer persona at the outset of any project.

A market segment is a group of products that share common characteristics. For instance, there are premium carbonated products like Pepsi and Coke and their are value carbonated products like store branded sodas. In addition, you can have organic, natural and high fructose everything segments. Companies products can be further segments as green technology, diesel and regular gas powered cars. You get the point. What is you products market?

The next decision is the main benefit you want to focus on. Developing a Value Proposition helps to organize your thinking.

Hold a brainstorming session with your partners and determine the following:

1. What is the customer segment in need of?
2. Match them up against the list of the best features the brand offers. Do you have something that meets their needs?
3. Find the rational benefit by putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer and seeing the brand features from their eyes: start asking yourself over and over again “so if I’m the consumer, what do I get from that?”. Ask it five times and you’ll see the answers will get richer and richer each time you ask.
4. Then find the emotional benefit by asking “so how does that make me feel?” Ask that five times as well, and you’ll begin to see a deeper emotional space you can play in and own.

For instance, no one really cares that a golf club has 5.7% more torque. When you ask what do I get from that, the better answers are longer drives or lower scores or winning a tournament. These are rational benefits. When you ask how does that make you feel, the emotional space is confidence and optimism. This is the emotional benefit.

Ultimately, you are looking to scale everything back to JUST ONE BENEFIT! Yeah, you are going to focus on communicating ONE BENEFIT!

Finding the Value Proposition

Brands are either better, different or cheaper. Or not around for very long. The key is to find a unique selling proposition for your brand. You don’t always need to find a rational point of difference as long as there is room to be emotionally unique.

Here’s how the above graphic works (its the ultimate venn diagram)

Map out everything your consumer wants–all the possible need states. Then map out all the benefits that you and your competitors can do better than anyone else – consider both functional and emotional. You want to find that intersecting zone where what you can do best matches up to a need state of the consumer. Then find a way to serve that need state to the best of your ability and transform it into an even bigger deal than first meets the eye. The fact is you have to win the overlapping zone where your brand performs well and consumer want something.

The battle ground zone is where both you and your competition can satisfy the consumer need at an equal rate. There is only way to win this zone. "Yeah, we do that too but what you really want is the overlapping zone where your brand performs well and consumer want something."

The reasons to believe are really simple. These are the reasons the owner has come to believe the product is superior to the competition. If you are a small business owner this is really easy because you have devoted your life to building something on the foundation of the Reason's to Believe. However, if you are a marketer, finding the reasons to believe is usually as simple as talking to a couple of people running the company who have real passion and belief in what they are doing.

LEGO’s brand name comes from the Danish phrase “Leg godt”, which means “play well”. LEGO coincidentally means "I put together" in Latin.

While most people probably view LEGO as just one of several major toy brands — in fact LEGO describes itself as the “world's third largest manufacturer of play materials” — anyone that has built with its signature bricks knows that it isn’t just a brand meant to entertain children. LEGO is in a category of its own because of what it makes possible: the opportunity to create.

The value proposition plays on the why, not the what. What for Lego is blocks that can be constructed in the form of buildings, Star Wars scenes, spaceships, etc. Why is the opportunity to create or Inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.

The value proposition for LEGO then is a consistent and quality building material that enable the creation of new things.

Brand Position Statement

1. Customer Segment - Boys and Girls whose parents value creativity and learning, primarily from the ages 5-12 in Western Europe and North America
2. Definition of the Market - Building and cross promotional products within the toy industry.
3. Value Proposition - Building blocks that can be constructed in the form of buildings, Star Wars scenes, spaceships, etc. with the opportunity to create or inspire the builders of tomorrow.
4. Reasons to Believe
   • Lego reached 100 million customers in 2015
   • Reported revenue of about $5.2 billion
   • 2nd largest toy maker in the world
   • licensed products with Disney, Star Wars, and Marvel

Additional Reading

• Writing a Brand Positioning Statement by Graham Robertson
• How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement by Beloved Brands

Vocabulary

• Brand Positioning Statement

Student Activity

Create a brand position statement in the following groups:

1. Lulu
2. Athletica
3. Nike
4. Under Armor
5. Adidas
6. New Balance
7. Asics