Brand Positioning Statement Example: Zipcar When Zipcar was introduced to the market, a competition-based perspective was adopted.

The positioning emphasized the superiority of the service in relation to the competitive alternative of owning one's own car. This approach is captured in the following positioning statement:

To urban-dwelling, educated techno-savvy consumers [target], when you use Zipcar car-sharing service instead of owning a car [competitive frame], you save money while reducing your carbon footprint [points of difference].

Once Zipcar was established as an alternative to owning a car, greater emphasis could be given to how Zipcar helped the targeted customer achieve his or her goals. This might have been done by laddering up from the points of difference to a brand essence of being a "responsible choice" for transportation and linking to the target's goal of demonstrating a commitment to protecting the environment. This more customer-based approach is illustrated below:

To urban-dwelling, educated, techno-savvy consumers who worry about the environment that future generations will inherit [target and insight], when you use Zipcar car-sharing service you make a responsible choice [brand essence] and demonstrate your commitment to protecting the environment [target's goal].

The positioning of a new brand often evolves from a competition-based approach to one that places greater emphasis on customers' goals as knowledge of the brand increases. Once a brand is wellestablished, a single statement, such as the one below, may serve to capture elements of both competition-focused and customer-focused positioning:

To urban-dwelling, educated, techno-savvy consumers who worry about the environment that future generations will inherit [target and insight], Zipcar is the car-sharing service [competitive frame] that lets you save money and reduce your carbon footprint [points of difference], making you feel you've made a smart, responsible choice that demonstrates your commitment to protecting the environment [target's goal].

The job of positioning a brand is never done. As new competitors enter the market, a brand's positioning must be modified. The entry of other car-sharing services, such as Connect by Hertz, force Zipcar to

explain why targeted customers should prefer it to services that offer similar attributes. A focus on brand essence may be helpful in this regard. Zipcar may do well to target younger consumers, emphasizing its pioneering role in the car-sharing category and positioning the brand as one that demonstrates a commitment to protecting the environment. By contrast, Connect may concentrate on serving Hertz' existing customer base (older business travelers) on a new occasion (short-term city rentals) and leverage its number-one status and reputation of quality service.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: John Wiley & Sons, excerpted from Kellogg on Marketing, 2nd Edition by Alice M. Tybout (editor), Bobby J. Calder (editor), Phillip Kotler (foreword by) (c) 2010 by The Kellogg School of Marketing.

How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement

Brand LeadershipBrand Positioning Statements provide the most useful function of taking everything you know about your brand, everything that could be said about the consumer and making choices to pick one target that youll serve and one brand promise you will stand behind. While we think this brand positioning statement sets up the creative brief, it should really set up everything the brand does equally important for internal as everyone should follow to what the positioning statement says.

The Brand Positioning Statement

A best in class positioning statement has four key elements:

Target Market (a) Definition of the market you play in (b) Brand Promise (emotional or rational benefit) (c) The Reason to Believe (RTB) the brand promise (d)

The more focused your decisions, the more successful you will be: decide on one target, one promise and maybe one or two reasons to believe that help to directly back up your promise. But the target shouldnt be everyone 18-65, and dont throw your eight best features at the wall and hopefully something sticks. And the reason to believe has to back up your promise, not be a whole new promise.

The classic way to write a Brand Positioning Statement is to take the elements above and frame them into the following: For the target market (a) Brand X plays in the market (b) and it gives the main benefit (c). Thats because of the following reasons to believe (d). This is what it looks like when you put them into this format:

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Looking at the example above for Grays Cookies (fictional brand), the target is proactive preventers, who want to do everything for their health, including sacrificing what they eat. Thats all about a consumer that wants control. The main benefit is guilt free control, with the balance of taste and health in the cookie.

The biggest thing you have to do is make tough decisions. Find the target of those you can get to love you, rather than trying to sell to everyone that might one day like you. Match up your benefits to the need states of the consumer. And leverage where you are on the Love Curve to determine how much emotion you are able to build into your Brand Positioning Statement. Who is Your Target?

Beloved Brands know who their customer is and who it is not. Everything starts and ends with the Consumer in mind. Spreading your limited resources across an entire population is cost prohibitivelow return on investment and low return on effort. While targeting everyone just in case might feel safe at first, its actually less safe because you never get to see the full impact. Realizing not everyone can like you is the first step to focusing all your attention on those that can love you. It becomes all about choices and you will be much more effective at convincing a segment of the population to choose your brand because of the assets and promise that you have that match up perfectly to what they want.

To demonstrate knowledge of that target, defining consumer insights help to crystallize and bring to life the consumer you are targeting. The dictionary definition of the word Insight is seeing below the surface. Too many people think data, trends and facts are insights. Facts are merely on the surface so they miss out on the depthyou need to bring those facts to life by going below the surface and transforming the facts into insights.

When insight is done right, it is what first connects us to the brand, because we see ourselves in the story. Insight is not something that consumers didnt know before. Its not data or fact about your brand that you want to tell. That would be knowledge not insight. Insight is something that everyone already knows and comes to life when its told in such a captivating way that makes consumers stop and say hmm, I thought I was the only who felt like that. Thats why we laugh when we see insight projected with humor, why we get goose bumps when insight is projected with inspiration and why we cry when the insight comes alive through real-life drama.

Whats the Benefit?

The next decision is the main benefit you want to focus on. Doing a Customer Value Proposition (CVP) helps to organize your thinking as a great tool for bringing the benefits to life.

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Hold a brainstorming session with everyone who works on the brand so you can:

Get all of the consumer insights and need states out. Match them up against the list of the best features the brand offers. Find the rational benefit by putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer and seeing the brand features from their eyes: start asking yourself over and over again so if Im the consumer, what do I get from that?. Ask it five times and youll see the answers will get richer and richer each time you ask. Then find the emotional benefit by asking so how does that make me feel? Ask that five times as well, and youll begin to see a deeper emotional space you can play in and own.

For instance, no one really cares that a golf club has 5.7% more torque. When you ask what do i get from that, the better answers are longer drives or lower scores or winning a tournament. These are rational benefits. When you ask how does that make you feel, the emotional space is confidence and optimism. This is the emotional benefit.

Some CVPs can end up very cluttered, but the more focused you can make it the easier it will be for you to choose which one you will stand behind, and which one benefit youll communicate. Thats right: JUST ONE BENEFIT!

Agencies use so many tricks to get it down to the ONE THING. Examples of this could be a postcard or a bumper sticker, or silly questions like what would you say to get someone to marry you or say in an elevator. My favourite is to get people to stand up on a chair and SHOUT FROM THE MOUNTAIN what your benefit is. It forces you to want to scream just ONE THING about your brandkeep it simple. You cant scream a long sentence. And if you are into math, another way to look at this is through a simple

function, where the probability of success (P) is directly linked to the inverse of the numbers of messages (M) you have in your ad: P = 1 divided by 1 to the power of M. My guess is that if you find this last formula motivating, maybe marketing isnt for you. Emotional Benefits

People tend to get stuck when trying to figure out the emotional benefits. I swear every brand out there thinks it is trusted, reliable and yet likeable. It seems that not only do consumers have a hard time expressing their emotions about a brand, but so do Brand Managers. Companies like Hotspex have mapped out all the emotional zones for consumers. Im not a researcher, but if youre interested in this methodology contact Hotspex at http://www.hotspex.biz Leverage this type of research and build your story around the emotions that best fit your consumer needs. Leveraging Hotspex, Ive mapped out 8 zones in a simplistic way below:

Within each of the zones, you can find emotional words that closely align to the need state of the consumer and begin building the emotional benefits within your CVP. It almost becomes a cheat sheet for Brand Managers to work with. But you want to just own one emotional zone, not them all. Finding Your Uniqueness

Brands are either better, different or cheaper. Or not around for very long. The key is to find a unique selling proposition for your brand. You dont always need to find a rational point of difference as long as there is room to be emotionally unique.

USP 2.0Heres how this process works:

Map out everything your consumer wantsall the possible need states. Then map out all the benefits that you and your competitors can do better than anyone elseboth functional and emotional zones. You want to find that intersecting zone where what you can do best matches up to a need state of the consumer. Then find a way to serve that need state to the best of your ability and transform it into an even bigger deal than first meets the eye. Avoid the intersecting zone where your competitor is better than you and please avoid that zone where you and your competition foolishly battle in an area that no one cares about. The battle ground (?) zone is where both you and your competition can satisfy the consumer need at an equal rate. To win in this situation, you need to get creative and find ways to outexecute or find some emotional connection that changes the game and makes you the clear winner.

Reasons to Believe (RTBs)

If we borrow from classic logic below, they teach you to one conclusion and two premise. I took one logic class and sat there for 13 straight weeks of premise-premise conclusion. Easy class, but the lesson has stuck with me:

In a positioning statement, the brand benefit would be the conclusion. And the Reason to Believe (RTB) would be the supporting premise. I say this for a few reasons. First, the RTB should never be the conclusion. The consumer doesnt care about what you do, until they get something from it. The benefit has to come from the consumers shoes. Second, if pure logic teaches two premises are enough to draw any conclusion, then you really only need two RTBs. Brands with a laundry list of RTBs are not doing their job in making a decision on what the best support points are. You either force the ad agency to decide what are the most important or the consumer to decide. By deferring, youre weakening your argument.

Lets take a look at two practical examples of a positioning statement in action.

The quintessential example Ive often heard cited to illustrate how a positioning statement can be effective is Volvos.

For upscale American families, Volvo is the family automobile that offers maximum safety.

Note that this does not talk about the quality of their air bags, the optional collision warning with autobrake or the adaptive cruise control with distance alert. Nor does the statement mention the results of the tests that prove they offer maximum safety. Those are all nice features, but the benefit of all of them is maximum safety.

Note also that the positioning does not talk about great gas mileage, affordability, the sound system all stuff that a customer (an upscale American one, with a family) will probably look at when he gets closer to making a buying decision.

And now look how they execute. The first categories of their long list of features are Preventive Safety, Protective Safety, Child Safety, and then Security. Only then do they start talking about other categories people might care about, like Comfort, Tech & Sound, Styling, and Performance. Now look at any brochure in their catalog. Youll see safety mentioned as the constant refrain, along with other features to distinguish each of their models from each other. They probably have their own positioning statements too.

Whats that? You dont work in the automotive industry? Perhaps a more hi-tech example will help. Heres a positioning statement that I worked on about 2-1/2 years ago, for my current company.

For existing Nuance customers, Nuance Recognizer v9 is the best-of-breed speech recognition software that drives higher business performance by dramatically increasing the efficiency of your selfservice solutions. By combining the natural conversational capabilities of OpenSpeech Recognizer with the administration and maintenance resources of the Nuance 8.5 engine, Nuance Recognizer v9 provides unparalleled levels of accuracy, reliability, and ease of use.

This v9 release occurred about a year after Nuance and ScanSoft merged. It represented the integration of both companies flagship product lines. But you cant market a product as now, on one unified code base to make our internal support and programming easier! Whats in it for the customer? Lots of stuff, but with R&D focused on the integration work, it was up to product management and product marketing to pull a message out from the list of committed features. We focused on the three benefits of accuracy, reliability, and ease of use. And then we used it. Everywhere. The website blurb. Trade show signage. The datasheet. The whitepaper itself is called Bringing New Levels of Accuracy, Reliability, and Ease of Use to Speech-Based Self-Service Applications. The customer-facing presentation hits you over the head with it too. Accuracy. Reliability. Ease of Use. And those arent just marketing mantras we had the lab tests and beta user evidence to prove the accuracy; new load balancing features and a resource manager that simply werent in both versions before; and an entire OA&M mechanism added with the Management Station. But by focusing on those higher level benefits, we could introduce all these features (consolidated logging, reporting and analytics, improved natural language support, yada yada yada) as evidence supporting those benefits, and provide a structure to the argument.

Get it? No? Then consider the alternative. What does all this marketing material look like when the engineering team doesnt have a high level message in mind while theyre designing and building the product? Its whatever the marketing people make up. If youre lucky, its based on whatever features they can yank out of requirements documents. And then were writing about one-of-a-kind unique capabilities that leverage our core strengths and enable us to utilize our vast experience to help you expand your investment and achieve an ROI. Huh?