Branding For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Filling Your Niche: Positioning Your Brand

In This Chapter

• Determining your brand's point of distinction

• Finding an available, meaningful market position to fill

• Getting real about your competition

• Putting your brand position to the test

Depending on who's counting, today's average consumer faces a barrage of up to 3,000 advertising and promotional messages every single day. People cope with the onslaught in two ways. First, they tune out messages that don't appeal to their wants and needs. Second, they brush off messages for offerings they already buy from trusted suppliers unless — and here's the whole point of finding and protecting a position for your brand — the offering being presented is uniquely and attractively different and better.

To get through the noise and clutter of today's marketplace, you have to win a competitive position by presenting your offering as unique and different in a way that truly matters to customers. Then, after your brand wins a place in your customers' minds, you need to hold on to your position by delivering a brand experience that's so perfectly suited to customer desires and expectations that your clientele sees no reason to let any competing brand into the space you fill.

Branding expert Walter Landor, the creative and strategic genius behind many of the most famous brands you know today, is widely quoted for his assertion that “Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.” This chapter helps you find an available ...