You may not have heard about the elusive 5th ‘P’ of marketing – Positioning – but in today’s wildly competitive and increasingly digital world, it might just be the most powerful one of them all.
Traditionally, we think of marketing in terms of the 4 Ps – product, price, place, and promotion. But here’s the secret: brand positioning is the engine behind all four. It shapes how your offering is perceived, ensures consistent storytelling, and connects emotionally with your audience, whether you’re a fast-moving SaaS platform or a global industrial manufacturer.
And yes, positioning is just as crucial, compelling, and catalytic for a business that sells to other businesses (B2B) as it is for flashy consumer (B2C) brands. Done right, it will ripple outward, guiding your product design, pricing structure, promotional strategy, and distribution plan.
First Things First: What Is Brand Positioning?
Simply defined, brand positioning is how you want people to emotionally and logically perceive your product or service. It’s created through disciplined customer, market, and competitive research, with the goals of:
- Discovering the needs and desires of your customers
- Helping you understand the characteristics that distinguish your offering from others
The outcome of these efforts is a written brand positioning statement that ultimately guides all product, pricing, promotion, and place decisions. It leads to the development of externally facing customer messaging, and both positioning and messaging differentiate your product or service from the competition. In this way, effective brand positioning actually influences the four other marketing Ps to ensure a consistent strategy across the board.
Why Positioning Matters More Than Ever
You might think that traditional B2C branding giants like Coca-Cola or Nike have little in common with modern B2B brands like Slack, HubSpot, and Salesforce but you’d be astonishingly wrong.
All of them, whether decades-old or disruptively new, win because they nail one thing:
Brand positioning that captivates hearts, aligns with minds, and drives action.
“Your brand directly impacts growth” says Kate DiLeo, CEO and Brand Architect, “In fact, strong brand positioning creates the ‘you get me’ moment your target audiences need in order to take the next step and buy. It also aligns your sales and marketing efforts around a singular perspective and message. The outcome is better budget maximization, greater process and team efficiencies, and stronger customer acquisition. Bottom line: brand positioning affects not just your revenue, but your bottom line, too.”
B2B Case Studies You Can’t Ignore
Let’s spotlight two B2B examples that showcase how positioning isn’t fluff, it’s fuel.
3M (B2B/Industrial)
3M isn’t just a manufacturer, it’s a science-driven solutions company. Its positioning, “Science. Applied to Life,” captures how the brand turns complex research into simple solutions across industries like healthcare, transportation, and construction.
In evolving their positioning, 3M made the strategic shift from a product-centric manufacturer to a purpose-driven innovation leader. 3M had a portfolio of more than 60,000 products, but customers saw them as just a supplier. Through the process of developing new positioning, they realized the common thread across divisions was the application of science to solve practical problems. By aligning messaging with their innovation-first DNA and customer-focused mission, they created a unifying brand promise that resonated globally.
Instead of just listing products, 3M communicates purposeful innovation that improves lives and solves real-world problems.
Slack (B2B SaaS)
Slack changed how organizations think about internal communication. Rather than pitching itself as a messenger app, it positioned itself as “Where work happens.” This simple yet powerful phrase reframes Slack as a central productivity hub, not just a tool.
The insight came from watching how users actually used Slack, not just for messaging, but for sharing files, coordinating across time zones, and integrating with dozens of apps. Slack leaned into what their users were already doing and simplified the message to focus on workplace transformation. Their early adopters (mostly startups and tech teams) became evangelists, helping Slack build a strong community around its mission.
It speaks to collaboration, speed, and the new remote-first workplace.
These brands show that when your positioning speaks directly to your audience’s pain points and aspirations, you earn relevance and staying power.
How To Build a Rock-Solid Brand Position
Let’s break down the steps that successful companies like 3M and Slack often take in the positioning processes:
- Learn what their consumers want and desire
- Study what their competitors are and aren’t doing for those target customers (or at least not doing well)
- Identify their own product, production, and delivery strengths, plus areas of competitive weaknesses and opportunities
- Create brand messaging that engages consumers and motivates them to buy
One way to approach this endeavor is to use your customer, competitive, and market research data as a base for developing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). This can help inform the development of distinctive brand positioning strategies that drive product, placement, pricing, and promotion.
Harvard Business School gives smart advice on how to write your brand positioning statement in this helpful article.
Here’s one approach you can use to create a strong positioning statement:
For [target customer], [brand/product] is the [category] that [differentiator] because [reason/proof].
Example:
For modern, distributed teams and organizations struggling with fragmented communication and tool overload, Slack is the digital workplace platform that brings people, tools, and conversations together in one place because it was designed from the ground up to streamline work, foster collaboration, and adapt to the pace of today’s digital-first world.
Final Thoughts
Positioning is no longer just about features or benefits. It’s about the role your brand plays in a noisy, fast-moving world. With AI, automation, and buyer self-service changing the landscape rapidly, your brand needs to:
- Communicate trust instantly
- Connect emotionally
- Show cultural and technological relevance
No matter your industry, size, or sales cycle, your brand positioning is your most potent weapon. Get it right, and you build loyalty, advocacy, and long-term growth.
The key to remember: Smart brand positioning can only happen when you have a thorough and deep understanding of your customers, competitors, and capabilities and follow through on those insights to create a winning strategy.
Not sure where to start? Get in touch to determine your company’s path to positioning that works.
