Article: Positioning brand positioning

Positioning brand positioning

Alexander Koene wrote this piece on 14 August 2008. Older than some marketing managers. The core still holds.

Everyone "positions." Almost no one means the same thing.

Walk into any meeting and someone will offer to position your brand. The design studio working on a logo. The agency rolling out a campaign. The web specialist tuning Google rankings. Same words, three different jobs, one shared confusion.

Most of the time the answer is a single line. Apple = tools for creative people. Nike = just do it. Renault = créateurs d'automobiles. We nod, we shake hands, we book lunch.

Then it gets quiet. Because that line isn't the brand. Apple can't be reduced to seven words, and you know it.

A brand is a network in the brain, not a sentence in a deck

A brand lives between people's ears. It's a network of associations: images, memories, half-remembered ads, the thing a colleague mumbled about it last Tuesday. You don't build a network like that in an afternoon with three Post-its.

Decades of consumer research keep landing in the same place: people don't choose brands the way they think they do. They feel first and explain afterwards. Which is why positioning is less about the rational claim you make and more about which emotional drivers you choose to activate, again and again, with discipline. Our own 23plusone work maps twenty-four of those drivers; the point is the same with or without a model: brands that move people are picking the right notes, on purpose.

What Volvo gets that a one-liner can't

Take Volvo. The story starts in the Swedish cold, where you have to build solid cars or you don't make it through winter. Frozen roads. The occasional unfortunate reindeer. Decades later, the brand still triggers the same associations: safety, quality, care for the people inside the car. One sentence won't carry that. A chapter might.

Brand stories have chapters. They evolve. They surprise. They keep moving people year after year; or they fade.

What Absolut taught us about beautiful boredom

For years, Absolut Vodka was applauded for the consistency of its bottle campaign. Awards. Praise. Imitations in design schools. Then the yawn arrived.

Consistency can be beautiful. Predictability is fatal. Absolut caught it in time: new flavours, fashion icons, ice bars, a campaign that took us to an idealized world. The brand repositioned without disowning its past.

That's the real job. Not freezing the brand. Keeping it alive without breaking what people already love about it.

Positioning as a frame, not a cage

A brand positioning is not a dogma carved in stone. It's a working frame. It tells you which choices fit, why they fit, and what must never disappear when the next chapter starts. It leaves room for new moves and protects the through-line when the baton passes to a new team, a new agency, a new generation of customers.

A sharp line can help. As an anchor. Not as a finish line.

The real work

Strong brands captivate, surprise and touch you somewhere deeper than the rational pitch. They can't be captured in three words. They grow, they breathe; occasionally they embarrass themselves in public.

The real work is simple to describe and hard to do. Keep striking the right chords. Renew without forgetting. Tell a story people want to keep following, even when they already know the plot.

People are the brand: the ones who use it, the ones who make it, the ones who pass it on. Position the story they get to live in, not the slogan they have to memorize.

Written by: Alexander Koene

Originally published on Adformatie (Dutch).