These strategies can help position your brand and improve your customer base.
In highly competitive markets, it can be a challenge to position your brand in a way that underscores your value proposition and attracts customers. As you define how your consumers perceive your brand, you cement a distinct brand image and form an authentic connection with your customers. By demonstrating the personal benefit of your offering, you can earn their business and loyalty.[1]
To make it easier to get your brand positioning just right, we will discuss what brand positioning is, why it's important, and eleven strategies you can use to position your brand.
What is brand positioning?
Brand positioning involves carving out a unique space for your brand in the minds of your target market. A brand positioning strategy involves systematically influencing how customers perceive your brand, specifically emphasizing how it's different from your competitors. Companies often express this using a brand positioning statement, which outlines the most important facets of your brand's position in the market.
What is the goal of brand positioning? For small-to-midsize business (SMB) leaders, brand positioning is the most straightforward way to convey the value and uniqueness of a product. This is because no single brand can be all things to all people. Because your competition has to occupy a certain space in the minds of your customers, by positioning your brand differently, you can emphasize its unique value add and attract your own customer following.
It's relatively easy to see brand positioning at work in the automotive sector. Toyota is one of the best brand positioning examples. The car company uses both quality- and price-based strategies:
Quality. Toyota promotes itself as a producer of reliable, long-lasting vehicles. For instance, in a recent ad campaign, a young couple zips by an "old lady" that appears to be broken down in a 1970s Toyota Corolla. They justify leaving her in the dust with a tongue-in-cheek, "Have you ever seen a Corolla broken down?"
Price. Toyota's vehicles often feature price tags far lower than comparable cars. Consider the 2024 GR Corolla, for example.[2] It costs $36,000, which is $8,795 less expensive than the BMW 330i, even though the Beemer has less horsepower.[3]
Using these and other brand positioning strategies, Toyota creates a consistent image in the minds of car buyers, making it easier to stand out from the competition.
Why is brand positioning important?
Brand positioning is important because it conveys your offering's value while making it easier to differentiate yourself from the competition. This enables you to:
Compete with other leaders in your sector. Because your brand positioning distinguishes your products from the competition, you make it easier for customers to pick you over the others.
Aim your marketing at a specific target audience. Each target audience reads different things online, watches different videos, follows different social media influencers, and indulges in unique reading material. When you use brand positioning to pinpoint your target market, you know exactly which channels to use to optimize your marketing strategy.
Generate brand loyalty. With brand positioning, you can deliver consistent messaging and then back it up with equally consistent customer experiences. Over time, this breeds trust and brand loyalty.
To convey how a brand sits in relation to competitors, many use a brand positioning map, which is a visual method of showing how consumers perceive a brand. It shows how a brand's attributes and customer base are different from those of its competition.
Brand positioning can also reduce the chances of your brand getting misrepresented, which can lead to reputational damage. This makes it a vital approach for many companies, especially considering 57% of marketers have witnessed either critical or defamatory content about their brands on social media.
Types of brand positioning strategies
What is brand positioning in marketing? As a marketer, you can use a combination of multiple brand positioning strategies, choosing from any of the following:
Price-based strategy
A price-based strategy involves putting your brand in a specific price bracket. You then deliver the kind of quality that meets or beats the expectations of buyers who can afford that price point.
Returning to the car market, BMW is known for offering higher-priced cars. People who can afford BMWs expect the car manufacturer to come true on its brand promise of giving customers "Sheer driving pleasure." Using precise engineering tested in consumer focus groups, race tracks, and wind tunnels, BMW strives to meet the expectations of those who are willing to shell out a few extra thousand for a car.
Quality-based strategy
A quality-based strategy emphasizes the quality of a product by highlighting its:
Reliability
Strong or long-lasting components
Performance after years or even decades of use
Consistently high customer satisfaction scores
Premium features, such as bells and whistles, make it easier or more pleasurable to use
Customer service strategy
A customer service strategy focuses on delivering a unique, superior customer service experience. For example, Starbucks personalizes each cup of coffee and encourages baristas to remember their customers' favorite cups of joe.
While Dunkin Donuts may not go to the same lengths, they're known for delivering coffee quickly, even making service timers visible to customers.
While these two customer service strategies are different, they effectively carve out a space in customers' minds.
Convenience strategy
A convenience strategy is all about optimizing user experiences in ways that make it easy for them to incorporate your product into their daily lives. For example, a winning convenience strategy may involve:
Making your products accessible. For instance, you may choose to make it easy for anyone to order something online and get it within a few days.
Providing a simple solution. A simple solution is easy to understand, saving customers time by shrinking the learning curve.
Giving customers a streamlined user experience. This can encompass a straightforward purchasing process, a user-friendly website, fast checkouts, and providing fewer but more dependable features.
Prioritizing customers who are on the go. Delivering convenience for customers who spend a lot of time traveling centers around giving them grab-and-go options, mobile apps, simple, one-click ordering, and web pages that load quickly on mobile devices.
Differentiation from competitors
Differentiating yourself from competitors may involve purposely taking a different tack. For instance, Apple delivered on its slogan "Think Different" by getting rid of cumbersome, manual user interfaces and confusing on-screen alerts.
When you succeed in your differentiation strategy, you give customers a clearer choice between you and the competition.
Social media strategy
A social media brand positioning strategy aims to establish an active presence in the minds of specific groups of social media users. For example, a grocery chain may choose to target the Facebook group Cheap Meal Ideas, which has 5.3 million members.
At the same time, the same grocery chain may also choose to target demographic groups that subscribe to Cheap Meal Ideas. The company could also create branding that would resonate with those who have similar likes, vacation plans, jobs, or taste in movies as Cheap Meal Ideas users.
Value-based strategy
With a value-based strategy, your mission is to choose an affordable price point and then deliver the highest-quality products or services you can for that price. At times, this may involve sacrificing other potential brand positioning strategies so you can appeal to the value-minded consumer.
For example, if you've bought clothes at both Walmart and Bloomingdales, you may have experienced different levels of customer service, perhaps getting treated better at the latter than the former. But because of the value Walmart delivers at a lower price point, it still pulls millions of customers.
Benefit strategy
While using a benefit strategy, you highlight how your product helps customers in a unique way. For example, Juneshine Hard Kombucha is an alcoholic beverage with an interesting benefit—producers claim it's good for your health, specifically your gut, a benefit Juneshine customers are willing to pay for.[4]
Problem and solution
A problem and solution strategy hones in on a specific pain point your target customers may be facing. Home Depot is a good example of a brand that uses a problem-and-solution strategy. Before big box options like Home Depot emerged in the home improvement scene, people were often forced to go to several small hardware stores and home goods suppliers to check items off a lengthy weekend shopping list.
Home Depot made it possible to get everything you needed in one place, saving customers several hours of shopping.
Endorser-driven strategy
With an endorser-driven strategy, you choose a celebrity or influencer to sign off on or promote your brand. In this way, you piggyback off the brand image of the influencer, as your customer base presumes using your product contributes to the endorser's success.
For example, many may have assumed that basketball player Michael Jordan's success was at least partially due to eating Wheaties, donning Hanes, or wearing Nikes. (It's gotta be the shoes!)[5]
Leader-based strategy
A leader-based strategy focuses on positioning your company as a leader in a specific sector or market niche. Your target customer may then come to trust you based on the fact that others choose your offering over that of your competition.
Amazon is a good example, even though you can buy goods online at eBay, Target, or Walmart, many consider Amazon a leader in the e-commerce space. As such, Amazon can draw consumers who'd rather purchase from a company that has earned the patronage of many millions of others.[6]
Narrow your search for branding agencies with our list of companies in the following areas:
Next steps
You can use these 11 brand positioning strategies to choose the most effective ways of conveying your offering's value, differentiating yourself from others in your sector, and forming long-lasting connections with customers. With a systematic approach to positioning your brand, you can define a unique niche for your business, one that customers can depend on for a reliable, consistent experience.
Now that you know how to create a brand positioning strategy, your next step is to gain a deeper understanding of how brand storytelling works, as well as how to choose an agency that can handle it for you. Here are some resources that may help: