Brand Positioning

Connecting Marketing Strategy and Communications

Erik Kostelijk, Karel Jan Alsem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000025064
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Brand Positioning is an English translation of an exceptionally well-renowned Dutch textbook, which provides a practical approach to analysing, defining and developing a brand's positioning strategy.

Divided into three key parts, the book works step-by-step through the creation of an effective marketing strategy, combining an academic approach with the strategic and operational guidelines, tools and techniques required. Unlike other textbooks, it has a unique focus on the relationship between branding, marketing and communications, exploring brand values, brand identity and brand image, and analysing how these can be transformed into a successful positioning strategy, using international case studies, examples and practical exercises.

This textbook will be core reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of marketing strategy, branding, marketing communications and consumer behaviour. It will also be of great value to marketing and communications professionals looking to develop and maintain their company's brand.

Part I

Foundations

We start this book with an introduction to positioning in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, we go deeper into the content of the concept of positioning and its relationship with other concepts such as image, identity, and reputation. We end this chapter with a description of the positioning process.

Chapter 1

Relevance of brand positioning

1.1 An introduction to brand positioning

This book is about brand positioning. The concept of positioning has become internationally known because of the famous book by Ries and Trout (1986): Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind. Positioning essentially is about two things (Laforet, 2010):

1. First you decide what kind of message and image you want to convey to a target group. This concerns the strategic choice of a distinctive position in the market.
2. Then you ensure that you achieve that position. This is done through tactics: orchestrating the marketing mix (the five P’s: product, price, place, promotion, and personnel).

This book focuses on the first of these two things. The second item involves the implementation of the positioning: the operational marketing plan.

It may seem rather trivial to write a separate book about positioning. Because it might seem that it is nothing more than a small element of marketing. And what about its role in communication? And there are countless books about marketing and communication. All right. Here we have the first (theoretical) issue. Positioning belongs to both marketing and communication. And as a result, it is undervalued in both fields!

A second problem is the professional reality. Marketing and communication practitioners do not devote enough attention to brand positioning. This is because marketers are mainly occupied with all sorts of tactical marketing aspects; in the heat of the moment, they often don’t pay enough attention to the essence of the brand. This creates the risk that all kinds of activities are initiated that actually do not fit the brand, which leads to ambiguity. In turn, communication people often are also more concerned with operational matters such as making brochures or discussing the web site design with the agency. Or they are active on social media without strategically considering whether everything is in line with what the essentials of their brand.

The consequence of all this: consumers do not really know anymore what the brand stands for. The result is that it becomes difficult to create customer loyalty. Red Bull illustrates how effective a good brand positioning can be (Example 1.1). The Red Bull brand consistently emphasizes values such as “extreme” and “energy.” In this way the brand aims at customers who consciously or unconsciously associate with these values or at least desire to have an energetic feeling.

Example 1.1 The consistent branding of Red Bull

Red Bull stands for “extreme sports.” Because it stands for “energy.” And not just that. Red Bull shows in all possible ways that “extreme challenges” completely match with the brand. Red Bull sponsors Formula One races, organizes spectacular flying shows, and sponsors the highest individual free fall from space to earth. Partly because of this, Red Bull receives a lot of media attention. One of the energetic consequences: Sampling among students during the exam period. Wake up!

Photo 1.1 Red Bull stands for extreme performance. Source: istockphoto.com.

1.2 The increasing importance of brand positioning

There are several reasons (or actually trends) that make a clear brand positioning very important. These reasons are:

1. increasing competition
2. online growth leading to increasing market transparency and more powerful customers
3. increasing power of intermediaries
4. a lot of low involvement among consumers
5. the paradox of choice
6. the importance of the subconscious in decision-making

Ad 1 Increasing competition

A trend that has been going on for decades is the increase in competition in many markets. Competitors know each other more and more and it is therefore increasingly difficult to gain, let alone maintain, an advantage over the competition. Related to this, we also observe a decreasing “time to market” for innovations: if an organization has a product innovation, it should not wait too long with the actual introduction, because before you know it, the competition will enter the market and you lose your “first mover advantage.” And if you are the first one, the competition will not wait long to introduce the same, or even an improved version, so your advantage will be brief and not as big as expected. The life cycle of new technologies is therefore becoming shorter and shorter. This can be seen, for example, in the smartphone market where new, better, faster types quickly follow up and a smartphone is – even after only a year – no longer up-to-date.

Ad 2 Increasing market transparency and more powerful customers

The internet is the main cause of an enormous availability of information about brands and markets. Online you can actually find everything about brands: what brands communicate about themselves, experiences of customers, tests of independent organizations, etcetera. If there has ever been a complaint, it probably can still be found online. And with the growth of social media the power of the customer has actually increased exponentially. After all, a tweet is enough to reach a huge amount of people. And if that tweet is also picked up by a journalist, an even stronger flood of publicity is created. The use of social media and internet stimulated another trend: the availability of enormous quantities of data. We refer to this as big data. For both practitioners and academics it is the challenge to obtain useful information out of these data.

Ad 3 Increasing power of intermediaries

There are several important trends in the distribution of products and services. We mention the following developments:

• Increasing power of retailers. This trend has been going on for decades, mainly in the food sector. For instance in The Netherlands only two retailers occupy more than half of the market: the chains Albert Heijn and Jumbo jointly have approximately 55% (2019) of the food market in their hands.
• Growth of online sales. The possibility for online shopping (and communication) is the biggest breakthrough in the history of marketing. It leads to fundamentally new consumer behavior and therefore also to new digital business models (Verhoef, Bijmolt, 2019), especially the growth of new digital platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, Booking.com, Uber and AirBNB. These new intermediaries have generated an enormous power and strongly affect the retailing value chain (Reinartz et al., 2019).

These trends emphasize that you, as a supplier / brand, have to make new fundamental choices about your positioning. What is your role in delivering customer value? How do you cope with the new competition? What channels will be used? This has also to do with what is sometimes referred to in marketing as ‘push versus pull’. Push means that as a provider you try to promote the product to the intermediary (‘through the chain’). Pull means that your brand mainly stimulates the final demand, i.e., the needs of end users, to ‘force’ intermediaries to pay sufficient attention to your brand. Nowadays in most markets it is not a choice between push or pull, or online or offline, you have to do all.

Ad 4 A lot of low involvement among consumers

Due to the previous two developments, consumers could become more critical when making purchasing decisions. After all, an average consumer can compare alternatives relatively easily and then choose the brand that fits him best.

Yet this is probably not the case. Precisely because there is so much competition, and the development of new products is fast, many consumers get the impression that “all brands will be equally good,” which means that it does not really matter what you buy. This creates low involvement. Suppose a consumer has to choose a laundry detergent in a supermarket, facing a shelf full of different brands, sizes, types, and variants. This overload can lead to an “arbitrary” choice determined by, for example, the colour of the packaging or by a possible promotion. See also the next issue.

Ad 5 The paradox of choice

It has been argued that the multitude of choices creates a form of “choice fatigue.” This is also called the “paradox of choice”: you would expect that a greater choice for consumers is positive, because then there is really something to choose. But it could also lead to greater uncertainty because you can never be sure that you have actually chosen the best brand. This leads to cognitive dissonance: the feeling that you are less satisfied after your choice. The decision-making process thus becomes more complex, while the importance of the choice becomes smaller: almost all products on the market are in principle good enough to meet the needs.

This phenomenon has been investigated in a large number of studies. In a meta-analysis of the studies they investigated, Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, and Todd (2010) found, on average, no correlations in the number of brands and the choice motivation or the satisfaction afterwards. So, they did not find support for the existence of “the paradox of choice.” This does not mean that the paradox of choice never occurs, and perhaps it does in some circumstances, but more research is needed on this point.

Ad 6 The importance of the subconscious in decision making

A trend that is not so much related to consumer behaviour but more central to the field of psychology (and marketing) is the “discovery” of the importance of the unconscious. Many psychological experiments show that many decisions of people are often taken unconsciously (Dijksterhuis, 2007). This finding is at odds with the idea of the “homo economicus,” often used in economics: that people use rational, “economic” considerations when making choices. This point is important for positioning because it means everything has to be right from the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Part I: Foundations
• Part II: The creation of the brand positioning strategy
• Part III: The implementation of the brand positioning strategy
• References
• Illustration references, with links to original material
• Index