7 Frameworks To Help You Develop Your Brand Positioning

Your brand positioning is the way you shape the perception of your company in the minds of your target customers, setting you apart from your competitors in the marketplace. It defines the unique value, benefits, and personality your company or product offers. 

Brand positioning is important because it helps you differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace, attract the right audience, build customer loyalty, and justify your pricing. Effective brand positioning helps guide all your marketing efforts and serves as a strategic basis for decision making and company operations.

Building your brand positioning

When I work with clients to craft their brand positioning, I start with three critical inputs:

• Market context - what is important about the market in which the company operates - what is going on with customers, competitors, and in the broader business landscape?
• Business context - what is important about the company or product - what is their purpose, what problems do they solve, what sets them apart?
• Target audience - who is the ideal customer? What is important to this customer, and what motivations or pain points can the brand solve for them? What are their buying and product usage behaviours?

Using this information, you can get to the core of what's special about your brand that sets you apart from competitors and connects you with your customers. This forms the basis for your unique value proposition (UVP), unique selling proposition (USP), and your brand positioning statement.

Based on this, you can frame out your brand positioning, your brand persona, and your key messages.

But how do you develop these inputs to begin the process?

Start with market research, audience research, and internal fact-finding within your organization. You can also use AI to find some of this info for you, but be careful to double check its sources to make sure the information is accurate.

Once you have your raw data, here are some of the frameworks I like to use to develop the inputs for my clients’ brands:

Clarifying your market context

To understand your market context, you want to know what is going on in the marketplace and what your competitors are doing that might impact your business.

The following frameworks can help you categorize that information and think about how it could affect you:

PESTEL analysis:

PESTEL analysis examines the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal factors that impact your market. To perform a PESTEL analysis, research each category and identify relevant trends and potential disruptions. 

For example:

• Under "Political," you might consider new regulations;
• Under "Economic," government tariffs;
• Under "Social," consumer trends;
• Under "Technological," new AI applications;
• Under “Environmental,” changing climate conditions in your market;
• And under “Legal,” data privacy regulations (ex: CASL or CCPA) impacting how you can collect and use your customers' information.

This analysis helps you think about the external environment that your brand positioning will exist within.

Perceptual map:

A perceptual map visually represents how your brand and competitors are perceived by customers. Typically, it uses two key attributes (ex: price and quality) to create a quadrant. Plot your brand and competitors on the map based on your understanding of your customer’s perceptions. 

This helps you identify gaps in the market and opportunities to differentiate your brand.

A perceptual map of John Deere compared to its competitors in the push mower category. Image credit: Tim Lewis et. al.

These tools inform the market context by providing a structured understanding of the external landscape, allowing you to identify opportunities and threats, and to see where your brand fits within the competitive environment.

Defining your business context

Your business context is the situation inside of your company. What do you do, and what problems do you solve for your customers? What do you stand for? What is your organization good at, and where might you fall short?

These frameworks give you a clear picture of your company, so that you can communicate it to your customers:

Mission, vision, and values:

Your mission, vision, and values define your company’s purpose, aspirations, and guiding principles. Your mission statement explains why your company exists. Your vision statement outlines your ideal long-term future. Your values articulate the core beliefs that guide your company’s actions. Crafting these foundations for your organization helps to define your brand’s core identity and direction.

SWOT analysis:

SWOT analysis examines your company’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal aspects of your company (positive and negative) that are within your control, while opportunities and threats are the external context (positive and negative) that could impact your company, such as the forces uncovered in your PESTEL analysis. This provides a clear picture of your company’s current position and potential for growth.

These tools inform your business context by providing a clear understanding of your company's internal capabilities and external opportunities, ensuring that your brand positioning aligns with your core values and strategic goals.

Understanding your target audience

The most important information for developing your brand positioning is a deep understanding of your customers.

Your brand positioning is designed to communicate to your customer how your company meets their needs or solves their problems, so you want to have a clear sense of what those problems are and what your audience cares about.

These frameworks help you understand your audience's needs and behaviours, and lets you figure out what messaging will resonate with each customer group:

Empathy mapping:

Empathy mapping helps you understand your target audience’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It involves creating a visual representation of what your customer says, thinks, feels, and does. This helps you gain deeper insights into their motivations and pain points.

Customer journey mapping:

Customer journey mapping visualizes the steps your customer takes when interacting with your brand, from initial awareness to post-purchase support. Identifying touchpoints and potential pain points along the journey allows you to optimize the customer experience.

A customer journey map helps you understand your customer's needs and behaviours at different stages of their buyer journey. Image credit: Visual Paradigm

Segmentation:

Segmentation divides your target market into distinct groups based on shared characteristics. Common segmentation variables include demogeographic (ex: age, location), firmographic (ex: company size, industry), psychographic (ex: values, lifestyle), and behavioural (ex: purchase habits, product usage patterns) that are relevant to your business. This enables you to tailor your messaging and offerings to specific customer groups based on their needs.

Segmenting your audience lets you target different customer groups with products, promotions, and messages that meet their needs. Image credit: OptiMine

These tools help you understand your target audience by providing a detailed view of your ideal customer, their needs, their beliefs, and their behaviors, allowing you to create a brand positioning that resonates with them.

How a marketing strategist can help

Don't know where to start? A marketing strategist like me can help. 

I’ve helped develop dozens of brands across industries like agriculture, food, energy, industrial services, manufacturing, travel and tourism, and more. My fine-tuned toolkit and deep expertise can help you build a brand that stands out from your competitors and connects with your customers.

I also offer additional services like market and audience research to help you understand your audience and marketplace, as well as fractional marketing strategy and management services to help you with the planning and implementation of your brand within your organization. 

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more!

The right tools for building your brand

Using these tools, you can understand your target customer, the market environment you are operating, and finally the aspects of your business (both positive and negative) that set you apart from your competition. 

With this foundation, you can establish a brand positioning that truly sets you apart and resonates with your customers, allowing for stronger brand recognition, increased customer loyalty, and ultimately, helping drive business results.