What makes your brand stand out? What unique offerings does your business provide? Why should a customer choose your product or service over all of the others on the market? These are questions that you need to answer when creating a brand positioning statement.
Brand positioning is how you want your customers to see your company in relation to its competitors. It’s not about what you want, it’s about what the customer wants and how you can provide it better than anyone else. In this blog post, we will discuss how to create a brand positioning statement using AI and customer insights. We’ll also give examples of how some well-known brands have successfully positioned themselves in the marketplace.
What Is Brand Positioning?
Brand positioning is the process of creating an image or identity in the customer’s mind about your company, product, or service. This can be done through marketing campaigns, advertising, public relations, and other communications.
Note that brand positioning is entirely about your customers’ perception of your brand. Creating a brand positioning statement is not about what you want or how you see your company. It’s important to understand how customers perceive your brand first before crafting a position statement.
The word “positioning” refers to your brand’s position in the market. So before creating your brand positioning statement, you must bear in mind your main competitors and how your brand stands in relation to theirs. Sometimes the distinctions are obvious, but other times they’re more subtle. Finding your unique offering is a crucial step to building and nurturing a strong brand image that will attract new customers.
Now that we’ve broken down the meaning of “brand positioning” we can see that there are two vital elements at play:
- Your customers’ perspective of your brand
- Your position in the market in relation to your competitors
As we’ll explore, with the help of AI for customer insights, you can get a clear understanding of these two elements to create a brand positioning statement that’s truly reflective of how customers see your business.
How to Use AI and Customer Insights for Brand Positioning
Social media channels and review sites are brimming with freely accessible data from your customers and your competitors’ customers.
Almost half (49%) of all internet users (PDF) say they leave a review at least once a month, and 80% of Twitter users mention brands in their Tweets. This content is organically generated and unlike surveys, they’re not biased by how the question is worded. Instead, they give an accurate representation of how customers feel.
To get a clear understanding of how customers perceive your brand and those of your competitors, you need to read and analyse customer reviews at scale. This can be done manually, but it’s very time-consuming, impractical, and subject to human bias.
With the help of AI you can analyse thousands of reviews and Tweets within minutes.
Customer Insights
Consumer sentiment by topic
Symanto’s sentiment analysis technology uses the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology to read and analyse customer reviews and social media posts and comments.
Our technology can accurately identify customer sentiment by topic. Unlike other, more basic models, Symanto’s NLP tech can understand the context of the customer’s review or Tweet.
For example, if a customer gives a negative review to a competitor that mentions “poor service,” our technology can understand that this is likely referring to the company’s customer service rather than, say, the quality of their product.
It can also differentiate between multiple topics in the same sentence, for example, “I love the product but the service was terrible.”
In this way, you can get a very granular understanding of how customers feel about various aspects of your brand and those of your competitors.
After processing the data, our technology presents its findings in the form of intuitive data visualisations so that you can easily compare different topics and identify where your brand excels as well as customer pain points.
Psychographic profiling
Symanto Psychographics is one of our unique technologies. Using NLP, Symanto Psychographics can read between the lines of reviews and comments to identify the key personality traits of the author. For example, whether they’re more likely to be emotionally or analytically driven.
You can use these insights to build a psychographic profile of your customer base as well as that of your competitors, and identify whether you appeal to a specific niche of customers.
The results can throw interesting light on your position within the market. In a Symanto case study comparing food delivery companies, we found, for example, that both Grubhub and DoorDash attracted customers with high emotionality, while UberEats attracted a more rationally-minded consumer base.
These insights give you a better understanding of your direct competitors and how you can refine your messaging to target your ideal customer profile more effectively.
Competitor analysis
Social media posts, comments and online reviews are free to access publicly. That makes them an ideal source of data on your competitors. Symanto enables you to run a like-for-like analysis of multiple competitors within minutes. Our dashboard is designed to make it easy to compare customer sentiment and customer profiling.
Take a look at this chart from a report comparing popular streaming services:
As you can see, this data visualisation enables you to get a clear understanding of similarities and differences in the customer psychographics of the three brands. For example, we can see here that Prime Video streamers are rationally driven, while Disney+ streamers by comparison are more emotionally driven.
How to Create A Brand Positioning Statement
Once you have a clear understanding of how customers see your brand and how it compares to your competitors, you can start to create your brand positioning statement.
A brand positioning statement is a concise description of how you want customers to perceive your brand. It’s the foundation of how you communicate your brand to the world and should be reflected in everything from your website copy to your social media posts.
Brand positioning template
Here’s a template you can use to create your brand positioning statement:
For [your target audience] who want [customer need], [your brand] is a [name of industry] brand that offers [an offering or unique selling point] so that [benefits of your product or service].
Brand positioning examples
Apple
For tech-savvy consumers who want innovative mobile devices and personal computers, Apple is a consumer electronics, software and online services company that offers cutting-edge technology so that customers can have a seamless experience and be empowered by breakthrough services.
Coca-cola
For people who want refreshment, Coca-Cola is a non-alcoholic beverage company that offers more than 500 sparkling and still brands so that customers can enjoy moments of happiness.
Nike
For physically active consumers who want to perform beyond their expectations, Nike is an athletic footwear and apparel brand that offers the latest in sports design so that customers are supported and inspired to push beyond the impossible and reach their personal best.
Starbucks
For coffee drinkers who want quality beverages and pastries, Starbucks is a coffeehouse chain that offers an upscale experience with a wide range of food and drink choices.
Summary
In this blog post, we’ve looked at how to create a brand positioning statement by understanding your customer’s needs and how they see your brand compared to your competitors. We’ve also looked at how AI can help you gather insights about your customers and how to use those insights to create a brand positioning statement that will help you stand out in the market.
Get Started with Symanto
If you’re ready to start using AI to understand your customers and create a brand positioning statement that will give clear direction to your marketing efforts, get in touch with us today. We’ll be happy to show you how our technology can help you achieve your marketing goals.
