Crafting A Brand Positioning Map For Your Product

Gain a data-driven understanding of your customer through Importance-Performance Maps. In today's competitive business world, differentiating your brand by understanding and delivering what truly matters to your customers is crucial. That’s where Importance-Performance Maps (I-P Maps) come in, providing a powerful visual tool to drive strategic decisions. What exactly is an I-P Map? It's a two-by-two grid that allows you to evaluate how well your brand performs in the areas that are important (as well as *not* important) to consumers. The vertical axis represents the importance of various attributes in consumers' eyes, while the horizontal axis shows your brand's performance in those areas. You can include other brands in your market, too, in order to see how your brand stacks up against the competition along those. When done correctly, every critical attribute of your offering -- whether it's product quality, customer service, or pricing -- is plotted on the I-P Map based on these two dimensions. Why does it matter? I-P Maps reveal your brand's strengths and areas where improvement is needed. Here's a breakdown of the quadrants: - Keep It Up (High Importance, High Performance): These are your strengths—attributes that are both highly important to customers and where your brand performs well. Maintain focus here to keep your competitive edge. - Concentrate Here (High Importance, Low Performance): These are critical areas where your brand is underperforming, despite their high importance to customers. Improving performance here can significantly boost customer satisfaction. - Low Priority (Low Importance, Low Performance): Attributes that are less important and where performance is lower. These areas may not require immediate attention but should be monitored for any shifts in customer priorities. - Possible Overkill (Low Importance, High Performance): Here, your brand may be over-delivering in areas that are not as important to customers. Resources invested here might be better allocated to areas of higher impact. How do I use I-P Maps? Use I-P Maps to make informed decisions backed by data that align with customer expectations. Fix those areas of underperformance that are important to consumers. Stop investing in attributes of your product or service that consumers just don't care about. Prioritize investment in product offerings, elevate aspects of customer service, or reallocate resources to close competitive gaps or strengthen your advantages. Use I-P Maps to make informed choices that improve your business performance in impactful and efficient ways. Art+Science Analytics Institute | University of Notre Dame | University of Notre Dame - Mendoza College of Business | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | University of Chicago | D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University | ELVTR | Grow with Google - Data Analytics #Analytics #DataStorytelling

Yes, most ‘brand strategy’ work is just executive ego-stroking. We can do better. Here’s how In The Kitchen goes about it for B2B companies. Positioning comes first. We start with a positioning exercise that works at the highest level. For multi-product companies, that’s the portfolio. For single-product companies, it’s the product. We work out the core: ▶ The category and market segment where we play ▶ The best-fit buyer where we win ▶ The problem we solve and competing alternatives ▶ The competitive advantages and winning differences that put us over the top ▶ The unique value our buyer gets from us If you have *authentic* positioning, you’re more than halfway to building a killer brand…but there are a few things to do. We focus on just three: 1️⃣ A clearly articulated style 2️⃣ A small handful of subject matter themes 3️⃣ A memorable, attention-grabbing set of hooks (⚠ IMPORTANT: The big trick is to make sure that ALL of this works relentlessly to convey your unique value and set your product apart from the competition. This is where most branding falls down.) Style is the typical stuff of branding. We need to develop an easy-to-follow definition of how we communicate. Verbal and visual personality, tone, colors, fonts, text treatments, graphical/illustration/photo styles, and the other basics of a brand guidelines document. Themes are macro-level subjects that will span your market presence. These are broad definitions of what you’ll communicate about. These will change on a shorter cadence (ideally yearly), but are important because they put a sharper point on what your brand style needs to support. (E.g., if you do a lot of founder storytelling, it can help to have a signature photo/video style that helps your founder stand out in a certain way.) I call the last box “hooks,” but more academic types might call them “distinctive assets.” You want to walk away from a branding exercise with a small handful of catchy, powerful, unique assets you’ll use repeatedly in your marketing. These assets will live in your brand guidelines and themes, but it’s a good idea to call them out. They can be anything. A catchphrase. A particular color or combination. A specific type of illustration. A friggin mascot. Your founder’s glasses. (Witness Seth Godin.) Whatever they are, everybody needs to know it. …and that’s it. …I know I will get comments saying, “Yeah, but what about…” Your point of view and insights (to the degree they are things you will communicate about) belong in themes. Your purpose/vision should be reflected in the unique value *for buyers* you nail during the positioning work. Want to infuse emotions into your brand? Put them in the style bucket. As always, I think you should do what works for you, and I don’t think this is “the ultimate way” to do branding. But if this helps you think, I’m glad.

Is your positioning burying the lede? We see this all. the. time. when we work with brands. In our positioning process one of the first steps is defining all the different types of value their target customers care about in a buying decision. Then we map what the brand does really well to the things their customers care about most. This results in a lot of a-ha moments for teams. It helps them see their value in a new light. It shows them how to combine their strengths to build an identity they can own. Too often brands focus their identity around highly overlapping value. In other words, the *fingerprint* of their position is essentially the same as lots of other brands in their space...including the market leaders. They think they're making themselves look good because they're matching what other successful brands offer. But in reality they become yet another iteration of the same value their customers have seen 100 times. And if it comes down to your brand and the market leader saying the same thing...they're going to make the safe choice. Luckily again, you may have some great assets to build around that are just being underutilized. This is what I explored in this new episode of: From 10 to Win. In this episode I looked at SEO tools. The market leader is SemRush...and the challenger brand I wanted to dig into is Conductor. On the surface their positioning and core messaging is almost identical. "Increase results from organic content" For SemRush having a fairly straight forward position as an all-in-one SEO tool is fine. They can grow largely off of an established reputation in the space. But for Conductor, by mirroring a similar position and message I don't have a strong reason to choose them over the tool I've heard about a million times and I know is a safe bet. Using our new positioning and competitive intel tool SmokeLadder(.com) though I saw they have a key strength around: *integration*. Digging more into their site I found a video that tells a compelling story about the different ways they utilize integration: ✅ Integration with PM tools to create tasks SEO content and insights ✅ Integration with your site to make live content updates ✅ Integration with your site analytics to see performance It defines a workflow that I haven't seen from other SEO tools. Yet that whole area of value is buried several layers down. It feels like an afterthought. But that's something they could build an identity around to go from: 😴 Yet another SEO platform -to- 🧐 Your team's fully integrated SEO platform Now a prospect has a reason to learn more...and a reason to remember them in a vast sea of options. What potential super powers does your brand have lurking below the surface? With just a little digging you may find some very meaningful ways to stand out from the competition. Don't bury the lede. #positioning #competitiveintelligence #competition