How to Stand Out: Brand Positioning

Follow the leader, or be the leader?

Standing out in today's competitive market goes beyond offering quality products, or promoting a family owned business.

Every competitor says both of those things. Neither one separates you.

Brand positioning starts with the key differentiator

The key differentiator lies in positioning, and in crafting tailored messaging.

Focus on a narrow niche. Understand your target audience. Use language that resonates with them, making your communications feel like personalized love letters instead of broadcasts to everyone and no one.

Narrow feels risky to most business owners. It's actually the safer move.

A message built for a specific person lands. A message built for everybody gets politely ignored by everybody.

Here's the test. Say you're a dentist. "Gentle, quality care for the whole family" could come from any office in the county. But the dentist who positions around terrified adults, people who haven't sat in the chair in ten years, owns a sentence nobody else in town is saying. Same skills. Completely different gravity.

Try the category audit

Before you write a word about yourself, list what your top five competitors all claim.

Quality. Service. Family owned. Since 1998. Locally trusted.

Anything on that list is wallpaper now. You can still be those things. You just can't lead with them, because a claim everyone makes positions no one.

What's left after you cross out the wallpaper is where your positioning actually lives.

Use your unique traits

Incorporating your unique traits into your business enhances differentiation.

The things that make you an odd fit for some customers are usually the exact things that make you the obvious choice for others.

Which is why identifying who you're NOT a good fit for gives you clarity on the audience you want to attract.

Write that list down, too. The jobs you don't want. The customers who drain you. The work you'd happily hand to a competitor. Exclusion is a positioning tool, not a failure. Most owners find their sharpest difference hiding in the work they keep apologizing for.

The difference has to be true

One warning before you go looking for your zag.

Positioning isn't inventing a difference. It's naming a real one, clearly, and then actually running the business that way.

If you position around speed, your operation has to be fast. If you position around personal attention, a call center voice menu will undo it in one phone call. Customers test the claim against the experience, fast.

That's why the strongest positioning usually comes from something you're already doing differently and just never said out loud. The way you answer the phone. The customers you turn away. The step your competitors skip that you'd never skip.

It's already in the business. Positioning is mostly excavation, then honesty, repeated everywhere.

Zig when they zag

As branding expert Marty Neumeier said, when everybody zigs, you zag.

That isn't advice to be contrarian for fun. It's advice to look at what the whole category is doing, and recognize that matching it perfectly is the one guaranteed way to be invisible.

Your difference needs a name and a test, which is what the brand difference test gives you. And it needs a brand identity system that carries it into every touchpoint.

Not sure where your brand is leaking? Take the free brand audit quiz first, then talk to us if you want a hand fixing it.