Brand Positioning

I just spent two days going through a brand positioning workshop for Moe's Southwest Grill.  What a challenging and awesome process!   My colleagues and I were honored to have Dwight Jewson, PhD from Strategic Frameworking Inc. www.strategicframeworking.com  take us through this enlightening process. 

I have been through the process before with HoneyBaked Ham.  At the time, our agency on record was The Richards Group and they use a slightly different model (they call their process "spherical branding") than I am going to describe.

For those of you that haven't been through this process, brand positioning is one of the most important pieces of the business.  Attributes that connect to a brand tell the consumer how they feel about the brand.  Brand positioning builds equity and relevance of the brand.  It connect the customer and validates their choice to participate with the brand. It also becomes the foundation and filter for all you do from marketing, operations, training, etc.

We spent the first half of day one talking about the importance of brand positioning.  I outline some of the highlights below.  He walked us through what he calls "the criteria for a brand positioning":

• It is born from a larger purpose
• It is simple and compelling
• It speaks to something scarce
• It is intensely human
• It instills strong energy
• It establishes clear brand authority
• It clearly communicates identity
• It takes us to a differentiation territory

He also talked about customer currency, which I found very compelling:

• time - no one has enough of it
• energy - how much skill do I need as a customer to participate
• quality - is it a quality product
• money - affordability
• self esteem - how do I feel about myself when I buy it (this form of currency was very interesting to me)

As a marketer, understanding the variations of customer currency and identifying which ones to leverage or "do well" is important.  Take Panera for example, there format is not really fast, but it isn't "sit down slow" either. There menu system is confusing with little explanation around products, you are confused with where to go to order (the bakery, the lunch line, etc) so the customer does spend a lot of energy prior to ordering. You have to wait for your food and go into basketball mode and box out others at the counter from mistaking your food for theirs and walking away with it.  Probably, no, definitely an area they can improve. Quality is what they excel in - they have a great product! It is on the higher end of fast casual, but still affordable.  My self esteem is definitely heightened when I eat at Panera.  I feel healthy, I leave there light footed with a pep in my step knowing I have made a good choice about what I have put into my body.  This dynamic or notion of self esteem being a form of consumer currency is sooo interesting to me.  This is a new learning for me as a brand manager. 

We spent the rest of day one, going through a process where we constructed our "advantage playing field".  We had to establish our opportunity zone on an axis.  We had to create a differentiated advantage from our competitors through the attributes we chose to plot on either end of the axis.  This process was pretty grueling and we agonized of each word. 

Next we created our short story or brand benefit hierarchy. He called them the building blocks of branding.  It includes:

Sign up for something bigger

Emotional benefits

Functional benefits - what do we do for people

Attributes - what is our stuff

Strategic Pivot - what is going on in culture that we join

Target

 

 

The process starts at the bottom and works up.  We defined our target, identified the strategic pivot agonized over our attributes, benefits, and landed on the bigger purpose.  It took us all of day two to go through it, but I think we landed in a great place.  At this point, the information is confidential, but I can share some other brands that we used as an example:

 

 

Nike

Unlimited Personal Potential - Something bigger

irreverence, justified - emotional benefit

winning - functional benefit

products made to the exacting standards of the world's best athletes - attributes

All in all, an awesome exercise.  I truly enjoy this kind of work and find myself analyzing other brands to define their brand positioning short story.  Next, communicating the new positioning to the system and the department heads, identifying touch points, and beginning executing against the new and improved positioning statement.

One a side note, Dwight recommended a few books which I haven't read, but will share:

• Different - Youngme Moon
• How We Decide - Jonah Leher