How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement That is Benefit-Oriented
What’s the first thing that you think of when you hear the words “The Happiest Place on Earth?” The fact that those words make you imagine a fun-filled day at Disneyland is a testament to how well a brilliantly crafted brand positioning statement can focus your entire marketing plan. In this article, let’s take a closer look at what goes into writing one of the most useful parts of an overall marketing strategy: the benefit-oriented brand positioning statement
Do you know that there is a difference between your brand and the products that you sell? A company’s brand is its identity. It’s what people think of when they hear your name. Products come and go, but your brand continues even as your business may change over time. A brand positioning statement describes who you are, your target audience, and how your brand meets the needs of your customers. Most brand positioning statements include answers to the following questions:
- Who are you?
- Who are your target customers?
- What do your target customers desire?
- What benefits do you provide your customers?
The ability to concentrate on benefits gives you an exciting opportunity to focus in on the relationship between you and your target audience. This focused analysis is called a benefit-oriented brand positioning statement.
What is a Benefit-Oriented Brand Positioning Statement?
The first thing to remember when you begin to consider using a benefit-oriented approach to position your brand is that this approach is consumer-centric and focuses on the benefits that you provide to the customer. How does using your brand benefit the customer?
Benefits to the customer are both functional and emotional. For example, the customer of a spot carpet treatment featuring a special pet stain removing additive benefits from the ability to use the product to clean pet accidents from their carpet. Along with this functional benefit, the customer gains the emotional advantage of feeling less stressed while house training a new puppy.
TIP: Examples of emotional benefits include words like energetic, wealthy, popular, organized, sexy, and smart.
Why is Benefit-Oriented Brand Positioning Powerful?
Focusing on the benefit to the customer is one of the oldest and most common types of brand positioning because it gets at the core of your existence as a business: the relationship between you and your customer. Your customer is primarily concerned with the benefits that they receive from their loyalty to your brand. Committing to a benefit-oriented approach allows you to focus all of your organizational energies toward fulfilling the benefits that you’ve promised your customers.
A customer oriented brand positioning statement gives your marketing team a formidable advantage when it comes to framing the overall marketing strategy. Disney, for example, makes sure that the visitors to their theme parks benefit from its strict adherence to the Disney Four Key Basics: safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency. Everything flows from close attention to the benefits that Disney promises to its customers.
Creating a Benefit-Oriented Brand Positioning Statement
Do you know how your brand benefits your customers? A strong position statement matches customer desires with your ability to supply those benefits. Figuring out how your brand helps your target audience can be difficult, and many businesses find it helpful to engage the assistance of a creative and experienced marketing strategy team like the one at Connie Kroskin Consulting to assist in crafting this all-important piece of their brand positioning statement.
Customer Desires
What does your customer want that your brand can provide? Remember that the customer desires both functional and emotional benefits. Successfully understanding the desires of your target audience is key to growing your business.
Marketing experts employ a variety of research tools to develop a full picture of the types of benefits that motivate buyers, and potential buyers, to purchase products. These sophisticated tools include:
- Focus groups
- Ethnographic studies where the researcher observes the user interacting with a product
- Interviews
- Social media monitoring and interaction
How Can Your Business Benefit Your Customers?
Once you know your customer base, it’s time to look inward and analyze how your brand can give the customer what they desire. Marketing professionals often approach this task by dividing potential benefits into functional and emotional categories and then determining how a brand can meet the customer desire for the benefits.
Let’s imagine that your brand relates to pet care and your company owns several lines of pet products along with some boutique pet grooming shops throughout the nation. Along with a multitude of functional benefits, such as ease of use, you’ll discover that your brand provides a whole host of benefits to your clients.
For example, let’s say that your brand markets a low-cost carpet stain remover containing natural ingredients. Market research shows that your consumers want an effective way to clean up pet accidents while also being gentle to the earth. You can market your carpet cleaner in a way that shows both the functional and emotional benefits of using the product. The information will also guide you in developing future products.
Benefit Oriented Brand Positioning and Taglines
Disney’s “Happiest Place on Earth” and Nike’s “Just Do It” taglines flow directly from their benefit-oriented brand positioning. It’ll be much easier for you to create a tantalizing tagline if you put effort into writing a thoughtful examination of the relationship between you and your customers. Imagine how many exciting directions you can take your brand once your target consumers develop a definite connection to it.
Finally, are you ready to dive into the detailed analysis involved in writing a robust benefit-oriented brand positioning statement? By looking beyond products, and instead honing in on who you are and how you can provide functional and emotional benefits to your clients, you’re paving a path into a future that isn’t tied to specific merchandise but instead is open to the constantly evolving marketplace. An approach like this leads to sustained growth and momentum.
Contact us to discover how a compelling brand positioning statement can drive your entire marketing strategy.