Positioning your brand is probably one of the most important aspects of branding. It is the unique strategy that will introduce your target audience to exactly what it is that differentiates your product or service from your competitors. I am working with a number of companies right now developing exactly this.

It is absolutely fascinating what gems come out of discussions on positioning. At the outset, many companies are hard pressed to recognize a difference. All they see is the obvious. My strength is that I want to understand how the product or service is delivered, how is it made, what is the experience that surrounds the product or service? Several times the difference is not in the actual product but the delivery of the product or the follow-up. You have to look at the entire product cycle from conception to happy customer and beyond. There is an opportunity in there. You can count on it.

Compliances offer up positioning opportunities. Training offers up positioning opportunities. Frankly there is much to learn from every angle and nuance. For example, I worked with a consumer food product customer. They felt that their fruit product was much like all their competitors across the world. All were grown exactly the same way, with the same ingredients, under similar conditions using the same technologies and marketing and shipping conditions. I refused to believe that there was no opportunity and so I dug deeper into the industry standards. I wanted to know how one product is rated over another. What was intriguing was that the very standards for grading our produce was the opportunity for a very BIG aha moment. Here is the skinny on fruit standards. They are judged on 3 criteria – size, appearance and firmness.

Consider these criteria again: size – appearance – firmness. Is anything missing? I suggested there was and it was huge.

Taste.

You see, taste isn’t a criteria. That is left up to the individual. I suggested that there must be at least a minimum standard that a good sample must taste like. With watermelon, it’s the sweetness – a lemon, its tarty characteristic. Everyone agreed that we were on to something.

Once this particular fruit standard for taste was established, we then contracted the two leading agricultural universities in Canada and the United States to independently develop processes that tested for taste based on the bar we set. While other competing fruit have may won taste competitions judged by consumers, we now have established a definitive test for taste not unlike the the test for size, appearance and firmness. The processes were legally protected and are now proprietary to us.

We were now the ONLY fruit tested for taste!

Our fruit’s taste was now a guaranteed standard of quality NOT based on differing opinions, but on quantitative data. The bar had been raised.

A very compelling difference. This my friends is positioning. In this case the customer had to change how it did business and in doing so, introduced a new standard to their industry. This is not the work of a follower, but a leader.

Positioning can be very powerful if you are savvy enough to recognize the opportunity and bold enough to implement it. The real gems are far beyond the obvious. Look all around the edges of your product or service.

One other small example I will tantilize you with involves a current customer who has a software product. He is in a saturated market where all developers (including them) use one simple digital tool as the basis for determining solutions inherent to the software. If they carry out one small alteration I am suggesting to this simple tool they will instantly make that common tool the achiles heel for every competitor they have – over night.

This is no small boast. When I suggested it, the customer saw the potential immediately. So simple.

Currently the tool has no real value to the software only to say that it has to be there. Much like a car has to have tires to move smoothly over a road – they are important, but they are a given in every model and simply not seen as important or influential enough to warrant a mention in the marketing of a car. This simple tool is such a animal. We are not complete on this yet, so I can’t mention specifics.

My tease is to inspire you look deep into the soul of your product or service and develop a positioning strategy that goes way beyond fancy advertising slogans and resonates with target audiences, by eliminating pain points (defined in a previous article) and making customers want to work with you. A great positioning strategy will excite you, your company and ultimately lead customers to love you.

Are you up to the challenge?