Positioning Research: The First Step in a Psychology-Proof Positioning Strategy

Powerful brands have one commonality: super-sharp brand positioning. 

Your brand positioning is simply the place your brand occupies in the consumer's brain.

Of course, as a brand, you want nothing more than to occupy a prominent and unique place in the brain that matches the customer's needs. With a solid positioning strategy, you can make that happen. But how do you start such a positioning strategy? And what should you think about while creating a positioning strategy? That’s exactly what we’ll discuss in this blog. 

Brand Positioning in the Brain

Simply put, brand positioning is the place your brand occupies in the brain of the target customer. In other words, what associations customers have with your brand. 

Brand positioning is the attempt to influence this mental place of the product, brand or company in the customer's brain.

You can do this by purposefully linking associations to your brand in the consumer's brain, thereby giving your brand a unique place in the brain.

The first step for any strong positioning strategy is to determine for which combination of unique attributes you want to be known relative to competitors.

In doing so, it is essential that the chosen associations also match the needs of the customer; otherwise, your brand positioning would get you nowhere as a brand.

Take a beer brand as an example. You could position a beer brand as healthy beer, packed with botanicals and antioxidants. And while you can actually capture these associations as a brand, this would be wasted effort simply because the customer might not be waiting for a healthy beer at all.

Why is a positioning strategy important?

First, strong positioning ensures that more people are more likely to think of your brand in buying situations. As a result, you will sell more, and you will grow as a brand, according to Byron Sharp's research which he describes in his book How Brands Grow.

A successful positioning strategy succeeds in capturing that coveted spot in the consumer's brain by growing the number of positive and unique associations with your brand.

We can also turn it around. If you don't have a strong positioning strategy, for example because you choose the wrong associations or because you fail to tie the chosen associations strongly to the brand, you will lose out to the brands that did conquer a larger mental availability with unique associations in the shopper's brain.

And of course, you'd rather avoid that.

However, there is an added benefit for you as a marketer. After all, a clear brand positioning also makes your job as a marketer a lot easier.

You could think of a brand positioning as a strategic lighthouse. Once you know what your brand is about and what associations you want to associate with your brand, it becomes much easier to manage the brand as a marketer.

Or in other words, if you don't know the position of your brand, every single marketing mix decision is difficult. There will always be pros and cons, there will always be reasons why one option is better than the others, and there will always be uncertainty around decisions.

If you have a clear positioning, that will inform decision making, allowing many decisions to be made for you. You simply follow the positioning.

Therefore, a marketing manager with successful positioning skills has an easier and more successful life.

The First Step to a Successful Positioning Strategy

So a successful positioning strategy ensures market success and brand growth. But how do you define such a strategy? Where do you start?

The first and most important step in creating a successful positioning strategy is the baseline measurement. In other words: looking at where you are now as a brand, as well as where your competitors are now.

Positioning research gives you insight into the place your brand occupies in the consumer's mind compared to other brands.

With that, positioning research gives you answers to important questions such as;

• What is our brand's position in the market?
• How can our brand stand out from the competition?

Positioning research: Most common methods

Identifying the positioning of your brand in relation to other brands is done through positioning research.

The two most common methods for positioning research are traditional online questionnaires and neuromarketing methods.

Traditional questionnaires often use open-ended questions to find out what associations customers or potential customers have with a particular brand.

Often the questionnaire includes items such as "What do you think are positive points of brand X?" or "What do you think of when you think of brand X?". Closed-ended questions such as "To what extent do you associate brand X with attribute 1?" are also common.

While these types of questions give you quite a bit of insight into your brand's brand positioning, there is a drawback to traditional methods.

When you consciously ask the respondent in this way, they start thinking unrealistically deeply about how they see your brand. The result is a rational response.

This is good in some cases, but in many cases it still gives a distorted picture of how the (potential) customer actually thinks about your brand. Indeed, it turns out that people do not think rationally and consciously most of the time, but often make decisions - such as purchasing decisions - on autopilot.

Let's start with the basics, by looking at how brands are stored in our memory.

Our Memory: An Associative Network

To understand how brands are stored in our brain, we must first have a clear understanding of how our memory works.

This is because our memory consists of one gigantic network of concepts connected to each other, also called an associative network. Brands are therefore nothing but an association network in the consumer's brain.

If one piece of information in the network is triggered, then other concepts in the network automatically become active as well. The closer the associations are, the more likely they are to become active.

This process of triggering and activating concepts is largely unconscious. As humans, we also have very little influence over it. But what information is triggered and activated does affect our choices.

Because consumers themselves have no influence on the formation and activation of associations, there is often a discrepancy between people's behavior and what they consciously think or want.

Traditional questionnaires capture only the conscious part of our brain, but ignore the unconscious part. In this way, you often do not obtain a complete picture about brand positioning with traditional research.

Precisely for this reason, neuromarketing research has garnered much popularity in recent years.

Positioning research with neuromarketing: How does it work?

At Unravel, we use neuromarketing techniques to research brand image and positioning. 

Neuromarketing methods to brand imaging and positioning have in common that respondents classify combinations of brands and attributes under time pressure.

These methods are based on the fact that people make decisions through two different thought systems: system 1 and system 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive and emotional, while system 2 is slower, more rationalistic and more logical.

Because response time methods force the respondent to make a choice quickly, that unconscious part of the choice process is measured. Not only does the time pressure result in a more intuitive response from the respondent, but response time in itself contains valuable information.

Indeed, response time turns out to be meaningful when it comes to the strength of an association: the stronger we associate something with each other (e.g., McDonalds and Delicious), the faster we can process these thoughts simultaneously.

Reaction time methods such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Intuitive Response Test (IRT) measure this reaction speed.

Want to read more about Positioning Research? Take a look at Unravel’s Brand Image and Positioning Research.

Positioning Research with Neuromarketing: Applications

You can apply positioning research in several ways. Let's discuss the most common applications first. 

Uncovering customer needs. 

First, you can use neuro positioning research to map out which associations are relevant within a certain product category, in order to discover what you can best position yourself on as a brand.

By also measuring how competitors score on these associations, you literally discover on which dimensions there is still "fallow ground" on which to stake a brand.

Comparing intended with actual positioning

Second, you can use neuro positioning research to map out whether your brand positioning is in line with how your intended brand positioning is.

You can also map the same characteristics to your competitors. That way, you gain insight into the distinctiveness of your brand.

You can do this once or repeatedly, testing the success of your positioning strategy by testing whether your strategy triggers the intended associations.

Identify the drivers from non-customer to customer

You can also use positioning research to find out what the key drivers are for converting potential customers into customers.

To investigate that, you measure not only the associations existing customers have, but also those non-customers have. That way, you get insight into the most important associations to convert someone from non-customer to customer.

In addition, you can unravel how different attributes are related to key marketing KPIs.

Neuromarketing positioning research thus gives direction to your positioning strategy by providing insight into which traits and associations have the most potential to positively influence targeted KPIs such as purchase intention, NPS or willingness to pay.