Brand Positioning: Complete Guide With Examples

As a business owner, you spend a lot of time looking inward at your company and its offering—and that’s not a bad instinct. You’re aiming to create the best product or service possible. However, you also need to look outward, as no business exists in a vacuum, and your success hinges on your audience’s perception of you.

That’s where brand positioning comes in. It can help your brand stand out in a crowded marketplace, increase brand recall and brand loyalty, and attract customers—all of which can increase sales. Read on to learn what it is and how to create a brand positioning strategy for your company.

What is brand positioning?

Brand positioning is the expression of how a brand best solves a need for a specific audience. When done right, brand positioning influences a customer or potential customer to see a brand as having a better value proposition than competitors.

Brand positioning work begins with developing a brand positioning statement, which is an internal summary of your company’s unique value in the market. Arthur Foliard, executive creative director at the international branding agency Koto Studio, says, “Brand positioning is more than just why you exist. It focuses on the things that make you different and unique and the reasons customers should go for it and invest.”

Your positioning statement will serve as a compass for your brand and marketing strategy. “Your brand positioning will impact how you speak and how you look,” Arthur says. “It’s going to influence the way we approach copywriting and the way we approach digital campaigns.”

Ultimately, it’s the foundation of your brand and marketing strategy.

Brand positioning strategies

1. Price-based positioning
2. Symbolic positioning
3. Experiential positioning
4. Functional positioning
5. Emotional positioning

There are several ways to approach brand positioning. The one you choose depends on what value or quality you want to emphasize. Here are five common positioning strategies:

1. Price-based positioning

Price-based positioning strategies promote a brand as the most affordable option in a particular product category. Walmart’s offer of “Everyday Low Prices” is an example of a price-based positioning strategy.

There are some downsides to price-based positioning. “It always feels like brands default to pricing as a differentiator, but unless there’s a very, very good reason, we will never try to push price positioning,” Arthur says. When you differentiate on price, you can find yourself under constant pressure to lower your prices. If your competitors lower theirs, you’ll have to keep lowering yours to undercut them.

2. Symbolic positioning

A symbolic positioning strategy lets brands connect to customers through values, lifestyles, or symbols. This type of positioning is common for luxury brands like Hermès and Ferrari, which use symbolic positioning to encourage status-conscious consumers to aspire to own their products.

A brand might also use symbolic positioning to connect with customers through sustainability or social impact. Take the sustainable footwear brand Thesus, which offers carbon-neutral shipping and uses recycled materials for its boots and shoes. To celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Thesus announced it had given away its intellectual property—years’ worth of work—to speed up the industry’s adoption of sustainable practices.

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3. Experiential positioning

Experiential positioning focuses on a customer’s interaction with a company’s products or services. Travel and entertainment companies use experiential positioning strategies that emphasize fun, adventure, and cognitive stimulation.

4. Functional positioning

Functional positioning focuses on the practical benefits of your offering, emphasizing tangible characteristics that can best serve a customer. Many software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies use this strategy; the accounting software platform QuickBooks, for example, positions its product as a solution to the challenge of managing accounting and billing processes as a small or midsize business owner.

Retail brands may also choose functional positioning. The skin and hair care brand The Cleanest Lab makes products for people with sensitivities or serious health concerns. The brand evaluates its ingredients through the lens of its customers’ potential health concerns, so its positioning revolves around being the healthiest option for a target audience.

5. Emotional positioning

An emotional positioning strategy appeals to a customer’s emotional needs and wants. The goal is to stir up positive associations, like excitement and hope. Nike’s "Just Do It" slogan uses this strategy, encouraging audiences to live up to who they want to be with an encouraging motto.

Brand positioning example

Koto helped the lab-grown meat company Meatable adjust its positioning to improve the brand’s reputation and attract potential investors.

“Meatable is aiming to be the first company in the world to produce quality meats efficiently and sustainably at scale,” Arthur says. “But it’s a big, scary thing when you think about what you need to make meat.” Koto identified an immediate problem with the company’s brand persona: photos of anonymous technicians in white lab coats peering through microscopes, diagrams of the cell-culturing process, and even a manipulated image of a cow-fish hybrid. In other words, its brand positioning focused on an innovative scientific process—a striking differentiator, but not an effective way to sell food.

“We realized that there’s something much more interesting about Meatable,” Arthur says. Arthur and the team at Koto proposed focusing on how Meatable’s products represent a return to the high-quality, pasture-raised, hormone and antibiotic-free meat products of the past—with the additional benefit of letting cows live out their days in peace.

The agency proposed “the new natural” as its new brand identity, supported by collateral featuring pristine landscapes, contented farm animals, and graphics emphasizing the company’s potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“What’s lovely about ‘the new natural’ is that what you’re doing is a return to a fully natural, nice, clean planet, delivered through innovation,” Arthur says. Koto’s campaign included a series of postcards from retired livestock around the world: “We’re going to ask ourselves one great question during this, which is, ‘What are our animals going to do?’” Arthur says. “And we told them, maybe, they’re just going to retire. Maybe they’re actually going to go back to Switzerland and be able to retire.”

Meatable’s new positioning strategy illustrates the power of emotional positioning and a strong brand story. “With these lovely stories, you don’t really focus on science. You don’t really focus on what’s happening in the lab. You’ll focus on the outcome,” he says. “We’re not going to want to kill any cow or any animal. We’re going to be able to have this beautiful planet. You could talk about the pricing, you could talk about the lab and the scientists, but actually just focusing on the idea that there’s a better future for us—that’s a lot more compelling.”

How to develop your brand positioning

1. Conduct market research
2. Define your differentiators
3. Draft your brand positioning statement

A successful brand positioning strategy starts with a clear brand positioning statement. Here’s how to define your company’s positioning and craft your statement:

1. Conduct market research

Market research provides insight into your target audiences, competitors, and relevant trends in your market. Here’s a breakdown of key steps and how they inform the positioning process:

1. Research your target audience. Effective brand positioning responds to a need, belief, or desire present among your target customers. Research your target audience to refine your understanding of who they are, what they care about, and which factors motivate purchasing decisions.

2. Conduct competitor research. Research your competitors to learn what they offer and what they believe sets them apart. Try to identify which type of positioning strategy each competitor uses.

3. Review industry and market trends. Identify the forces currently driving change in your market, and be on the lookout for emerging trends or potential disruptors. A strong brand positioning strategy factors in anticipated changes in your industry.

To gather insights, you can use primary research tactics (like conducting surveys, studies, or focus groups) and secondary methods (like internet research, social media, and reading industry and government reports).

2. Define your differentiators

Your differentiators—such as unique features, benefits, or qualities—distinguish your business from your competitors. There are three main types of product differentiators:

• Horizontal product differentiation. Horizontal differentiation encompasses the subjective ways your brand differs from others, like its aesthetic design.

• Vertical product differentiation. This type of differentiation distinguishes products through objective attributes, such as materials and price.

• Mixed product differentiation. This is a combination of horizontal and vertical differentiators.

Listing all your products and services and noting what makes them stand out from the competition is a good place to start. But differentiators can go beyond your offerings; they can include anything that makes your business distinct, such as your exceptional customer service, your brand voice, collaborative design process, rigorous testing standards, or product packaging.

Tap a trusted colleague or a mentor to help you brainstorm. Incorporating multiple voices can help you evaluate the full range of possibilities. Next, cross-reference this list with your target audience research to identify traits that set you apart and matter to your ideal customers. It’s not just about being different, but being different in a way that matters to the people you serve.

3. Draft your brand positioning statement

Brand positioning statements are concise—typically just a few sentences long. Positioning statements are primarily internal documents that guide key decision-making processes. Successful companies weigh business and marketing decisions against their positioning statements and prioritize actions that strengthen market positioning.

Effective brand positioning statements address the following:

• How is your product or brand different from competitors?

• Why should your target market believe you’re different?

• How is your company uniquely qualified to deliver on its brand promise?

Write a simple, memorable summary of how you want your target audience to view your brand. You’ve already identified the ways you provide unique value to customers, so imagine you’re in a room with a prospect, and explain why they should choose you.

How to assess the success of your brand positioning

Brand perception—the public’s impression of your brand—is critical for evaluating the effectiveness of your positioning strategy. You can measure brand perception in various ways:

• Brand perception surveys. Brand perception surveys reveal how consumers see your brand on a cognitive, emotional, and experiential level. You can survey current customers or tailor it to a wider base.

• Customer satisfaction surveys. Customer satisfaction surveys uncover how existing customers feel about your products and services, resulting in measurable feedback.

• Brand audit. A brand audit evaluates your current brand positioning and performance. You can audit your brand by looking at how well your external branding aligns with your business strategy and running a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis.

• Social listening tools. Social listening tools, like Hootsuite Insights and Cyfe, let you monitor mentions of your brand on social media platforms. This can reveal how consumers feel about your brand.