Comprehensive Brand Positioning Course

This course will provide you with everything you need to position your brand to win. It is based on a proprietary process and set of tools that have been used to successfully position hundreds of brands throughout the world. 

This unparalleled brand positioning process was refined over 30 years and has been used by more than 200 highly successful brands in almost every product and service category.

To unleash your brand's full power, you must create a unique value proposition that is emotionally compelling. This requires a rigorous brand positioning process based on deep customer insight. And it requires an understanding of how brands can connect with customers through shared values and exceptional experiences.

This brand positioning process is part art and part science, using both the left and right sides of your brain. 

The course includes examples from many world-class brands and all the tools, templates and information you will need to position your brand to win.

The course is comprised of a video, seven handouts and links to 28 relevant blog posts. I will instruct you to use the handouts at appropriate points throughout the video. 

While the video is an hour and a quarter in length, the total course length with exercises and blog post readings will require between two and four hours to complete. You can stop and restart the course at any time based on your schedule. 

You can take the course here: Positioning Your Brand to Win

Virtual Brand Positioning Workshop

You may know that BrandForward has conducted more than 150 successful brand positioning workshops for some of the top brands in the world. These workshops were designed to achieve leadership team consensus around emotionally compelling unique value propositions for those brands. Today, in the COVID-19 environment, it is more important than ever to craft a brand that is unique and that has strong emotional appeal. That is why we have modified our process to conduct virtual brand positioning workshops.

We can begin with the same brand audits, customer research and brand equity measurement. We will also inform the workshop by stakeholder input gathered by a simple pre-workshop survey. The only difference is that the workshop itself will be conducted virtually via online conferencing technology.

In the workshop, we will define the primary, secondary and tertiary target markets with great precision. After that, we will define the brand's essence and craft its promise. We will also identify the brand's archetype and its personality. This will lead to a brand positioning statement that includes the brand's unique value proposition. And the workshop participants will have a chance to review research findings, argue assumptions, debate approaches and tweak the exact wording.

All of this will lead to a brand position that is unique and highly compelling to its target customers.

The best part is that this can be accomplished not in months but in days or a few weeks at most.


"Thanks again for the excellent session you facilitated on Tuesday. I continue to get positive feedback from all who were present. I met with our president today, and he reiterated what a great job he thought you did and how the day exceeded his expectations. Your clear commitment to the Conservancy's mission was very much appreciated by the group, and your experience in brand building and skill in facilitating made a long day in a windowless meeting room actually fun!"

Angie Sosdian
Director, Marketing Strategy Project
The Nature Conservancy

"Brad’s book, Brand Aid, inspired me to change the way our division approached brand strategy. Brad’s unique talent for storytelling draws readers, as well as work-shop participants, deeply into the ideation process with fantastic results. I was very fortunate to have Brad facilitate a series of global workshops to further refine our brand strategy. He helped us define and align on a differentiated approach that quickly vaulted our global brand to the top of the market."

Michael Saso
Group Manager, U.S. Coronary Product Marketing
Abbott Vascular

"Brad is a master facilitator. He facilitated three different brand strategy workshops for us. He was able to achieve agreement between co-CEOs from different cultures with divergent points of view. I would highly recommend him to help you achieve consensus on your business and brand strategy."

André Bernheim
Co-CEO
Luminox

"Brad expertly led our organization in its rebranding efforts. This started with brand equity research and proceeded through an adroitly facilitated brand positioning workshop and then cogent presentations to key stakeholder groups. His group facilitation skills are exemplary. Our museum is deeply grateful to Brad for his outstanding work in helping us clarify our brand identity and how we will succeed in the marketplace, both locally and more broadly.”

Bruce Barnes, Ph.D.
Ron and Donna Fielding Director
George Eastman Museum



For more information, contact Brad VanAuken at vanauken@brandforward.com.

Brand Positioning Components

Brand positioning components will likely vary depending on which brand consultant or marketing agency you use. These are the core elements that most consultants or agencies use:

• Target customer definition (demographics, psychographics (lifestyles, attitudes, values, behaviors, job titles, etc.)
• Brand essence (the heart and soul of the brand - it's timeless quality - in the form of 'adjective adjective noun')
• Brand promise ('Only [brand] delivers [relevant differentiated benefit or shared value]')
• Brand personality (seven to twelve adjectives that describe the brand as if it were a person)

Brand mission, vision and values are often added. Its mission is its reason for being, its purpose. Its vision is what it wants to be, its aspirations. Its values can best be communicated through "We believe..." statements.

Some people talk about a brand's DNA. This is roughly equivalent to its essence. 

Some people talk about a brand's unique value proposition. This focuses on the same thing the brand promise does - the brand's unique and compelling point of difference.

People often support the brand promise with proof points and "reasons to believe" the promise.

Sometimes, people will articulate the brand promise or unique value proposition within the context of a specific product or service category or competitive frame of reference. How this is defined can make a big difference in the overall brand positioning.  

Some people add brand archetype to the mix. The brand archetype speaks to the brand's underlying motivation and is roughly based on Jungian archetypes.

Some include core brand attributes in the brand positioning statement. 

Fewer people add brand pricing and distribution strategies to the brand positioning statement, though most people consider these to be more tactical and less strategic. However, for some very upscale brands, these can be a very strategic part of the brand's positioning. 

The brand positioning statement is a strategic internal document that guides almost all of the brand's marketing activities. It is always included in agency or creative briefs. 

To a large degree, the brand positioning statement is the roadmap for how a brand takes on human qualities and what human qualities it takes on. It is also a roadmap for how the brand will succeed in the marketplace.

Other blog posts on brand positioning:

• Brand Research a Must for Brand Positioning
• Determining the Current Brand Position
• Brand Positioning
• Brand Positioning 501
• Six Approaches to Brand Positioning
• Unique Value Proposition
• In a Way, It's All the Same
• 50 Ways to Differentiate Your Brand
• Brand Positioning is Easy
• When to Reposition a Brand
• How Does Your Organization Approach Brand Repositioning? 
• Brands and Competitive Frame of Reference
• Choosing the Right Competitive Frame of Reference
• Rebranding Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Rebranding Footjoy 
• Repositioning RCI
• Brand Associations
• Brand Archetypes
• Brand Personality as a Point of Difference
• Differentiating on the Unexpected
• Creating "Category of One" Brands
• Creating New Categories Versus Battling it Out for Marketshare
• Repositioning Your Competitor's Brand
• The Creative Brief
• Writing the Agency Brief
• Delivering on Your Brand's Promise
• Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage
• Ten Proven Ways to Align Your Organization with Its Brand's Promise

And here is BrandForward's online step-by-step brand positioning workshop, everything you need to successfully position or reposition your brand:

• Positioning Your Brand to Win!

Positioning Your Brand to Win!

I am pleased to announce that I am now offering an online version of my highly acclaimed brand positioning workshop. The workshop provides you with everything you need to create a unique and emotionally compelling brand promise along with every other element of a comprehensive brand positioning statement. For more information, click here.

Brand Positioning

Despite the importance of this topic and the fact that this is our number one requested service (I have helped more than 200 brands with this), I have not written a blog post on this in a while. So, here are some of my thoughts on brand positioning.

First, this is the most important and fundamental task for brand managers. Everything else - brand identity, brand messaging, customer touch point design, etc. - must build off from this work.

Second, this is much more difficult than it might seem upon first consideration. Most industries are mature and most viable brand positions have been taken. Increasingly, the vast majority of brands in most categories are delivering well not just on the cost-of-entry customer benefits, but also on most of what used to be differentiating customer benefits. 

Here are the brand positioning components that I address in our process:

• Target customer definition (in great detail)
• Brand essence (the heart and should of the brand)
• The brand promise (including the competitive frame of reference, differentiating benefits or shared values and the proof points/reasons to believe)
• The brand archetype (what motivates the brand to behave in the way that it does)
• The brand personality (seven to ten adjectives that describe the brand as if it were a person)

The brand's unique value proposition is closely related to the brand's promise. They are essentially the same thing. Often, I also help brand manager's think through the brand's mission, vision and values. This work precedes the brand positioning work (or at least runs parallel to it). Finally, another way to think about this is to ask the question, "Why?" Why does this brand exist? Why should it exist? Why should people care?

Further, we often consider customer lifestyle and price positioning as a part of brand positioning. 

A variation in brand positioning is to create a "category of one" brand. Creating a "category of one" brand entails defining the brand's category in a way that is meaningful and highly compelling to the target customer, while allowing only one brand to be in the category's consideration set. This is easier said than done and few brands have successfully achieved this. 

Increasingly, we have been asked to position brands in ways that create more emotional appeal. This typically requires focusing on emotional, experiential and self-expressive benefits or shared values. This also usually requires deep qualitative customer research as an input to the brand positioning process. 

A trick in positioning any organization brand is to create a unique and highly compelling position that spans all of the brand's product and service categories. To do this, the brand manager must first understand how the brand could be successfully positioned in each of those product and service categories and then discover the common thread between them. Too many brand managers give up on this difficult task and decide that the umbrella brand stands for "quality" or "innovation" or "service" or "leadership" or some other non-differentiating cliche. 

Increasingly, one must know how to differentiate brands in commodity categories. And I mean real commodity categories - petroleum, soybeans, water, etc. There are more than two dozen techniques we use to specifically differentiate commodities. All of them can work with brands that have parity products.

In our brand positioning workshops (in which we build leadership team and stakeholder consensus around the brand), we also address business strategy (including business models) and competitive strategy as they relate to brand strategy. We believe that brand strategy cannot be developed in a vacuum.

We use our very powerful proprietary BrandInsistence(SM) brand equity measurement system to identify brand positioning vulnerabilities, gaps and opportunities to inform the brand positioning process.

When we have crafted a new brand positioning, then it is time to create the supporting brand identity including the brand tagline. Further it is time to create the brand elevator speech and the brand story. And it is time to build an integrated marketing campaign in support of the brand position.

For more information on brand positioning, refer to Brand Aid, available here.

Components of a Brand Positioning Statement

I have helped position more than 150 brands over the past 15 years. During that time, my thinking on what should be included in a brand positioning statement has evolved. Here are the components I focus on today:

• Target customer description - To whom does your brand most appeal? Who is your brand's most advantageous customer? Who is your brand primarily serving? I ask people to think about  today and in the future. I have them think about primary, secondary and tertiary targets. I have the marketers describe the target customers in as much detail as possible. The more targeted the brand is, the more clear the brand's promise becomes. Targeting a brand in great detail does not rule out secondary or tertiary markets or people who aspire to be the primary target.
• The brand's essence - The heart and soul of the brand, its timeless quality, stated in the form "adjective adjective noun." This does not need to differentiate. It just needs to capture the brand's core essence.
• The brand's promise, including its competitive frame of reference, its primary differentiating benefit or shared value within that frame of reference, the market forces that make that differentiating benefit relevant or salient and proof points for and reasons to believe the brand's promise. The brand's promise is very similar to the brand's unique value proposition. I focus on benefits or shared values that go beyond functionality, ones that are emotional, experiential and especially self-expressive.
• The brand's archetype - Based on Jungian archetypes, this provides insight into the brand's core motivations, what drives it to behave as it does. 
• The brand's personality - seven to twelve adjectives that describe the brand as if it were a person.
• Other important brand associations - brand associations that are core to its character and identity.

For more information on brand positioning, read chapter 6 (Brand Design) of Brand Aid.