How to craft the best brand positioning strategy for your market
- Alberto Carniel
- Dec 6, 2019
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 29, 2025
How can a business stand out from its competitors—and what should the most profitable offering be?
How can a company position its brand in the industry, and what strategies can it use to do it?
And, by the way… what does brand positioning actually mean?
Companies should aim to differentiate from competitors’ products and offerings.
One of the most effective ways to stand out is to carve out a unique position in the marketplace.
Brand positioning is another evergreen pillar of the #MarketingPlan.
Keep reading and learn everything you need to know to craft the best brand positioning strategy for your brand.
Table of contents
WHAT BRAND POSITIONING MEANS
A pre-requirement of brand positioning is a deep understanding of customers’ wants and needs, so I suggest you read my previous blog article where I go through market segmentation.
A business analyzes the market and discovers the groups of consumers it can serve best.
Afterwards, it positions its brand in the industry so that everyone recognizes its specific offerings and image.
Defining brand positioning
Brand positioning is a designing process that enables companies to outline their offering and image and occupy a distinctive place in the minds of their target audience.
In other words, positioning defines consumers’ perception of a company and its brand.
Everyone within an organization should use brand positioning as context before making any marketing decision.
Some of the variables that help marketers position a company are:
Product or service characteristics
Perceived quality / price ratio
Usage
User of the product or service
Competition
Since a company’s position is not simple to change once established, it should be concrete enough to reflect the present state of the business, but also visionary enough to leave room for growth.
The perfect positioning sits right in between what a brand is and what it could be.
Kotler and Keller (in Marketing Management) identified three requirements for the right positioning (I explain them in detail later):
Deciding a frame of reference by determining the target audience and relevant competitors
Given a frame of reference, identifying similarities and differences with other brands
Making a compelling motto (or mantra) to enclose the brand’s essence
A different approach: brand storytelling
An alternative to the competitive brand positioning explained above is brand narrative and storytelling.
This is a less structured approach that doesn’t necessarily require an in-depth consumer, company, and competitive analysis.
In May 2009, Businessweek issued “Selling by storytelling” by Ronald Grover, where he described brand positioning as the result of storytelling rather than an outline of specific attributes or benefits.
In A breakthrough approach to brand creation, Randall Ringer (founder and CEO of Verse Group, now part of MBLM) and Michael Thibodeau (brand strategist and creative director) pinpointed five key aspects of brand storytelling:
Words and metaphors that weave the tale
How the consumer interacts with the brand over time
How the brand represents people, objects, and places (and its language)
The bond between brand and sensorial experience: engagement with people’s heart
The role played by the brand in consumers’ lives
They also elaborated the Narrative branding framework, made of:
Setting: time, place, and context
Cast: the brand becomes a character with its own history (creation myth) and relationship with/responsibility towards the audience
Narrative arc: how events unfold in the story
Language: the brand’s authentic voice, its symbols, metaphors, and leitmotifs
Since I’m a digital marketer, I don’t feel like I’m the best person to go deep into narrative, metaphors, and language use—mostly because I believe a narrative branding approach requires strong mastery of the language and culture of a target population.
Once you understand the common guidelines above, the actual process of making an effective brand story may vary according to industry, region, culture, and so on.
So in this article, I’ll focus on an analytic approach to brand positioning.
HOW TO CRAFT BRAND POSITIONING
Segmentation, targeting, and positioning are the backbone of all marketing strategies.
In my previous article, I’ve already gone through the first two steps—so now it’s time to deepen all the elements mentioned above and provide practical guidelines and tools.
Identifying a competitive frame of reference
A competitive frame of reference determines the main rival brands to compete with.
That’s why it’s strictly connected to the target audience: given a distinct public, a business competes with products or services that are close substitutes.
Mastering competition also means forecasting future rivals.
For instance, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint spent billions to build their network—but thanks to the development of Wi-Fi networks and hotspots, Skype broke through.
Another example is the supplement industry.
Just consider how fragmented the energy bar market is: every sub-category appeals to different people, in different situations.
Companies should understand rivals’ real and perceived strengths and weaknesses to get a comprehensive view.
They can interview customers to acquire this intel.
Analyzing this positioning table, it is clear that the company could attack Competitor A on product availability and technical assistance, Competitor C on almost everything, but it should not engage Competitor B, which has no main weaknesses.
Competitors are usually more than what marketers expect.
Coca-Cola focused on soft drinks and missed the growing market of coffee and fresh-fruit-juice bars, which negatively affected its business.
The concept of competition includes a broader set of rivals.
In 2000, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Bernard J. Jaworski published E-commerce, suggesting that companies profile direct and indirect competitors by mapping buyers’ steps in obtaining and using a product or service.
After identifying the primary competitors, marketers should try to figure out their strategies and objectives:
What is each competitor seeking in the marketplace?
What drives its behavior?
Identifying differences from rivals
A company should determine its points of difference (PODs)—unique characteristics that consumers recognize only in that company.
There are three criteria to create strong, positive, and unique associations:
Desirability: associations must be personally relevant to consumers. They must believe in the brand’s promise (i.e., the delivery of the desired benefit).
Deliverable by the company: the organization must have the internal capabilities to maintain these associations in consumers’ minds over time. PODs must be supported by product/service design and the overall marketing offering.
Does the product/service actually deliver the right message, or does it require real changes?
If the product/service is fine, do consumers need a different message to align perception with the PODs?
Differentiating from competitors: consumers must associate the brand with unique and greater characteristics compared to its rivals.
Identifying similarities with competitors
A business should also find its points of parity (POPs) with the competition—attributes the brand has in common with rivals.
Shared associations are fundamental to build brand positioning.
A brand must have similarities with the industry (or product/service category) to be recognized as credible and legitimate (category POPs).
Example: consumers may not consider a travel agency credible until they see it can book flights and hotels, give leisure advice, and provide multiple pricing options.
A business must also have POPs with competitors (competitive POPs) for two key reasons:
Every similarity can invalidate a competitor’s point of difference
A shared association negates a perceived vulnerability of the brand (when consumers think that being great at one thing implies being weak at something else)
A good way to master similarities is to put yourself in competitors’ shoes, identify their PODs, and—when appropriate—emulate them.
How to make a brand positioning map
Marketers can’t work on POPs and PODs all at once, so they have to select which ones will position the brand.
During positioning, it’s often preferable to build POPs and PODs based on benefits rather than attributes.
Attributes usually support the reasons why a brand can credibly claim certain benefits.
A useful tool to choose similarities and differences is the positioning map (also known as a perceptual map).
Positioning maps are visual portrayals of consumers’ perceptions and preferences.
They represent a market situation and describe how people see a product or service according to different dimensions.
In this example, I picked two dimensions:
Price: the more a brand is on the right side of the X axis, the more expensive it is
Design trend: the more a brand is in the upper part of the Y axis, the more traditional its design is. Accordingly, the more it’s located in the lower part, the more trendy and youthful the style is
You can try building a positioning map for your brand by using dimensions that matter to your business.
What a brand mantra is
A brand mantra should be three to five words long and capture the indisputable brand essence or spirit.
In A new brand world, Scott Bedbury wrote:
“Brand mantra is an articulation of the heart and soul of the brand and is closely related to other branding concepts like ‘brand essence’ and ‘core brand promise’.”
A brand mantra is useful to help employees and partners adjust their communication and align it with the brand positioning.
It’s different from a brand payoff (or slogan): the mantra is designed for the inside of an organization.
Examples of brand mantra and slogan
Nike’s brand motto of authentic athletic performance guides product and testimonial choices. Nike’s payoff is Just do it.
McDonald’s brand mantra of food, folks and fun encloses its soul and core promise. McDonald’s slogan is I’m lovin’ it.
Disney’s brand philosophy of fun family entertainment keeps its marketing on track. Disney’s payoff is Where dreams come true.
How to design a brand mantra
According to Kotler and Keller, a good brand mantra should communicate the operating industry and condense the unique value proposition.
It should also be simple: memorable mantras are short, fresh, and lively in meaning.
And it should be meaningful and inspiring for employees.
Brands often use the mantra to focus on PODs (unique differentiators), while using other methods to reinforce POPs.
To recap.
A compelling mantra relies on three key points:
Communication
Inspiration
Simplification
HOW TO COMMUNICATE BRAND POSITIONING
Communicating brand positioning means making consumers understand:
The industry where a company competes
Its points of parity and points of difference
Announcing the benefits
One way to convey a brand’s position is reassuring consumers about the results they can expect after using a product or service.
Marketers rely on benefits to communicate positioning:
Performance benefits (e.g., great taste of a cookie and high-quality ingredients)
Imagery benefits (e.g., delighted customers enjoying a cookie)
A brand can offer more or fewer benefits compared to the competition.
It can even decide to provide more benefits for a lower price.
Comparing to industry leaders
Associating a brand with well-known and established players can support positioning.
For instance, Tommy Hilfiger advertised itself as part of a U.S. designers elite by associating with Geoffrey Beene, Stanley Blacker, Calvin Klein, and Perry Ellis—leveraging their reputation to grow and carve out its place among them.
Relying on the product descriptor
Zorraquino’s branding dictionary defines a product descriptor as:
A functional brand name that enables the main quality or application of a product or service to be identified. It tends to be useful in lesser-known markets where the public will first encounter brands with a generic denomination.
Honestly, I couldn’t explain it better.
Product descriptors can help consumers understand positioning at a glance.
Example: in 2004, Ford invested over $1 billion to create a car combining SUV and station wagon characteristics.
This model became the Freestyle, and Ford communicated its unique position by establishing a new category called “sports wagon.”
Mistakes and challenges in brand positioning
Brand positioning hides many challenges for marketers.
Whether you proceed via narrative branding or a competitive approach, you’ll face the difficulty of communicating POPs and PODs clearly and credibly.
For example, trying to position a brand as high-quality and also stating it is inexpensive can create disruption in consumers’ minds.
Long-lived brands can exploit the myth of their history and creation, but that can backfire: consumers might perceive them as old-fashioned and not up to date.
As shown in the table below, attributes and benefits can have negative and positive associations.
Low price vs. High quality | Powerful vs. Safe |
Taste vs. Low calories | Strong vs. Refined |
Nutritious vs. Good tasting | Ubiquitous vs. Exclusive |
Efficacious vs. Mild | Varied vs. Simple |
A strategy to overcome these trade-offs is addressing consumers with distinct campaigns and revealing POPs and PODs one by one.
In my professional experience, the most common mistakes in brand positioning are:
Under-positioning: the brand doesn’t understand consumers’ perception and doesn’t unleash its full potential
Over positioning: the brand’s position doesn’t match the value attributed by consumers
Confused positioning: people don’t understand the message and can’t assign it value
Impossible positioning: an example says it all—if McDonald’s tried to become perceived as a healthy, high-quality bistrot… there’s no way it’s going to happen (should I explain why?).
CONCLUSIONS
Brand positioning isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s the difference between being an option and being the option.
If you take only one thing from this article, let it be this: positioning lives at the intersection of your audience, your competitive frame, and what you can credibly deliver—consistently.
Everything else (ads, social, website copy, even pricing) should follow from there.
Before you close this tab, do a quick exercise:
Write your target audience in one sentence.
List one competitor you’re truly compared to (not the one you wish you were compared to).
Pick one POD you can defend and one POP you must match.
Draft a 3–5 word brand mantra your team can actually remember.
If you want, drop a comment with just your industry and your 3–5 word brand mantra.
I’m curious to see what you come up with—and you’ll be surprised how revealing that tiny sentence can be.
REFERENCES
Kotler, Philip; Keller, Kevin Lane. Marketing Management. Pearson, 2016.
Grover, Ronald. Selling by storytelling. BusinessWeek, May 2009.
Ringer, Randall; Thibodeau, Michael. A breakthrough approach to brand creation. Verse Group (now part of MBLM), n.d.
Rayport, Jeffrey F.; Jaworski, Bernard J. E-commerce. McGraw-Hill, 2000.
Bedbury, Scott. A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century. Viking/Penguin, 2002.
Zorraquino. Branding Dictionary (entry: “Product descriptor”). Zorraquino (branding agency), n.d.