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Does My Brand’s Difference Matter?

POSITIONING FOR MOTIVATIONAL IMPACT

A BRIEF HISTORY OF POSITIONING

In earliest advertising, the goal of communicating to the consumer was to convey factual ideas about a product or service to promote its unique features and benefits. The logic of this traditional strategy was well expressed in Rosser Reeves’ (1961) famous unique selling proposition (e.g., “melts in your mouth, not in your hand”).

But this approach only works well when something factual about one’s product is truly new and unique. As more and more products entered into the market to make purely factual distinctiveness less and less obtainable, Ries and Trout (1972) developed the concept of “Positioning”, arguing that marketing should stake a unique position in the minds of consumers. The focus of communication under positioning theory became a psychological one, with an emphasis not just on reality, but on perception of reality.

FLASH FORWARD: Over 80 percent of new product launches in the last five years consisted of “new and improved” brand extensions, and the majority of these failed.

Success in today’s marketplace requires positioning skills of Olympian proportion.

THE "RUB" IN PRODUCT POSITIONING

The traditional requirements for effective positioning are brand/product Relevance, Uniqueness and Believability, for which we propose the acronym, RUB.

• The marketer must create relevance by leading consumers to recognize that the brand/product is for them, that they possess a need for it, that they want it.
• The marketer must create uniqueness to get consumers to recognize that the brand/product is different than what is currently available in the market.
• The marketer creates believability to provide the necessary supports to convince consumers that the claimed benefits are real benefits.

The “rub” is that, in most cases, new products can’t start out fulfilling all three criteria. It is a fundamental marketing mistake to insist on instant relevance for your new product or brand, or instant believability for unique benefits. It is the job of marketing to teach consumers how and why new products are relevant or important to them, and how unique benefits can be credible.

MODEST IMPROVEMENTS: Innovations that are modest enough to be believable are generally seen as ordinary and non-unique. The absence of functional uniqueness has driven many product categories toward image-based positioning (e.g., Coke is Classic, Pepsi is a New Generation) to create unique personalities for functionally-similar brands. These brand personalities can be leveraged to create identity-based symbolic relevance (e.g., traditionalists should drink Coke, radicals should drink Pepsi).

REVOLUTIONARY BENEFITS: Innovations that are truly unique often encounter a barrier of believability. Believability is a moving target as product technologies evolve at a rapid pace. And detecting relevance for new-to-the-world benefits can be the biggest challenge of all; consumers usually can’t anticipate the relevance of new benefits, especially revolutionary ones. Consider the cell phone, wifi, the automobile airbag, eBay or the Segway as only a few examples.

LIMITATIONS OF TRADITIONAL METHODS

The typical quick positioning analysis is woefully inadequate to these challenges: Consumers are presented with a positioning statement followed by summary questions with which they are asked to agree or disagree (Relevance: This brand/product is for people like me, Uniqueness: This brand/product is unique or different than other brands/products, Believability: I believe it is possible for this brand/product to deliver these benefits). Such analyses evaluate and recommend positioning strategies based on the overly optimistic presumption that consumers are able to simultaneously assess multiple dimensions of similarity and difference between brands, to foresee future relevance, and to make inferences regarding the strength of support points they may need to work to understand.

GOING DEEPER

More useful positioning insights are attainable by going beyond superficial stated summary measures toward derived measures of relevance, uniqueness and believability.

• If a brand’s positioning is relevant, the elements of that positioning should drive purchase. For Toyota Scion’s positioning (What moves you) to be relevant, it must elicit associations that actually drive purchase behavior for the target segment of young car buyers (e.g., innovative, cool, reliable, good value); only if the positioning successfully pulls these levers can it be considered relevant.
• To determine if a positioning is truly unique one can use multidimensional techniques to simultaneously consider the degree of similarity/difference between positionings and brands, isolating the qualities that statistically “pop” for each brand and positioning. This approach supports opportunity mapping, which provides a visual summary of positioning candidates vis-à-vis unoccupied “white space” (unclaimed positioning territory).
• The essence of believability lies in the strength of the links between the most unique aspects of a positioning and those (relevant) benefits that drive purchase. Conducting associative network analysis identifies key “chains of logic” that link unique benefits with relevant benefits and their key support points. Returning to the Toyota Scion example, individually customizable [functional benefit] links to breathtaking design [experiential benefit] which links to lets others know I’m both smart and cool [emotional end-benefit]). These linkages provide important guidance for messaging.