Bulletproof Process to Reposition Your Brand

Over the past twenty-one years, BrandForward has successfully repositioned more than 200 brands in almost every product and service category. We have worked with start-ups, Fortune 100 companies, B2B companies, B2C companies, not-for-profit organizations, colleges and universities, financial institutions, health care systems, trade associations, municipalities and more.

Throughout that time, we have refined a proven process to successfully reposition brands to be unique, emotionally compelling and believable. And we have worked with many brands to transform them into "category of one" brands.

We have differentiated brands in commodity categories and built strong emotional appeal into brands that had previously differentiated themselves based solely on functional attributes. We have created brand positions that work across a wide array of product and service categories, rebranded merged entities and connected brand positions to marketing campaigns.

This brand positioning process normally costs tens of thousands of dollars. Today, I am offering you an online version of this process for only $275. This is inconsequential compared to most brand marketing budgets. And to sweeten the deal, I will give you a signed copy of my best-selling Brand Aid book ($29.95 value) and three hours of my consulting time ($1,000 value) for free. I think you will agree with me that the ROI for this small investment is exceedingly large.

If you have ever wanted to learn how to apply a bullet-proof process to position or reposition your brand, this is your best opportunity. And you will never get outside expert help to reposition your brand for a smaller investment. Click here now to sign up for this amazing offer.

Ten Ways to Successfully Position Your Brand in Overcrowded Markets

Today, brand managers are increasingly at a loss about how to differentiate their brands. In most product and service categories, every unique and purchase motivating position has been claimed by one or more brands. Product and service categories have matured, brand research has gotten sophisticated and competitors have successfully filled all of the brand positioning niches. So what is a brand manager to do to discover a new unique and compelling brand position?

Here are some ideas:

1. Identify, create and own a new "category of one." The Strong National Museum of Play did this by repositioning its brand from a children's museum to the only museum of play. 
2. Through qualitative research, discover one or more compromises all of the brands in the category are making with their consumers and then design a business model and brand to overcome these compromises. CarMax did this vis-a-vis traditional used car dealerships and Uber did this vis-a-vis traditional taxicab companies. 
3. Choose a valued benefit that has never been a part of the category. Apple did this with the introduction of smartphone apps. Southwest Airlines did this by owning "fun."
4. Add an element to the brand that no other competitor in the category has added. Opaque did this. It introduced the concept of dining in the dark. 
5. Make an outrageous version of a traditional product. Check out Loudmouth Golf for wild clothes. 
6. Combine two or more products into one or two or more functions into one product. Victorinox Swiss Army was one of the first to do this with its knives. 
7. Focus on a niche market or on one market segment. Orvis and lululemon do this, as does Lane Bryant. 
8. Create a character that gives the brand a distinctive personality. Kellogg's Tony the Tiger was one of the first, but GEICO's gecko,  Progressive Insurance's Flo and Jamie and Pistachio's elephant, Ernie are also examples of this. 
9. Go left when everyone else is going right. Naomi Klein did this with her No Logo book when everyone else was writing about the power of brands.
10. Use a new material or technology that no one else is using. SmartSolve has created environmentally friendly dissolving paper, pouches, labels, thread, tape and adhesive. 

What do all of these approaches have in common? Out-of-the-box thinking.  None of these brands would have become what they became if their managers had applied linear or incremental thinking. 

If you are interested in this topic, here are some other blog posts that might be of interest to you:

• Branding in Highly Competitive Categories
• Differentiating on the Unexpected
• 50 Ways to Differentiate Your Brand
• 6 Powerful Ways to Differentiate Your Brand
• Sources of Brand Differentiation
• Creating "Category of One" Brands
• Creating "Category of One" Brands
• Breaking Customer Compromises
• Branding Water
• Just for Fun - The Loudmouth Brand

By the way, the Interceptor vehicle pictured above is a car, boat, plane and helicopter all in one, applying idea #6 above.

Unleashing Brand Power

Why do some brands command premium prices, while others are forced to compete on price? While some companies are racing frantically to the bottom, others are gliding effortlessly to the top. These world class brands win the admiration of their customers, the envy of their peers, and claim the lion's share of their market's profits. 

They achieve this through something I call "brand insistence” – a state where your customers don't just have a preference for your products and services . . . they demand them. 

Ultimately, these brands can become a “category of one,” standing alone without peers. After having helped 200+ companies create powerful brands, I have crafted a 17-minute presentation to show ambitious companies how they can unlock the full potential of their brands to become a “category of one.”

CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO: https://unleashingbrandpower.com/give-us-17-minutes

Six Approaches to Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is perhaps the most important task in brand management. Ideally, it should drive everything else. Brand positioning is part art and part science. I like to inform the exercise by in-depth research including qualitative customer benefit exploration, brand equity measurement, brand benefit importance/delivery mapping and brand position testing. Having said that, intuition and creativity also are important skills that feed into this process every step of the way. 

There are six basic approaches to brand positioning:

1. Own one or a unique combination of two benefits that are highly compelling to the end consumer and unique to the brand within the traditional product/service category. The benefits could be emotional, experiential or self-expressive. (I no longer advocate focusing on functional brand benefits.)
2. As a variation on this, own an emotional, experiential or self expressive benefit and a functional benefit that serves as the proof point for the emotional, experiential or self-expressive benefit.
3. Own a highly compelling value that is shared with the end consumer.
4. Focus on both (1) a differentiating benefit within the tightly defined product/service category and (2) the primary category benefit. (See Promoting Category Benefits for more information on this approach.)
5. Choose to compete in a broader category than the traditional product category, providing for potentially more sales but also more competition. This usually results in a significant repositioning of the brand focusing on non-traditional brand benefits, but can include focusing on the narrower category benefits associated with the traditional product category as a point of difference in the larger product category. 
6. Create a "category of one" brand by creating a new highly compelling category for which your brand is the only choice. (See Creating "Category of One" Brands for more information on this approach.)

I wish you great success in optimizing the position of your brand.

Testing Outside of Boundaries

We conduct a lot of brand research on behalf of our clients - a mix of qualitative and quantitative. We usually try to "push the envelope" in what we explore to make sure we have not missed a brand positioning opportunity, a brand extension opportunity or any other opportunity.

Often, clients are not comfortable with this approach. We get responses such as, "We would never do that." or "Why would you test that? That is not 'on brand.'" Others ask why we are testing negative personality attributes. Some say, "Don't test that. That position is already taken by one of our competitors." Sometimes we hear, "I don't know why that is relevant." or "Why don't you focus on something more tangible." Some brand managers are much more comfortable testing functions and features than emotional, experiential and self-expressive states.

Frankly, a lot of brand managers are solidly "in the box." They will never create a breakthrough brand position or a new product concept if they are not willing to test outside of what they already know the brand's (or product's) boundaries to be. One needs to test outside of boundaries to understand if those are the true boundaries or if the boundaries can be stretched. As it has been said, "To push the boundaries, you need to know where the edges are." And to create "category of one" brands, it is mandatory that one tests outside of the current category definition.

While I agree that one should not waste time or money testing things that are irrelevant and tangential to the brand's success, sometimes it is just those things that seem tangential that result in the true breakthroughs. So, before you reign your brand consultant or brand researcher in, consider that he or she may just be on to something by testing outside of your comfort zone. 

Creating "Category of One" Brands

To become a “category of one” brand is the holy grail of branding. What does it mean to become a “category of one” brand? It means that no other brand is even in the same category as your brand. Your brand has created a new category – one that matters to people.

What does it take to create a “category of one” brand? Intuition, insight, vision, risk-taking and an entrepreneurial spirit.

Here are some examples of “category of one” brands:

• The Strong (National Museum of Play)
• Cirque du Soleil (A New Form of Live Entertainment)
• CarMax (A New Approach to Used Car Sales)
• Uber (A New Approach to Paid Transportation)
• Netflix (A New Approach to Movie and TV Watching)
• Naropa University (Focused on Spiritual Enlightenment/Transformation)
• Opaque (Dining in the Dark)
• Modern Toilet Restaurant (Toilet Themed Restaurant)
• Elio Motors (Two Seat, Three Wheel, 84 MPG Vehicle for $6,800)
• Medifast (Energy Drops and Flavor Infusers)

Central to creating a “category of one’ brand is envisioning and innovating the new category. This will certainly create buzz and a huge amount of free publicity. It will also create new demand. The people to whom it is targeted will want to try the new brand. And then they will want to spread the word about what they experienced. Word-of-mouth marketing is significant for “category of one” brands.

Creating a new category also creates a first mover advantage, and depending on how fast one can scale up, significant economies of scale and network effects. This creates tremendous financial advantages for the “category of one” brand and barriers to entry for me-too brands and other subsequent competitors.

Eventually, other brands will enter the category, especially if it is large, profitable and growing. However, if your brand is the one that created the category and it scaled up fast and took advantage of the category creation buzz, it should have financial advantages and mindshare advantages.

Are there currently or will there soon be competitors to each of the above listed brands? Sure, but there will likely never be another Cirque de Soleil.

Being a “category of one” implies a fair amount of innovative thinking, product innovation, often system innovation and usually business model innovation. So “category of one” brands can even be quite disruptive. Consider Amazon.com when it was first introduced or eBay when it was first introduced or Uber today.

Brands that innovated new categories must take charge of and credit for those new categories and they must grow them quickly or they might lose their advantage. Kodak created digital photography but consider its position in that market today. Who created the smartphone category? Who owns it today? Who created the MP3 player category? Who owns it today? Is it even relevant anymore with the emergence of the smartphone category? Which brand created airport rental beds? Is that brand still dominant in the category?

Instead of trying to differentiate your brand within an already crowded product or service category, consider creating a “category of one” instead. It is more fun. It will create more buzz. You will get a lot more free publicity. And, if you do it right, your brand will grow at an amazing rate. To read my post on seven strategies to  create new business categories, click here.

We offer a full day workshop in which clients explore alternative category definitions, competitive frames of reference and preemptive brand positions to discover a potential “category of one” brand position. This highly facilitated workshop is preceded by stakeholder research. Its output is a recommended “category of one” brand position, which can be translated into a tagline, a marketing campaign and inform strategic business decisions.

Please email us about how this workshop can benefit your brand.

Competitive Frame of Reference

Choosing the most advantageous competitive frame of reference is a very important part of brand positioning. I have already talked about Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute redefining itself from an engineering school to a place where technological innovation thrives (why not change the world?). I have also talked about The Strong redefining itself from a children’s museum to THE place that studies and explores play and American University redefining itself as a place for WONKs, focusing on its location in Washington, DC and even its association with public policy.  In all three of these instances, the brands intended to move from more crowded categories to a category of their own creation in which they became the only (category-of-one) brand.

I have also talked about how to define the category that a cola brand might be in. Is the category colas, or carbonated beverages or soft drinks or non-alcoholic beverages or all beverages or rehydration or human liquid consumption or refreshment or something else?

What category is Dasani Drops in? Perhaps the tagline defines it – “flavor enhancer.” Does this mean that the category is not flavored water? How does that help Dasani Drops competitively?

There are hundreds of professional associations and societies in health care, reflecting the degree of complexity and specialization in that field. We recently worked with a professional society that focuses on developing physician leaders. Is their competitive frame of reference professional societies for physicians, professional societies for physician leaders, professional societies for health care executives, professional development for health care administrators, leadership development for physicians or something else? While these may all seem similar, depending on what they have chosen, their competitive set and unique value proposition changes, especially in this crowded field.

Just as choosing the most advantageous target customer definition is not a trivial exercise, so too is choosing the competitive frame of reference. Choosing a competitive frame of reference based on the most powerful motivators for the target customers can lead to a previously undefined category in which your brand has few, if any competitors. That category definition helps your brand own the benefit more quickly before any other brand is able to claim it. Being able to redefine the category requires out-of-the box thinking.

If interested, we have tools to help you explore category description alternatives, including those that could transform your band into a category-of-one.

Creating New Categories Versus Battling it Out for Market Share

I have written about creating “category-of-one” brands before. Most brands spend their time trying to increase their share of existing markets. They pursue many different tactics to do so, from innovating new product functions and features and offering price promotions (which erodes brand equity) to improving product quality and creating value-added services. Some even create highly entertaining ads hoping this will help them break through the category messaging clutter. The problem with these approaches is that they are incremental and most of them can be very easily matched by the competition.

Brand managers know how difficult it can be to create brand differentiation within an existing category.  In mature markets, every market position has already been taken. True breakthroughs come only from creating entirely new categories, highly compelling new categories.

So, how does one do this?

• Break customer compromises. Remember the Harvard Business Review article “Breaking Compromises, Breakaway Growth”? It mentioned CarMax as a company that methodically broke the compromises that brands in the used car buyer category routinely made with their customers. The Internet enabled Amazon.com to create the first global megastore open 24/7.
• Redefine the category in a radically new way. Remember the book Blue Ocean Strategy? It cited Cirque de Soleil as a brand that created a new category of entertainment that was part circus and part musical theater.
• In an industry defined by functional categories, redefine your space by customer end benefits. My Alma Mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, chose to redefine itself from a technological university (or engineering school) to a place where people could go to change the world through technological innovation (why not change the world? ®). Similarly, Paul Smith’s College did this by refocusing on the end benefit of being THE college that allows one to live and play in the six million acre Adirondack Park while receiving a college education (The College of the Adirondacks ®).
• Create an entirely new category, enabled by technological breakthroughs. eBay is an example of this. The Internet enabled them to create more efficient markets through a global online auction platform.
• Create an entirely new category based purely through imagination and vision. The Strong could have touted itself as one of the world’s largest children’s museums. Instead, it created the only museum of play.
• Significantly change the existing business model. Netflix is an example of this. Consider what happened to Blockbuster after Netflix emerged. And consider how Netflix evolved as cable companies offered instant downloading of movies.
• Rebundle existing products and services in an entirely new way. The Mexican cement company, Cemex, shifted its unit of measure from cubic yards of cement to the appropriate amount of cement delivered within the requested delivery window.

All of these require out-of-the box thinking, which usually requires rethinking business models. Finally, they require identifying new ways to provide increased customer value, ways that are outside the norms 

Creating "Category of One" Brands

Many marketers talk about "category of one" brands, but most really don't know how to create them. 

To create a “category of one” brand, one must choose a preemptive frame of reference so that the brand is the only one in its consideration set. Rather than differentiating the brand by choosing a differentiating benefit within a current product/service category or frame of reference, one differentiates the brand by identifying or creating an entirely new product/service category or frame of reference that is highly compelling. The new category is set up so that the brand in question is the only one within that category (Figure 6–5).

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition, (c) 2015 by Brad VanAuken

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