An expanded view of brand positioning part 1.
As you build or rebuild your business, establishing your brand position is critical. Remember the kid's book "Where's Waldo?" Apparently, without a powerful brand position, you are Waldo:
I'm not actually sure Waldo is even in here. This is Netflix's take on the kid's book, using all TV show characters. Further proving my point?
Brand positioning is important, but there are problems with the common ways we approach it.
Problems that can hurt you and your business, or at least make you miss important opportunities to connect with your customers and peers in the ways you want to.
If you look up definitions of brand positioning, in most places you'll see something like:
"brand positioning is the act of designing the company's offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market, differentiating the company from its competitors."
When I asked people what they thought brand positioning was in November's Fondue party* people said things like:
It's the specific spot you stand in that nobody else can stand in.
Once you find it, nobody can unseat you.
It's the way you get noticed at a party full of posers.
It's figuring out who you stand in front of, and how you appear, so they can see you and only you as the solution to their problem.
In a crowded marketplace and in the fast pace of the digital spaces, we need to struggle to be seen. Positioning helps you stand out.
Positioning shows people how you can solve their problem better than the others.
It kind of makes my chest constrict as I read it. Like there isn't enough air for all of us. Setting myself apart from, and better than, my brilliant peers is not an interesting idea to me.
It's a perspective rooted in a dominant story about competition for scarce resources. And while we are living in this time of increasingly apocalyptic capitalism, we sometimes do need to work strategically with competition to survive.
But the story that human beings are inherently competitive is one that has been used to justify the destruction of humans and the earth for far too long.
So many folks I know, in so many different ways, are working to replace those violent stories in our work with ones that are rooted in generosity, mutuality, connection, sustainability.
So why are we still trying to "occupy a distinctive place in the mind of our target market?"
Your people are not targets. Your community is not a market. And you want to relate, not occupy.
Our current definition of brand positioning reinforces our feelings of scarcity, competition, superiority/inferiority, and isolation. And thats why the process of branding can feel so inexplicably hard.
It suggests that all those other businesses (and people running them) are a threat, and we need to show the world that we are both different and better than they are (superiority/inferiority).
It makes us feel like we are at a crowded party, jumping up and down trying to get noticed by the popular kid (the customer) who just walked in the room (scarcity and rejection).
It makes us hyper-focused on being the only one. Our beautiful uniqueness is turned into a mechanism of separation from others (isolation).
It tells us to narrow ourselves to one singular inflexible story, to occupy space that ONLY we can occupy, and defend it. (individualism, fear, scarcity, competition)
Thankfully, I can see that we are all out here resisting these lying stories. Whether we are bookkeepers or activists or teachers or coaches or embodiment facilitators or soap makers, we're trying to do the work in a way that contributes to a culture we want, not the one that is burning the world up.
We get to be clear about what we do and who we do it for. Clear about the gifts we bring to the larger ecosystem of the whole. We are one cell in a much greater organism of healing and change. Together.
Being wholehearted, specific, and honest in your brand is a personal development project, a creative process and a liberation effort. It's worthy of your investment of time and money and focus to get to the clarity you, and your people, are looking for.
I'm working on a new definition for brand positioning for us.
A definition that includes a more ecosystemic way of thinking about our role in our communities. I'll let you know when I've got a draft, so you can critique it! In the meantime: how would YOU define it without the competition principle?
In part 2 of this post I’ll share a really cool exercise you can do to explore this idea of positioning in a more holistic and connected way. It's called culture mapping and it's loads of fun.
Join my email list to get the announcement when I publish it.
p.s. 2022 is coming. Let's get excited about it. The future is volatile: more crisis is coming, and more opportunity for big and meaningful change. I'm launching the 2022 cohort of the Visionary Syndicate in early January. It's a branding program and incubator for creative businesses (new, or transforming.) Email me back to get on the waiting list for the early bird pricing in late December.
*wondering what a fondue party at the Bureau is? Find out here. We've got another one coming up in December.