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This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Ad-Free Brand, The: Secrets to Building Successful Brands in a Digital WorldAd-Free Brand, The: Secrets to Building Successful Brands in a Digital World

Learn More Buy

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Ad-Free Brand, The: Secrets to Building Successful Brands in a Digital WorldAd-Free Brand, The: Secrets to Building Successful Brands in a Digital World

Learn More Buy

The Four Building Blocks of Brand Positioning

Those who spend all of their time thinking about brands and brand positioning can make the subject seem incredibly complex. Before you know it, these experts will fill you up with so much marketing jargon and so many impressive-sounding positioning principles and rules that your head may end up exploding from the pressure.

Yet the best-executed positioning won't always come from these sorts of experts. Great positioning is often developed by the people who know the brand best, the people who are most passionate about the brand, when they are allowed to play a key role in the positioning process.

So, where many experts might attempt to convince you that positioning is a complex process best left to people like them, my goal in this book is to show you basic brand positioning is simple and can be done by anyone—with or without marketing and advertising experience.

...basic brand positioning is simple and can be done by anyone—with or without marketing and advertising experience.

While any person in any organization can help create great brand positioning, whether he has a high tolerance for marketing-speak or not, to do so he must first understand some basic concepts.

I've attempted to simplify the jargon down to four key principles I believe form the foundation of solidly constructed brand positioning. I call these principles "the four building blocks" of brand positioning, and I refer to them often throughout the book.

The four main building blocks of good brand positioning:

  1. The competitive frame of reference
  2. Points of difference
  3. Points of parity
  4. The brand mantra

Don't Get Hung Up on the Words

When it comes to positioning terminology, I sometimes get questions like "what is the difference between a brand mantra and a brand essence?" or "is a point of difference the same thing as a key differentiator?"

My answer? Don't get hung up on the words; it's the concepts that matter.

For the sake of clarity, in this book I've standardized on a set of terms that work for me and have become comfortable for me to use in my positioning projects.

But often, I'll be working with a client who approaches positioning from a slightly different point of view, and when this happens I always gravitate toward the words most comfortable to the client (They are the client!).

The exact terms aren't important. What really matters is whether we agree on how to articulate brand meaning and understand what makes the brand stand apart.

Using the terminology from this book to describe your brand positioning won't automatically make it good brand positioning, and some of the best positioned brands I have ever seen were probably developed by people who had never heard of a point of parity.

My advice? Use whatever words you like, but seek to deeply understand the concepts behind them.

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