Establishing a Brand Positioning
Often a good positioning will have several PODs and POPs. Of those, often two or three really define the competitive battlefield and should be analyzed and developed carefully.
The typical approach to positioning is to inform consumers of a brand’s membership before stating its point-of-difference. Presumably, consumers need to know what a product is and what function it serves before deciding whether it is superior to the brands against which it competes. For new products, initial advertising often concentrates on creating brand awareness, and subsequent advertising attempts to create the brand image.
There are three main ways to convey a brand’s category membership:
To reassure consumers that a brand will deliver on the fundamental reason for using a category, marketers frequently use benefits to announce category membership. Thus, industrial tools might claim to have durability
Well-known, noteworthy brands in a category can also help a brand specify its category membership. When Tommy Hilfiger was an unknown, advertising announced his status as a great U.S. designer by associating him with recognized category mem-bers like Calvin Klein.
The product descriptor that follows the brand name is often a concise means of conveying category origin.
One common challenge in positioning, as noted above, is that many of the benefits that make up points-of-parity and points-of-difference are negatively correlated. Moreover, individual attributes and benefits often have positive and negative aspects.
Consider a long-lived brand such as Burberry. The brand’s heritage could suggest experience, wisdom, and expertise as well as authenticity, or it could suggest being old-fashioned.
Unfortunately, consumers typically want to maximize both the negatively correlated attributes or benefits. The best approach clearly is to develop a product or service that performs well on both dimensions
To address attribute or benefit trade-offs, marketers can:
- launch two different marketing campaigns, each devoted to a different brand attribute or benefit;
- link the brand to a person, place, or thing that possesses the right kind of equity to establish an attribute or benefit as a POP or POD; or
- convince consumers that the negative relationship between attributes and benefits, if they consider it differently, is in fact positive.
Clearly defined POPs and PODs are particularly important to small businesses. (See “Marketing Insight: Positioning and Branding for a Small Business” for more on positioning and branding for a small business.)
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