Brand positioning: How Apple positions itself

APPLE is one company that has positioned itself well to its customers. Apple builds creative and innovative computers which are different from anything else on the market.

They use their own operating system, their own applications and have their own development environment.

They inculcate these same values to their own customers. If you're an Apple user then you're creative, innovative and different. The company makes an effort to leave out price in their marketing and they focus instead on the value their products create.

What is brand positioning?

Brand positioning is how one brand distinguishes itself to its audience from its competitors. It's how a brand defines how they are different to their competitors and why their audience should care.

Positioning defines how the brand's offering is unique, how it provides a distinct benefit to customers. For example, when you think of the words “soft drink”.

Coke and Pepsi immediately come to mind. This is because these two products are positioned to dominate the soft drink category. Positioning is not a game , fonts, colours and typography. It's a game of influencing perceptions.

Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. You position the product in the mind of the prospect. There's a lot of noise in the market and a lot of competitors in the market offering the same products and services that you offer.

There is no point in you coming into a market already crowded with competitors and then offering what your competitors are already offering. The competitors already have brand awareness, their audience already knows about them.

They don't know who your brand is. Businesses use marketing to communicate their market position to customers and influence their perception of their products or services. Marketing establishes the brand identity, influencing consumer perceptions of its position in the market relative to competitors' alternatives.

It's very important for you to come in the market and show your audience why they should care with a positioning strategy. The most important aspect of a positioning strategy is for you to know who your audience is, their desires, their dreams, their fears, their journey and the outcomes they want.

To identify an effective positioning strategy you have to identify the difference that you're going to make in the lives of your audience. Are you going to be faster, more convenient, easier, cheaper or more luxurious?

What do you want to be remembered for by the audience?

If you come into the market and you're the same everything that everyone else is offering in the market, you're not going to make any noise and it's going to be difficult for you to get the attention of the audience.

Identify, clarify and articulate the difference you're going to make in the audience's mind.

Why is brand positioning

important?

1. It clarifies how you're different from competitors. A positioning strategy helps you identify what sets you apart from everyone else in the market. For example, the Zimbabwean company Fresh in a box is positioned to be an industry leader in the e-commerce business.

The company basically sells farm produce online. They could have entered the market by doing what everyone else does: setting up a physical store to sell their products but that would have just added more noise in the market.

2. It focuses you on a specific target market. Ever heard of the saying “the riches are in the niches?” Providing a limited set of services to a limited audience helps your marketing to become more focused, powerful and effective.

For example, when Nike was launched the initial target market were athletes. The company was perceived as a high value expert in the athlete shoe segment and when they dominated this segment they then went in to dominate more segments.

3. It shows you how to win new clients. Positioning arms your business development team with critical arguments they can use in the nurturing and closing processes.

For example, Tesla is positioned as a car for tech-savvy folks who also care about climate change.

It's easier for the business development team to craft the benefits of using the product to the audience and for them to convince the target market to buy the product.

Types of brand positioning

strategy.

1. Cost-driven positioning.

Oldest method in the book.

This type of positioning is when a business offers everything other competitors offer but at a cheaper price.

This requires the business to have an inherent cost advantage or boatloads of money to basically subsidize their customers. An example is Itel. They offer smartphones that everyone else offers in the market but at a cheaper price.

Supermarket chains often have a house brand with very low price products in many product categories. The lower you go for price, the wider the market gets because more people can afford.

This will inevitably lead to price wars because a competitor can easily come in and offer a lower price. Eventually, it will become a game of cutting quality to get those lower prices.

Brands can also position based on price if they find a market gap at a specific price point. Being the only option in a certain price range becomes your market position.

2. Niche services specialisation

This is when you offer a service that is not widely available in the market. Offering specialised expertise that a generalist would not have. We all know of brands that say “we do this, we do that, we also do that”.

They try to fix everything for everyone. Their messaging is diluted because it's hard to know what they do very well. Consumers look at these brands and say, “what are they going to do for me? They are not specialised in anything and everything they're going to give me will be half baked”.

They call themselves “The One Stop Shop.” An example of niche services specialisation will be a digital marketing agency that focuses on managing social media for logistics companies only.

3. Positioning based on quality or luxury

Often the price and quality of a product align, certainly in the consumers' mind, as the high price is associated with high quality.

With this strategy, the prestige and perception in the customers' mind increases. People will call your brand better than others. You need to actually produce food quality products because if you don't, people will find you out and call you a fraud.

The greater the quality, the higher the price. You need to maintain that good quality but still have your profit margins.

Note that luxury does not always mean better quality; however, customers still believe it is better because of their reputation due to their long term luxury positioning strategy.

4. Positioning based on product characteristics

Using product characteristics or benefits as a positioning strategy associates your brand with a particular feature beneficial to customers.

For example, in the motoring world Toyota's position in the market is reliability. Porsche's position is performance and Volvo's position is safety.

5. Leader based positioning

We are the best at what we do and there is no one who compares to us.

This strategy is reserved for top-tier brands because it's easy for competitors to come in and offer the same service.

Examples are Mercedes and Rolex who are the best in their classes. It's difficult for a new brand to come in and say we are the best in this category.

◆ Leslie Mupeti is a graphic designer and brand strategy expert. He can be contacted on +263 785 324 230 and lesmup2018@gmail.com for feedback.