3 Questions to Elevate Your Brand Positioning in 2020

Ona Stories
5 min readJan 29, 2020
Leaders from Vodacom Tanzania and the Government of Tanzania interact with Augmented Reality technology produced by OnaStories

by Amina Ally Mahimbo, Onastories Operations Associate

Moving up the shelf in your customer’s mind

What is the first thing you want your customers to think of when they hear your brand name?

Let’s say you own a service based company and there are around 40 companies who provide the same services you do. How will a potential customer rank you? Will they even consider you as an option? What part of their thought space do you occupy? The concept of “brand positioning” seeks to answer questions like this.

Every brand occupies a certain space in customers’ minds. Think of a potential buyer’s brain as a supermarket shelf. Your brand and all its direct and indirect competitors are products on this shelf. Where is your brand positioned? At the bottom — often out of sight and mind; at the very top — premium, but perhaps a little out of reach; or right at eye-level — accessible, but perhaps a little commonplace. You can place your brand anywhere along this shelf — the questions are: What are your brand’s goals? And how do you do this positioning?

Brand positioning involves considering the product or service you offer, your prices, promotion and the place you sell your product or services. When imprinting your value to your target consumers, it’s important that they understand exactly what you are offering and why it is helpful for them. Why can’t they get your kind of service or products from anywhere else?

Remember that the act of positioning takes place within the consumer’s mind. It is crucial to plan the message you want to stay in their mind strategically. How do you do that? Here’s a few strategy questions to get you started on your road to impactful brand positioning:

Who is your audience?

Apple has shown us a great example of brand positioning over the years catering to creative professionals, students, educators and other similar consumers. They started out with computers and eventually evolved into a range of high end consumer goods. During this course, they changed and grew to cater to their target audience. Evolving with your customers can be painful but with patience, is good for the long term. People change, statuses change and everything else around us. When we narrow down te target audience it enables us to study them, analyze their behavioral patterns and adjust our current and future products accordingly.

What’s your frame of reference?

What category does your company’s services or products belong to? This means associations that aren’t unique to your company but give credibility for your identification by consumers. Let’s say you have a grocery store, you need to meet basic elements that give you credibility to belong in the list of grocery stores to be considered. Example; you have daily used items like milk, eggs, bread and others. This doesn’t make you unique but it makes your store considered as a grocery store. In Tanzania, the business mogul Said Salim Bakhresa started out selling food products and has grown into different conglomerates such as real estate and the hotel industry. His brand positioning in the food market is very high and considered as a first option before any other. This is because he framed his brand strongly as having all the daily food products that are needed by the customers. A lesson we can take from this is: be clear and conscience about what category your products belong to. This Frame guides the customers on how to categorize you in their minds.

What is different about your product or service?

The reality is whatever you’re offering is already available in different forms from many other companies. Hence the next focus should be on differentiating yourself from other competitors. In branding, this is called a unique value proposition. It involves you stating the value you are offering and how different you are from your competitors. Your unique value proposition should appear on your landing page and your marketing campaigns.

If you feel stuck and unable to find how different you are, start by looking from the inside out (from your end to the customers). You have to risk ‘likeability’ and embrace authenticity. You are not looking for everyone to like you, but for your target market to choose you repeatedly. Since most of your customers are looking for a product they can trust, authenticity is the best place to start. Especially in today’s crowded and digitally loud market. OnaStories — the company I work for — is a Tanzanian storytelling outfit using Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and 360° video content to create compelling stories for brands. No one else in the country is experimenting with the future of storytelling this directly. This willingness to experiment with emerging tech, and the focus on brand stories rather than advertising, sets the company apart in a crowded services market — allowing us to work with market leaders like Vodacom despite our size. As Steve Jobs said :

“DON’T DO IT BETTER, DO IT DIFFERENTLY”.

Because ultimately you can’t control the other person, only yourself.

BONUS: What do you promise to do?

Branding is about promises. Your brand only exists as a promise to a consumer about a service or product you can offer them. When crafting your “brand promise” focus on the emotional benefit that you offer your customers. Since consumers only care about things they genuinely like, positioning your brand by evoking different emotions helps leverage you above competitors. Big brands have already created taglines and associations that evoke emotions from their customers. Align your branding to your core principles. Focus on what you wouldn’t change then build around that. Oprah would often get asked about her brand. She says she didn’t even understand what ‘Brand’ meant. All she knew was that she was focused on excellence and doing the right thing. Those two principles are what she then aligned her brand with. Principles first. Brand follows principle. Nike’s tagline is “Just do it!” It gives you a feeling of inspiration, courage and spontaneity. It follows from the brand’s principles of being active, youthful and vibrant. This immortal tagline promises you, the buyer, that a pair of shoes will elevate you into your more spontaneous, active self. It’s always best to choose what experience you can guarantee to deliver to your consumers. Then make sure you deliver it.

Brand positioning will help you determine how to improve your product or service depending on your consumer’s needs. The key is to make sure the actual brand experience delivers on what was intended in the positioning. With these three questions in your arsenal, you can align your brand to your principles and occupy desired real estate in your customers’ minds.

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