Your product and brand have deep ties.
On the fundamental level, your product is what you offer to paying customers, while your brand is the perception a customer associates with your product or company.
That connection may make you feel like you can’t separate them – but you can.
And on the positioning level, I’d argue that you should. Each requires a different approach because each appeals to a different aspect of your potential customer.
Here’s how they differ and the steps to take for creating both types.
The goal of creating different positioning for your product and brand comes down to a simple difference:
Your product position is all about how you appeal to the practicality of your product, while brand positioning is about capturing the hearts of your customers. It’s practical features vs. emotion, and understanding how these differ reveals why you need individual positioning for each.
Creating your product positioning starts with a simple question: what is your product?
Hopefully, that’s an easy question to answer, because you know what your product is, what it does, and the category it lives in. From there, dig deeper by asking yourself why the product exists. What’s the mission or vision behind it and what problem space does it serve?
Then move into the position strategy by figuring out what your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like and how you want your product to be perceived by them, specifically.
Finally, move back to the product itself to translate its unique value to your customers, based on what they want and need. Note that this doesn’t mean you create a feature list. Positioning a product is about communicating how you deliver the value of those features to the customer.
Product positioning questions address the commercial and strategic parts of your marketing. But, for your brand, it’s about seeing you through your customers’ eyes.
Start with defining who your hero customer is and getting as specific as possible: What’s their name? Where do they get their news? Where do they hang out? And crucially: what problem do they want to solve?
A clear image of your customer in your mind will then help you position your brand as the North Star to their personal promised land. In other words: what makes your brand different?
The answers will often be one- or two-word attributes, and help you to define your brand on the visual and voice tone levels.
For instance, when I think of Apple, I think of words like “elegant,” “luxury,” or “accessible.” Those words are the personifications of the Apple brand, regardless of the specific product. You need to find similar words that personify your brand.
Knowing your ideal customer and your brand’s attributes then dictates how you speak to your ideal customer across every touchpoint and experience you offer.
You’re likely already seeing some similarities between the product and brand positioning questions. That’s because all of the questions are variations on a theme: differentiation.
The difference between product versus brand lies in the approaches to that theme.
You position your product based on its value equity, whereas you position your brand on your customer’s perception of your unique qualities.
It’s subtle, but understanding why those two things differ is key to creating appealing statements for a customer’s pragmatic, business-oriented decision-making, while also appealing to the emotional side of decision-making.
When it comes to how pragmatism and emotion influence buying decisions, I look to Harvard Business Review and its B2B Buying Hierarchy. It breaks down the spectrum of what influences B2B buying behavior into a pyramid containing five levels.
The bottom three levels are product-based. Then the upper two are brand-based, but all five rely on you getting your positioning statements right.
Here are the levels in detail, from bottom to top:
It’s clear how these levels divide into the pragmatism of product positioning and the emotion related to branding. The first three are about what the product does for the business, with the latter two focusing on the individual buying the product.
Now you can see how product and brand positioning differ, there’s just one question to answer – how do you create the positioning for each?
The answer is it’s a game of inputs and outputs. The inputs are specific knowledge of your product or brand and you get outputs that shape your positioning statements.
Starting with product positioning, your inputs are the following:
If you think of those combined inputs as a dataset, the output is a “report” that helps you create your product positioning:
You’ll see some crossover between the inputs for product and brand positioning. The key thing to remember is the following inputs are about the customer’s heart and emotions, even when there’s a crossover:
As for your outputs, you’ll end up with three:
There’s plenty of crossover when positioning a product versus positioning a brand. For instance, both require you to understand your customer and figure out the value your product offers. But there is a difference, and it comes down to pragmatism and emotion.
Ultimately, product positioning is about your customer’s pragmatic side, and brand is about hearts and perceptions. Learn to go beyond the pragmatic, and the emotions will win you customers for the life of your brand.
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