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If understanding the market is about understanding yourself in order to set your business strategy while understanding your customers and their needs and wants, then positioning is about what you do to bring those two things together. The purpose of positioning is to help buyers understand your offering quickly so that, as they search for buying solutions, they can see why your brand is relevant to the job they are trying to accomplish. You enable your customers to better understand your worth by putting your actions in context. People can then know which box your brand will fit in. Being aware of the options your target buyers might consider when making a purchase decision for their needs is key to deciding which box to put yourself in.

Differentiation and distinctiveness

Differentiate or Die and Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind are books that teach people how to position and differentiate their brand. In the 1960s, the concept of the Unique Selling Proposition was also widespread. Many branding professionals still support these approaches, emphasizing the importance of identifying a unique brand value that competitors cannot compete with. You put an emphasis on being the only one and differentiating a unique benefit.

Byron Sharp’s work has provided data from a number of different markets, showing that consumers do not perceive brands as different. It seems that brands are not radically different from competitors in the market. Sharp has cast doubts as to whether differentiation is really such a golden brand goal. The data suggests that distinction should be the real factor for success.

The two concepts mean different things. With differentiation, you are trying to ensure that your brand is perceived differently from its competitors. On the other hand, distinctiveness is about looking and feeling unique to you so that you are recognizable as yourself and not confused with other brands in your category. There is an ongoing debate on this subject, sparked by Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow.

Some branding experts ignore Sharp’s findings and continue to believe that brand positioning is about looking for a single attribute or association that a brand may have in the mind of the target consumer. From this point of view, brands that are successful stand for things that other brands cannot. They have associations that other brands cannot claim. They are successful because they differentiate themselves in the market. Some of these professionals advocate the brand purpose and believe that their brand is there to save communities, inspire peace, create harmony, and so on.

To me, knowing that these are hot topics in the branding industry means that when I choose professionals to work with on my brand or interview for my podcast, I want to find out their position on these topics.

According to Sharp, distinctiveness is achieved through the use of brand values ​​that stand out so that people can see and identify your brand in different contexts. It’s about choosing the brand name, logo, color palette, font, slogan and images that are distinctive so that you stand out from the competition. Sharp argues that “distinctive branding persists, differentiation doesn’t”. He suggests that instead of striving for meaningful, perceived differentiation, marketers should look for meaningless distinctiveness. Research confirms it in several product categories. It seems that our buyers are no different from our competitors’ buyers. So is it worth distinguishing our offer from those of our competitors?

To me as a lawyer, it’s surprising that Sharp needs to stress the need for distinction. Isn’t branding essentially about uniqueness? How else can you stand out? However, it seems that so much emphasis has traditionally been placed on brand significance that distinctiveness has often been overlooked.

The fact that Sharp’s research emphasizes the importance of distinctiveness is a twofold affirmation of what we already know about intellectual property: that you need to stand out in the naming and branding values ​​you choose to avoid potential trademark conflicts. Businesses should consider the intellectual property of competitors so that they can distance themselves from competitors in their own branding decisions. The focus must be on making your branding decisions to distance yourself from what competitors have chosen and own. The more distinctive your choice of branding elements, especially your name, the more you stand out through the use of intellectual property (i.e. when you make intellectual property protection an integral part of your visual identity creation process).

Contribution to Branding Strategy Insider by: Shireen Smith, excerpt from her book Brand Tuned: The New Rules for Branding, Strategy and Intellectual Property

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