Your Business Positioning Brief
The Linchpin of Market Prominence
- Have you ever wondered why some companies captivate the attention of their target audience, while others struggle to make an impact?
- What’s their secret?
- Is it their name?
- Their story?
- Or were they just lucky to be in the right place at the right time?
The businesses and brands that take over their market all have one thing in common:
- A carefully conceived brand position.
- Brands don’t take off by accident.
- Successful brands intentionally collect the wisdom and experience of their company leaders and position themselves to be in the right place at the right time.
- They know who they’re selling to, what their audience wants, when their customers are ready to buy, and how to get in front of the market.
If you want to create a gravitational pull towards your company, your position needs to be clear and understood by everyone: your prospects, partners, clients, and your entire organization.
What’s in Your Business Positioning Brief
Your Business Positioning Brief details a consistent sales and marketing message that your entire team can use to win the business of your ideal customers.
Audience Analysis
When you try to sell to everyone, you end up selling to no one.
The most successful companies, brands, and products focus on building a long-lasting relationship with a specific audience.
During your audience analysis, we determine exactly who you are well-equipped to serve, including your primary industry of focus, and any secondary industries that may benefit from your products or services.
As part of our standard audience analysis, we also equip you with three personas that detail who your target customers are. Personas help you get on the same wavelength as your buyers, giving your team a clear snapshot of the pain points you solve, and the goals that you can help your customers achieve.
Competitive Analysis
To paraphrase Sun Tzu, “The weakness of a competitor forms part of your own strength.”
Understanding your competitors is key to market victory because you can see where there is a vacuum in the market that you have an opportunity to fill.
For your competitive analysis, we analyze your top direct competitors, taking into account their name, market position, services, brand story, and weaknesses.
We also analyze any indirect competitors—brands and offerings that may provide a different type of solution for the challenge that you solve. For example, if you provide a cloud-based SaaS solution for project management, an indirect competitor may be legacy project management software that isn’t on the cloud. Another indirect competitor might be spreadsheets.
You are also competing against inaction. Your buyer may be indecisive, or indefinitely delay making any decision at all.
Service companies also face market alternatives to their solution. For example, if you’re a law firm, one alternative to your service may be for your potential clients to hire an in-house legal team.
As part of your competitive analysis, we explore these alternatives so that you can outposition them, too.
Name Analysis
Names have power. With a distinct, well-chosen company name you can stand out from competitors, generate curiosity, and earn widespread recognition in your market.
For example, the name “Apple” was chosen to convey simplicity, approachability, and friendliness. The name differentiated the company from traditional technology brands at the time, which often had complex or technical-sounding names, allowing Apple to position itself in the consumer electronics industry as a user-friendly and innovative brand.
Of course, you don’t have to change your name to stand out. Chances are you’ve already put some thought into your company name, and there may already be some brand equity behind it.
As part of your name analysis, we consider:
- How memorable your name is
- How it sounds
- How easy it is to type
- What it represents in relation to your market position
- Potential drawbacks
- Alternatives and variations that might solve any business positioning or perception challenges
Category
Your category is the one-to-five-word idea that you represent in the market. It helps you define your offering and understand how your business fits into the marketplace.
For example, Coke is the original soda. Mountain Dew positioned themselves as a high-caffeine soda. Eventually energy drinks hit the market, creating their own market category that was positioned against high-caffeine sodas. After that, 5-Hour Energy created yet another category that aimed to out-position energy drinks: energy shots.
When determining your market category, we consider:
- What you do for your customers
- How your competitors are positioned in the market
- What makes you different
- Your opportunities for out-positioning your competitors
In less than five words, we summarize your market category so that it’s easy for you to communicate, and easy for your audience to comprehend.
Unique Value Proposition
Your unique value proposition is what you offer that no one else has offered yet. It shows your target audience why they should do business with you instead of anyone else.
Your unique value proposition summarizes the need or problem that you solve, as well as the intrinsic benefits of your solution.
For example, when Dollar Shave Club launched in 2012, their value proposition was simple and effective: “For $1 a month, we send high-quality razors right to your door.” While other razor brands like Gillette offer “the best a man can get,” Dollar Shave Club created a unique value proposition that addressed the pain points of shopping for a razor: convenience and cost. With a clearer, more defensible value proposition, Dollar Shave Club was able to disrupt the razor market and grow exponentially.
To determine your Unique Value Proposition, we consider:
- The unique pain points you solve for your audience
- How your product or service functions differently from others in its category
- What kind of value you can deliver that other companies cannot or do not provide
- What you do to make your customers’ experiences special and unique
Then we boil it all down to a single sentence: your unique value proposition.
Mission
Your mission is your purpose. It’s why you and your team get out of bed in the morning and give it your all, day in, day out.
Your mission statement should be clear, concise, memorable, and inspirational.
Why does LinkedIn exist? To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.
Why does Google exist? To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
When determining your mission statement, we ask:
- What do you want to do?
- Why are you doing it?
- What do you care about?
We condense your answers into a mission statement.
Vision
Your vision statement is your big picture—the major goal that you’re setting out to achieve.
The best vision statements are ambitious but attainable, and they change the world for the better.
One of our favorite vision statements comes from Bill Gates. Microsoft’s vision in the early 80s was simple: a computer on every desk in every home. Microsoft not only attained their vision, but also shaped the way we work by making personal computers widely accessible.
If you’re reading this page, then you’re probably a visionary: a founder or entrepreneur that has a big idea (or many ideas) for shaping the future.
To hone in and clarify your vision, we ask:
- What does success look like for you?
- Where do you see your business in 10 or 20 years?
- What impact do you want to have on the world?
We then help you summarize this vision into a single sentence that’s clear, specific, and attainable.
Core Values
Your values are what you stand for. They allow you to make decisions about who you work with and what kinds of projects and clients you take on. Your values also help you rally your team around core beliefs and attitudes that lead to success.
At RedShift Strategists, all of our team members share four core values:
- Mindful
- Constructive
- Creative
- Strategic
We determined these values by considering what qualities are inherent to each and every one of our team members. We made a long list, and then narrowed it down to four values that complemented one another.
Our mindfulness means we consider our emotions and the emotions of others, while our constructiveness means that we will speak up and provide feedback when we notice something can be improved. Our creativity enables us to think outside of the box, while our strategic thinking firmly roots our creative ideas in achieving a specific objective.
To help you determine your values, we facilitate a Team Values workshop with your team and figure out the three-to-five values that reflect your virtues.
Brand Voice Statement
Your brand voice statement declares how your brand sounds: your tone, language, and personality. It keeps all communications from your brand cohesive and consistent, and aligns your messaging with your overall mission and values.
SuperBetter, a game that helps people build resilience, has an incredibly clear and consistent brand voice: confident, enthusiastic, and most of all, supportive. Their dedication to achievements and accomplishments carries through in their voice.
To determine your brand voice, we consider:
- What tone you use
- How you speak to your prospects
- How you speak to your customers
- How you speak to your employees
- How you speak to your partners
- How you speak to your investors
- How you speak to the media
We then capture the high-level aspects of your brand voice in a one-to-three paragraph statement. You can use this Brand Voice Statement to train your sales, marketing, and leadership teams so that there is a consistent, impactful tone across your entire company that reinforces your position.
Taglines
Taglines are simple, catchy slogans that immediately make a connection between what you offer and the desires of your audience. They evoke a relatable feeling that reminds your customers of your unique value proposition.
Your Positioning Brief will include general taglines as well as focused taglines for specific products, services, and campaigns.
Brand Story
Your brand story not only explains the origins of your company but also paints your customers as heroes. By making your audience central to your story, you position yourself as central to achieving their goals.
Dr. Martens does an excellent job making their wearers the hero on the first paragraph in The History of Dr. Martens:
Dr. Martens’ appeal to people who have their own individual style but share a united spirit – authentic characters who stand for something. People who possess a proud sense of self-expression. People who are different.
Their story goes on to highlight the role that the working class and punk musicians played in popularizing their iconic boot. Rather than focus on themselves, Dr. Martens focuses on the type of people they appeal to. The historical details of their company aren’t mentioned until the fourth paragraph of their story. Anyone who wants to express themselves through their shoes is going to resonate and want to be a part of Dr. Marten’s story, and feel compelled to purchase a pair of their boots.
When developing your brand story, we consider:
- The goals of your audience
- The challenges that your audience faces when attempting to achieve their goals
- How you help your audience conquer their challenges
- How you can be the guide that supports your audience as they successfully overcome obstacles and complete their journey
- How the history of your company is relevant to the needs and desires of your audience
We summarize the answers to these questions into a brand story that’s one page or less. It can be used to communicate your story on your website, in presentations, on products, and any other customer touch points where your story unfolds.
Finding Your Position Should Be Rewarding and Fun
There is a lot of thought-work that goes into completing a Positioning Brief.
But that doesn’t mean all of these ideas need to stay in your head. In fact, our primary objective is to get the ideas out of your head and focused on paper so that they can be amplified in the market.
We make the positioning process fun and engaging. Through a series of interactive workshops, we’re able to gather all of the building blocks for your Positioning Brief. We then wordsmith your core ideas into a brief that we review with your team.
The end result is a Positioning Brief that you can be 100% confident will propel your brand to the top of the market.
Own Your Position
The first step to winning over the market is to fully clarify your position, and write it down so that it can be consistently leveraged across your entire company.
RedShift Strategists specializes in crafting Positioning Briefs so that visionaries can achieve their goals.
See how you can position yourself for greatness.