Carve out a place for your brand with a positioning statement

It’s human nature to reflexively categorize and sort the information we encounter in our daily lives. To influence the way prospective customers understand your brand, you must present it in a way that helps them decide how to think about your brand.

This process is called positioning, and it’s the single most important (and least understood) component of your brand book. Positioning is the message that’s received, not the one that’s delivered. It’s not simply what you say, it’s how that information is arranged in a customer’s mind. Essentially, where does it land? What space does it ultimately wind up occupying?

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Positioning is about, well, taking a position. It’s a stake you plant in the minds of your prospective customers about what your brand can uniquely claim and defend. A positioning statement is a crisp, comprehensive way to guide someone on how to think about your company.

It defines and frames your brand, making it the central organizing structure of your brand’s messaging and strategy. To construct your positioning statement, you first have to do some work in surfacing its component parts.

Here’s how:

Since positioning is about the space you occupy in the mind of your customer, you can’t figure out how to position your brand until you know exactly who that customer is. There’s an order of operations in developing your brand, and developing your target personas comes before positioning. It’s also useful to have your brand’s ethos fully developed before attempting to determine your positioning. Understanding who you are and who you’re serving are vital first inputs.

After the target customer is established, it’s time to figure out your frame of reference — the context in which consumers view your brand. By providing consumers with a frame of reference, you’re equipping them with the information they require to categorize, contextualize and then compare your brand with what’s already familiar to them.

This is important, because potential customers need to consider points of parity (that is, what your brand is like) before they can consider points of differentiation (what makes your brand unique). Competitive frames of reference tend to be specific to reduce the number of brands competing for that prospect’s attention.

The specificity of a frame of reference signals to the customer where to place it in their minds, and the smaller the category, the better your chances of owning it (or at least, standing out).

Exercise: Write down the top five brands in your category. If you’re not No. 1 in that category, brainstorm other categories your brand is first or best in.

Some inspiration:

Panera Bread is not the No.1 fast-food chain, but it is the No. 1 fast-casual bakery cafe. Their frame of reference doesn’t try to compete with entrenched giants like McDonald’s or Starbucks. Instead, it puts Panera in a more specific, more ownable category.

White Claw isn’t the top canned alcoholic beverage, but it IS the No. 1 seltzer that gets you drunk. That makes “hard seltzer” an effective frame of reference for a brand that would rather lead a category than compete with beer, malt beverages and wine coolers.

It’s not enough to explain to your customers what you are, you also have to clearly signal to them the unique value they can expect from your brand. This is called your brand promise. Think of it as a commitment to your customer that they can always rely on you to do one thing particularly well.

Another way to think of brand promise is as your primary point of differentiation. HBR professor Youngme Moon calls true differentiation “a function of lopsidedness.” I love this way of thinking about it. How is your brand or product, well, weird? What’s off-kilter about you?

Consider two companies with the same frame of reference:

Lyft and Uber are ride-share companies that get you from point A to point B equally well. Uber’s point of differentiation is “everyone’s private driver”: pricey, elite and slick. When Lyft put forward the brand promise “your friend with a car,” it carved out a strong position for target customers looking for a friendlier, more laid back experience. It was a lopsided differentiator strong enough to last well beyond the furry pink moustaches the brand affixed to vehicles in the early days.

Exercise: What attributes of your brand, offering, operations, service or product are unique? Brainstorm as many as you can, then cut them in half as many times as it takes to arrive at just one. For Lyft, this attribute would likely have been “friendly.” How can you turn your remaining attribute into a brand promise?

By standing out, you’ll strike a chord with a subset of people (your target audience), and your brand will deeply resonate with them. People will either love or hate, consume or reject. What matters is that your target audience falls into the first camp (love and consume) and there are enough of them to make it a viable business.

Reasons to believe (RTBs) are short, simple statements that validate your brand promise. To be effective, they must be credible and relevant to the target customer. These few statements work together to support your brand promise with verifiable proof that backs up your claims. You may consider using performance metrics (“We double your speed”), third-party endorsements (How many times have you seen a toothpaste recommended by four out of five dentists?) or even biographical validation (Baby food created by a mom pediatrician).

Exercise: Imagine you had to convince a room full of skeptical potential customers that your brand promise is true. What proof points would you use to back it up? Brainstorm as long a list as you can, then narrow to the three or four RTBs that can be substantiated and are most relevant to your target customer.

You may find it useful to marry the internal exercises recommended above with data and insights collected externally through primary market research. Input from your MVP customers can provide relevant language and needed clarity on each component of your positioning statement.

Some useful prompts/questions to include:

1. Complete this sentence: “I use <brand name> because _____________.”
2. How would you describe <brand name> to a friend who’s never heard of it?
3. When and why is it best to use <brand name>?
4. Who is <brand name> for?

Once you’ve established your target customer profile, frame of reference, brand promise and reasons to believe, bring these elements together into a formal positioning statement. This may seem awfully academic and impractical for an early-stage startup, but going through this exercise will verify that your positioning contains every essential component.

Exercise: Using the results of the exercises from the previous steps, fill in the blanks:

[Your brand name] is: <Frame of reference>

For: <Target customer profile>

That: <Brand promise>

Because: <Reasons to believe>

Once you’ve completed the template above, smooth out the elements and language until you have a statement that doesn’t sound awkward to say aloud, for example:

“Company X is the easiest and fastest marketplace for preferred seats, letting fans live in the moment together.”

This statement should crisply and swiftly articulate who you are as a brand.

Putting your positioning statement into action

Carve out a place of distinction in your brand book for this statement so that every member of your team can understand and internalize your position. The academic version of this statement is internal, but the adapted statement can be used more widely: as a one-liner on your homepage or social channels, as your elevator pitch or even in your recruitment materials.

Your positioning statement serves as the foundation for developing your key messaging, value propositions, tag lines, and voice and tone. It provides the framework for how your brand shows up in the real world. This statement serves as both reference and the guardrails for real language created for your marketing website, sales materials and even your investor deck. The elements of your positioning statement also help determine tactical moves, like what to measure, and how to segment and target marketing campaigns.