Module 3
Brand Positioning

Brand Positioning

Positioning, or owning a space in the mind of your buyer, is more important today than it was decades ago when Jack Trout and Al Ries introduced the concept.

We’re in the middle of communication revolution, created by technology, but driven by human behavior. As we become over-burdened with information, our minds seek to simply, to categorize and to protect ourselves from stimulus overload. We position everything we encounter that is new, and rarely change that perception after our initial decision.

Agencies and the Fortune 500 have leveraged brand positioning for decades, but it’s still new to many early-career marketers and executives at small to mid-size companies.

Toolkit Module

Here you’ll learn the concepts of positioning along with different positioning approaches for specific stages of your market’s lifecycle, and decide what you want your brand to be known for.

Brand Positioning -
What You’ll Determine

  • Market Share, by Revenue and/or Unit Sales
  • Market Trends
  • Market Lifecycle Stage
  • Appropriate Positioning Approach for Market Lifecycle
  • Method for Delivering Value
  • Current Mindshare Owned
  • Mindshare Desired to Own
  • Mindshare Map

Tools in Brand Positioning

  • 63-slide PDF instructions for download
  • Strategy development report template for download and completion
  • 30-minute audio/video instructions presented by Jim Sagar – accessible from your account for 1 year
  • Written transcript for download

Typical Participants for Brand Positioning

This module asks challenging questions, the answers of which will be foundational elements of the brand. The marketing team can create these, but core brand stakeholders should sign off. For small brands, these could be the business owner or executive team. For larger companies, these can be brand managers, VPs or general managers.

Time to Complete Brand Positioning

This is two- to four-hour session to address each element the first time through. You can’t always make core strategic decisions in a compressed timeframe, so you may need to revisit this work over the course of two to three weeks. You can choose to iterate on this module before moving to the next, or come back to it after completing Brand Architecture and Brand Audit.