How To Write Your Positioning Statement
Writing a positioning statement will help you stay focused in the creative phase and design something that is on brand, on strategy and on message.
1. What is a Positioning Statement
Positioning statement is a succinct articulation of your brand’s position in the marketplace.
Positioning statement is client facing not customer facing.
Therefore, it is for the staff and customers don’t see it — it’s for internal purposes only.
What customers see is the brand slogan or tagline, the marketing campaigns and ads in all of a brand’s touch-points.
Writing a positioning statement involves in-depth research to articulate certain aspects of your brand.
It should be overarching on the brand level, where it would not be used short term or attached to a single campaign.
This is where the impulse to be tactical is at odds with an approach rooted in strategy because it takes more than writing a witty line to create.
However, I did my best to make the process of developing your positioning statement as easy as it can be.
You will no doubt find yourself in a situation or on a team where some on the team members don’t value the depth needed to formulate a sound positioning statement.
If you are a freelance designer or the scope is narrowly focused on your project, save this big-picture concept for later.
When you are on a pitch team and have the ability to participate in this process — then you can get down to writing one.
It couldn’t hurt to ask the account team or an in-house marketing or brand strategist for this statement as well.
If there’s no positioning statement, you can simply write your own to inspire the work you do.
And if you’re participating in a big-picture meeting, suggest to write one with the team.
So, how do you write one?
Keep reading, you will find a positioning statement template below.
First of all, you need to understand the brand ladder:
2. Understanding the Brand Ladder
You can’t create a sound positioning statement without building it from the ground up in a brand ladder.
Brand Ladder has been used at some of the best agencies to build brands.
This methodology originated at Procter & Gamble in the 1960s.
Think of it as a foundation of the house because it’s built from the ground up:
First, you need to start with your product features or brand attributes.
Features or attributes are tangible.
E.g. My iPhone got 64GB space — that’s a tangible feature of the product.
Bentley is a luxury brand — that’s a tangible attribute of the brand.
Next, you layer on top of those features the corresponding benefits to the target audience.
If I got 64GB — what does this do for me? how does it benefit me?
Well, it gives me a lot of space so I can capture every moment of my life without worrying about running out of space or having to limit pictures or videos.
Or it benefits me in a way that I can enjoy all the music I like with me everywhere without having to limit my myself.
Features are tangible, benefits are intangible.
What actually sell is benefits, not features — because people respond to emotions.
Then on top of those benefits, you identify a list of values the target uses to make purchase decisions.
And lastly, we put all of this together to create a positioning statement for a company or brand.
Here’s how to write your own:
3. Positioning Statement Framework
People often ask me: How to write a positioning statement?
Every positioning statement is different, but we can distinguish a common framework.
Different brands have different positioning statements, but when you analyze most of them, we can notice some similarities.
Use this time-tested and widely-used positioning statement framework:
Remember that this is the place where you need to be succinct and make every word count.
But you also must to be sure that you capture everything you need to.
So in order to capture everything in a succinct way you must be selective with words, but you also need to understand all of the elements that go into it.
So let’s break it down, step-by-step….
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Cheers,
Arek
