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Many brands and companies today are constantly reinvigorating their businesses and positioning them for growth. There is a constant need to innovate, reinvigorate, update, recalibrate, or just simply fend off the competition in an effort to better explain "why buy me."

To move forward, companies and brands need to first take a look at their current brand positioning. But for a moment, even a brief moment, it would make sense to go back to the brand drawing board to answer the question, "Just what is brand positioning, anyway?"

Simply, brand positioning creates a specific place in the market for your brand and product offerings. It reaches a certain type of consumer or customer and delivers benefits that meet the needs of key target groups and users. The actual approach of a company or brand's positioning in the marketplace is determined based on how it communicates the benefits and product attributes to consumers and users. As a result, the brand positioning of a company and/or product seeks to further distance itself from competitors based on a host of items, but most notably five key issues including price, quality, product attributes, its distribution, and usage occasions

As companies and brands today look to brand repositioning, they first have to ask, "What are the reasons to reposition my brand?" The answer might be declining sales, loss of consumer/user base, stagnant product benefits, or the competition, including such issues as increased technology and new features.

After having identified the reasons for pursuing a Brand Repositioning, you might now ask yourself, "What do I do?"

A four-phased brand repositioning approach will help guide you through this process and allow your company and brand group to best calibrate based on timing, budget, and resources to get the job done.

Phase I—Determining the Current Status of the Brand

The purpose of this phase is to understand the company and brand, including exploring key issues, opportunities, and challenges. The reason is to obtain a clear snapshot of the company and brand in present terms, which will offer a clear insight to opportunity identification and assessment.

Understanding the brand includes reviewing the complete history of the company and brand, including its current brand positioning, the original positioning, how it has evolved—and, most important, what the company and brand stands for today. Key questions to ask and answer:

  • What differentiates our company and brand from the competition?
  • What are the equity drivers of the company and brand?
  • What are the historical ways to communicate the company and brand equity to consumers and customers alike?

 

As we dive deeper into the current status of the company and brand, we also need to get a clear understanding of the company and brand, including a review of the current brand customer. Key questions to ask and answer:

  • Who is the current target customer base?
  • What is his/her profile?
  • What are the reasons for purchase?
  • What are the buying patterns?
  • What are the user patterns?

 

Once we better understand the current brand customer, we can then review the company and brand sales history, including revenue, growth, and industry and category market share. Also important to look at are the specific core product or service offerings.

This review should include a review of the current product strategy and mix, with specific emphasis on understanding the current SKU product strategy, if you are a company and specifically a manufacturer. If your business is in the service-offering or professional-consulting arena, this would include a review of the total service offerings and programs offered.

A key questions to ask and answer: "Do all products live under the same brand strategy, or are there different product strategies that fall under one brand strategy?" Here, you'll need to consider whether your business is a category leader, or a player as a secondary brand.

This phase should also include looking at production capabilities and constraints, distribution strength and strategy, top key accounts, key selling points, along with a careful review of all sales and marketing promotional materials.

Finally, review the competitive landscape: the number of competitors, keys to their success, and what they are doing right and some of their key challenges. Key questions areas to look at are market share, industry strength, customer profiles, consumer buying trends, and a review of the industry and category trends and forecasts.

Phase II—What Does the Brand Stand for Today?

With a solid understanding of your company and brand, we now need to understand how consumers feel about your company and brand today. In the consumer packaged goods world, this might mean talking to kids and moms and other user groups, to determine what your company and brand stands for among consumers.

Obtaining a clear insight into the way consumers feel and relate to your company and brand will provide the starting point of the repositioning work. First we need to gain parameters, including the following: identifying key growth areas for your brand, marketplace, and industry opportunities; looking at your brand positioning in the competitive landscape; measuring the current equity of your brand; and determining opportunity areas of where to take the equity of your brand.

Your clear objectives are to...

  • Understand current consumer perceptions and needs of your brand.
  • Determine how far to move your brand without alienating customers and loyalty base.
  • Identify how to position your brand to attract new users and ultimately convert them into loyal purchasers/users/buyers.

 

The first path to travel on the course of brand repositioning is to hold brand equity groups, which will directly ask consumers and users of your brand key questions, including "Why do they select your brand" and "What was the key decision-making element?"

Beyond these general questions, the brand equity groups will seek to understand users' and consumers' reasons for purchase, determine their hierarchy of needs and what your brand currently delivers, understand usage occasions and patters, and showcase brand-equity dimensions.

In addition, one of the most important functions of brand equity groups is to identify similar affinity groups and lifestyle and behavior patterns among your consumers and loyal customers that can translate into better understanding your customer profiles.

From a logistical perspective, the brand equity groups could take place over the course of two days with about four groups total. To ensure a good program read and reach, it would be best to run these groups in three to four cities.

Through this process you will identify needs, both unmet and met, in category and industry, determine the delights and dissatisfiers of your brand, as well as determine current brand equity drivers of your brand. In a sense, it will provide you with a current measure of the value of your brand to consumers or end-users. It will provide not only a snapshot of today and where your brand sits but also an immediate look of where you can take your brand tomorrow.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Gregory Pollack

Gregory J. Pollack is founder and president of PBM Marketing Solutions (www.pbmmarketing.com), a partnership brand marketing company. He can be reached via gpollack@pbmmarketing.com.