Positioning Your Brand: Ego, Emotion, Authenticity, Humour or Function?
Positioning your brand is as much about your brand values as it is about the brands tone. Your brand should connect at a fundamental level and helps to build the way customers interact with your brand. Here are a couple approaches to take:
Ego:
Perfect for luxury and quality sporting brands. You sell status, a life style that personifies success and esteem. You can capture customers by using a sense of mystery or intrigue. A sense of the unobtainable. Something to be reached for and likewise a symbol of achieving those heights.
Emotion:
Touch people at a deep level. Tap into their passions, their desires, their sentimental feelings. Move them to a sense of affect. Tug at their heart strings. This can be great for life style brands, environmental or rights actions and charities. Move your customer to action.
Authenticity:
Build confidence behind your brand. Words that come to mind may be trustworthy, reliable and legitimate. Adding testimonials or industry awards can be a good way to add validity behind a product or service. But remember people don't buy your product or service, they buy why you are in business and what value that will add to them. WIIFM. So ensure you relate this valuable feedback to why it is valuable.
Humour:
This often works well for alcohol or novelty products. Life is a party . . . wanna be part of it? Often using banter, playfulness or whimsy reflects the entertainment factor of your product or service. This can be a light hearten way of grabbing attention and deliver a clear message in a fun way. It often gets a good social and viral response.
Function:
Consumer products. The day to day necessities. Brands of function often describe the product plain and simple. This is only a strong positioning in markets which are not saturated. There is also a level of learning around a new product before you can trade for more entertaining brand positioning. Help them figure out how it works and will work for them.
We'd suggest there is always a mix depending on stage in the life cycle of your brand. It is probably best to add function when first building your brand to which ever of the other suited positionings that align with your market.
Once it becomes more renowned with a particular market segment, you can widen the net.
