How to choose the correct Market Positioning for your business.

What is Positioning?

‍In a perfect world, you would wake up one day with a wonderful business idea, create the product quickly and be the first one on the market. Your product would never have any competitors so it would sell by itself quickly without any advertising needed. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world.

Think of positioning as, well, a position. Imagine a fresh market, full of wonderful vegetables and fruits. How do you make the difference between your tomatoes and your competitors’? Do you yell louder? Do you change your production to organic? Do you work on your packaging? Do you invest in the best location? Do you offer free items? Do you raise your price to represent the quality? Do you get it? You have to distinguish yourself from the competition. To make it simple: your marketing positioning is a descriptive sentence of your product and company. 

So how can you choose the best positioning? 

You already have competitors, direct and indirect, setting the rules and trends. You have adapted your product to the need or better, you decided to disrupt everything. But now, things are getting a bit more complicated. You compare your product to your competitors and you ask yourself:  How exactly can I position it to be successful? Where is the niche? Is the niche interesting or risky? Why has no one already pursued this? The more you’ll study your competitors and market, the easier it becomes to make a decision. 

You are standing in a particular sector of the market and this is the direction in which you aim your product or service. You have to create a product so profound that it becomes something they’ve never seen before. Whatever it is that you decide to create has to be distinct, attractive, durable, and credible. Keep this in mind when you are finding a place for your product. 

Take Nike for example: two former athletes found a hole in the market for proper athletic shoes that were up to par with what athletes needed to excel in their sport. They created a company that would fill that gap using their authentic knowledge on the topic. Because at the time that Nike was born there was nothing on the market like it, they are still incredibly relevant today and known as trailblazers for their niche. More than that, they have kept up with what their consumers demand and continue to create new products that wow their audience. Their consistency in positioning translated into their advertising strategies and has been proven successful.

What are the differences between a marketing positioning and advertising positioning?

As we said, marketing positioning is a descriptive sentence about your product on the market compared to your competitors. Your advertising “positioning” is the creative direction you’ll use to stand out. 

Let’s discuss an example. When Jaguar enlists an advertising agency to a new campaign, they come up with this kind of brief: ‘Here’s our new car, the F-Pace, we want to expand our range to SUVs, our marketing niche is british elegance and sports cars.”

The advertising agency then reviews all of their competitors and analyzes their “advertising positioning”. They will find that Mercedes is partnering with athletes and world wide champions in their respective fields, Porsche chose to be bold and humoristic without neglecting to incorporate their sports background and  BMW uses aggression and intensity in their campaigns. So, where’s the niche for Jaguar?

The agency, Spark44, decided to advertise the new model by incorporating intelligence, humor and elegance, when all of their client’s competitors were going in a more professional and conventional direction. (And it worked!)

How to come up with the best advertising positioning. 

First things first: make sure your position in and on the market is inherently clear. Which market are you targeting, exactly? Why? What is your purpose and how can your product be beneficial for your audience? After you clarify all of these personal aspects of the positioning, you can then get a bit more technical. How big is the market? How are the other competitors positioned? Where is the niche? 

For example, BRACT is positioned as an agency that incorporates and spreads kindness using our projects while maintaining a super professional atmosphere (we don’t believe these two attributes to be mutually exclusive). As simple as it is, there were no marketing and communication agencies around us explicitly positioning their services as compassionate but also creative and efficient. We saw the gap, acknowledged the niche, and went for it.

Take a high-tech company for example. A cybersecurity company that offers protection for pharmaceutical companies against fraud and infringement. You’re protecting those companies from getting attacked and their research from being stolen. Your marketing positioning is what you offer them. Your advertising strategy can be a bit more playful. Something along the lines of  “create revolutionary medicine while sleeping peacefully”. This is how you approach your target. 

After you clearly state your position, get specific. The more separate and distinct your target market is, the higher the chance it will connect to them and prove to be profitable. Of course, it is always important to have a wide target so you are able to reach a larger audience. That being said, finding a super niche market for your product to reach is often overlooked but nonetheless equally as important. 

How can we help? 

Let’s start by getting to know each other. What is it and who is it that you are doing this for? If you had a hard time answering some of the questions we asked in the above paragraphs, it’s totally fine. We are here to assist you in any way you need. These questions have to do with topics that are extremely difficult to answer specifically when you haven’t had proper guidance. A marketing agency specializes in positioning because it’s a necessity when you are branding or maybe even rebranding a company. We take absolutely everything into account: your goals, the importance of your product, in which market it needs to exist and to whom you need to market it. We get to know you and why you started. Then we find the target that desperately needs what you have to offer (we know they’re out there!) , and fire it directly toward them!