The 5th P in Marketing: Positioning Your Brand

You may not have heard about the 5th ‘P’ of marketing—Positioning, but it might just be the most important one.

Brand positioning drives the traditional 4 ‘P’s of marketing – product, price, place, and promotion – to deliver an offering that meets the needs and desires of customers. And yes, it’s as important for B2B as it is for B2C.

You might not think that the traditional giants of branding – the Coca Colas and P&Gs of the world– have much in common with today’s wildly successful startups, especially those offering B2B solutions. But they can all map their successes to one powerful commonality: great brand positioning strategies that win the hearts and minds of consumers.

They spend millions to get it right. Let’s find out why.

First Things First: What Is Brand Positioning?

Simply defined, brand positioning is how you want people to 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.

Brandwatch gives smart advice on how to write your brand positioning statement in this helpful article.

Two Killer Case Studies

The best way to understand brand positioning is to see it in action. Let’s look at two companies that have successfully positioned themselves against bigger, established companies – and achieved incredible success. While both brands are in the B2C sphere,  they set an excellent example for companies from any sector.

Dollar Shave Club

This 2011 men’s razor start-up did the impossible: it took on Gillette—the “best a man can get”—and identified areas where it could serve customers better.

Though some trace their success to a humorous YouTube video that went viral, experienced marketers see past the laugh lines and understand that Dollar Shave Club leveraged strategic opportunities in price ($1), packaging (easy-to-open), and place (online) to appeal to a younger audience. Ordering from this hip startup made customers feel like they were joining a cool men’s club instead of making another boring purchase at the supermarket.

The results? Five short years after they launched, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion.

Now that’s some powerful brand positioning!

Yellow Tail Wines

The notably snooty wine industry sells itself on complicated combinations of taste and price. Australia’s Yellow Tail Wines found mega success by just being approachable and fun.

Like Dollar Shave Club, Yellow Tail had a laser focus on their customer. They understood that many consumers, especially the younger demographics, were intimidated by the idea of buying a glass or a bottle of wine. Even the pronunciation of names like Riesling, Beaujolais – and a real tongue twister, Montepulciano – created a clear barrier to entry.

Yellow Tail centered on a positioning strategy that made wine approachable, easy-to-choose, and fun: a product with a smooth taste, a $10-per-bottle price, a memorable name, and a cute logo (a kangaroo).

The results? Yellow Tail became America’s second largest wine brand in 2015—ahead of the “old guard” brands like Gallo and Robert Mondavi. Cheers to that!

How They Did It

While these B2C brands are catchy and easily recognizable, their approach to brand positioning is universal and can be applied just as easily to biotech, engineering, healthcare, or any other B2B organization. Let’s unpack their success!

Both Dollar Shave Club and Yellow Tail obviously exploited real gaps between competitive products and consumer needs. They make it look simple. However, it’s easy to get lost when mapping product/service features, value adds, pricing scenarios, and a myriad of internal capabilities into one cohesive direction.

Let’s break down the steps that successful companies like this 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.

Getting Started

There seem to be as many different opinions on brand positioning strategies as there are brands. But they all boil down to three simple questions that can help you determine which one is best for your business:

• Who is your customer? What problem are you solving for them?
• Who are your competitors? How is your offering different?
• What are your companies’ capabilities? Are they aligned with customer expectations?

Today, tools like Survey Monkey and Google Forms make online consumer research easy and affordable. However, more specialized research can deliver deeper insights, including panel research, focus groups, qualitative surveys, and more.

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 for a free strategy session to determine your company’s path to positioning that works.