Brand Positioning in Five Steps

What positioning is and what it is not

Positioning answers one question: why should someone from a particular audience choose you rather than the provider next door? It is not an advertising message and not a logo, but a decision about what you stand for and what you do not. Everything else, from the name and the look to offers and prices, follows from it. You can get there in five steps, with pen and paper and half a day.

Step 1: Choose an audience

“Everyone who needs our service” is not an audience. Choose the customers you most enjoy working with and for whom your service makes the biggest difference. Write down: who are they? What situation brings them to you? What matters to them, and what do they fear?

A helpful test: look at your five best jobs of the past few years. What do these customers have in common in terms of size, industry, occasion or attitude? That often gives you the audience straight away. Choosing does not mean turning others away. It only determines whom you aim your communication at.

Step 2: Take an honest look at the competition

Name three to five providers your audience is also considering, including indirect ones (such as “doing it themselves” or the big chain’s solution). For each, note down in key points: what do they promise on their website? How do they present themselves? Where are they strong, and where not? You are not looking for faults but for gaps: which statement does nobody make, even though customers would ask for it?

This exercise is sobering and sometimes uncomfortable, because it shows that many providers say almost the same thing: “personal, reliable, quality-conscious”. When everyone claims it, it sets nobody apart.

Step 3: Identify your own difference

Now set your strengths against the gaps. A viable difference meets three conditions:

It is true. You already live it day to day.
It is relevant. Your audience wants exactly this.
It sets you apart. Your competitors do not say it, or cannot prove it.

Possible differences lie in specialisation (only for practices, only for new builds), speed, way of working, a guarantee on the process, experience in a niche or an unusual attitude. Choose one point, two at most. If you emphasise three things at once, you will not get any of them across.

Step 4: Prove the difference

A claim only works once it can be checked. Collect what shows your difference: a fixed process you can describe, examples from real projects (with the customers’ permission), verifiable figures such as years in the market or number of projects completed, certificates or a transparent price structure. What you cannot prove, you are better off leaving out. A modest, proven sentence is stronger than a big, empty one.

Step 5: Put it into one sentence

Sum everything up in one sentence of this form:

We help [audience] to [result] by [difference] – proven by [evidence].

Suppose a heating engineer in the Rems Valley has noticed that his best jobs were owners of detached houses from the 1970s facing the question “heat pump or not?”. Competitors talk about “complete solutions”. His difference: before submitting a quote, he calculates every house in detail and says so when a heat pump is not worthwhile. His sentence could read: “We help owners of older detached houses to find the right heating system by honestly calculating up front whether switching is worthwhile – with a written calculation before every quote.” (The example is fictional.)

This sentence is not the slogan but your working material. It should be possible to word it nicely, but above all it has to be true.

The test: does it fit?

Check your sentence with four questions:

Would a customer from the target audience nod or wince?
Could a competitor say the same sentence? If so, it is too general.
Can all your staff repeat it in their own words?
Is there something you will no longer offer or no longer say because of this sentence? If not, you have not decided anything.

Show the sentence to three to five customers and ask: “What do you understand by this?” The answers show where you need to sharpen it.

What comes next

Further building blocks follow from the positioning: name and slogan (Finding a brand name, Developing a claim and slogan), logo and design (Having a logo developed: the process) and the rules for your entire presence (Corporate identity and corporate design). The order is: positioning first, then design. The other way round, you often end up with a pretty look and nothing to say.

If you would like to go through the process with an outside view, the Branding page explains how we go about it. For a conversation, a message via Contact is enough.