Taking A Position On Brand

Untying advertising's Gordian Knot

Almost everyone is talking about brand these days but nobody really knows what it means. Or to be more precise, everyone’s definition is at least slightly different. Rendering most discussions of brand useless to the point of parody. For most people, the emblems of brand are logo graphics and standard design elements, which are certainly part of the picture. But a teeny, tiny part.

A better though less widely used term for brand is "positioning." You position your brand in the marketplace. When Coke announced it was "The Real Thing" they were calling Pepsi a copycat. When Avis promised "We Try Harder" they were saying Hertz took your business for granted. If Bounty is "The Quicker Picker Upper" what does that make the other guys?

Positioning is certainly a first cousin to making a promise in your advertising except that positioning doesn’t always articulate a clear benefit. Folgers is "The Mountain Grown Coffee." Well... so are all the other brands. That’s where coffee grows. On mountains. But Folgers has grabbed mountain grown as its position and nobody else wants to say, "Hey, So Are We." So Folgers owns it. Together with the implication that it makes them a premium brand.

I use Folgers as an example not because I think it is particularly good advertising but because it demonstrates how persistence and repetition can create a brand position from a transparently foolish premise. Just imagine how effective a really strategic position could be.

So, are brand and positioning just two words for the same thing? Nope. Your brand is... (Hey, pay attention, this is important!) Your brand is the impression or series of impressions that come to mind when someone sees or hears your company’s name. That’s the true definition of brand. And the most important point in that little golden nugget is that you don’t totally control your brand; it resides in the collective consciousness of the marketplace.

Positioning is how you shape your brand to make people think of you in a way that promotes sales. Positioning is the part of brand you do control. With marketing. (I hardly need say that customer service, product development and quality control are also vital components of your brand.) Positioning is the message you repeat consistently, over and over, in the hopes that when people do see your company’s name their brand impression is what you want it to be.

It’s no accident that in all the examples given the positioning was the product’s tag line. (In fact, advertising people refer to that as the positioning line.) The positioning line always appears next to the product’s logo. (In broadcast advertising, it’s usually the last line your hear.) A good positioning line doesn’t live or die with the campaign that introduces it. The positioning line becomes the product mantra for years, even decades. Avis has used "We Try Harder" for 40 years. FedEx no longer uses "Absolutely, Positively Overnight" but I’ll bet fewer than one in 10 of the people who read this know the line that replaced it. Good positioning never dies.

So, if you’ve added a swoosh to your logo, you haven’t re-branded; you’ve redecorated. And if you change your ads from time to time, that’s great. But it’s not re-branding. Just remember, you don’t really control your brand, the marketplace does. Good, strategic positioning, repeated over the years, is the only way to create a solid, reliable brand that people will consistently identify with your product. It takes time and it takes discipline. And it works like gangbusters

It's the real thing.

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