Crafting the Perfect Brand Positioning Statement

Writing a brand positioning statement is critical to creating a successful marketing strategy. Beyond clarifying and focusing your marketing efforts, it helps ensure your strategy and messaging align with your brand’s goals.

Simply creating your brand positioning statement can enhance insights into consumer preferences and behavior and spotlight how to attract and retain customers. It can also provide a benchmark for measuring success.

“Brands have never been more important,” says Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery, who teaches the online course Creating Brand Value. “Consumers are looking to brands to create meaning in their lives—to make their consumption of everyday products and services more significant. As long as brands are meaning-makers, they will continue to create value for consumers and for firms.”

What Is a Brand Positioning Statement?

Brand positioning describes how brands establish competitive advantages in consumers’ minds in the marketplace. Think of it as the art of staking out a piece of mental real estate for your brand by crafting and communicating a differentiated customer value proposition. Success depends not only on your intent but on how consumers perceive, classify, and remember your brand relative to competitors.

In a nutshell: Your brand positioning statement defines how your brand is perceived. While it’s not public facing, consider it the North Star that guides your brand marketing strategies and messages.

“We believe that the more you nurture the brand, the more value we're going to get,” says Amy Murray, former vice president of global marketing at restaurant chain McDonald’s Corporation, in Creating Brand Value. “And it's going to be much more powerful than if we just did a buy one, get one free Big Mac. We know that when we work on the brand, and we do marketing and advertising around the brand, it's just going to be that much more valuable in the long term as far as return on investment and customer feelings.”

To create your brand positioning statement, consider your customer value proposition, the promise your brand offers your target audience that answers the question, “Why should I buy?”

Its aim is to differentiate your brand from competitors and attract and retain customers. Here’s a step-by-step guide to writing your brand positioning statement.

How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement: 5 Steps

1. Define Your Audience

Before generating your brand’s customer value proposition, you must understand who it serves and how it’s similar to or different from competitors.

Start with your target audience and research their demographics. What insights can you draw about consumers’ locations, needs, purchasing habits, ages, or life stages? Those points are essential to knowing who you’re marketing to.

Related: Why Identifying Your Target Audience Is Important to Your Marketing Strategy

2. Understand Your Competition

It’s vital to position your brand so consumers think about it beneficially—and that requires identifying your target market and competition.

To generate positive brand perception, create and communicate your offering’s advantages and qualities that address and solve users’ needs or problems. Ultimately, your goal is to connect your target audience with your brand by recognizing how your offering adds value through its experience, brand connection, or alignment with consumers’ values.

Evaluate Competitors Using a Perceptual Map

A perceptual map is a graphic representation of how consumers perceive your brand compared to competitors along dimensions such as price, quality, innovation, or customer service. Its purpose is to help you understand how consumers view your product or brand, enabling you to make more informed positioning decisions.

The key to perceptual mapping is choosing attributes that accurately reflect customers’ wants and needs. Getting those right is essential to making informed decisions and gaining insights about your brand’s differentiation and consumer perception.

• Choose two key attributes: First, define two core variables customers seek when purchasing a product or service in your industry. For instance, price and safety or innovation and utility in the automobile industry.
• Plot your brand and identify gaps: Place those variables on each axis of a graph, with “price” on the horizontal plane and “quality” on the vertical plane. Find your brand and competitors’ positions along both to understand where your brand stands. Strategically interpreting your competitive maps allows you to facilitate notions of direct and indirect competition.

3. Articulate Unique Differentiators and a Reason to Believe

How is your brand similar to—and different from—competitors? Consider how it uniquely benefits prospective customers. Then, use facts to support that.

“When I think about the value that brands have to consumers, I know that consumers use the brand promise to make a choice in a noisy landscape,” says Tina Edmondson, president of luxury at hotel brand Marriott International, in Creating Brand Value. “You know, in a sea of similar products, where the functional value of the product is really the same, it’s the positioning or the distinct promise that a product or service makes that makes the difference for the consumer.”

Related: Listen to Professor Avery discuss brand portfolio strategy and Marriott’s $13.3 billion acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts on The Parlor Room podcast, or watch the episode on YouTube.

Once you’ve identified your differentiators, develop your customer value proposition with the following questions:

• Who’s my product or service intended for?
• What customer need does my product or service meet?
• How does my brand meet that need?

Use your answers to complete the following statement:

We help [target audience] do [customer need] by [brand attribute].

The result is your customer value proposition.

Creating Brand Value explains this concept using three water brands as examples. Each identifies the brand’s target market, the need it meets, and how it fulfills that need:

• Voss: Voss offers upscale consumers a luxurious, stylish drinking experience with the purest water sourced from an artesian well in Norway.
• Perrier: Perrier provides middle-class consumers an elegant, refreshing sparkling water experience at an affordable price.
• Ethos: Ethos delivers socially conscious millennials a high-quality bottled water that helps combat the global clean water crisis with every purchase.

With a succinct value proposition—like those above—you can move on to the next step: writing your brand positioning statement.

4. Craft Your Brand Positioning Statement

After identifying your brand's value, define how customers perceive it in the marketplace. Together, your value proposition and brand positioning statement form your brand strategy’s foundation by distinguishing its products and services and guiding how it engages your target audience.

Ask the following questions:

• What similar brands will your target market consider purchasing from? Those make up your competitive set.
• How is your brand different from others? What makes it unique and valuable to your target audience? The answer is your primary point of difference.
• What proof can you offer? What makes that difference believable? Those responses are your brand’s reasons to believe.

Use your answers to build on your customer value proposition in the following statement:

For [target market], our brand is the only one among all [competitive set] that [unique value claim or primary point of difference] because [reasons to believe].

5. Inform Your Thinking with Real-World Examples

It’s essential to inform your understanding of your brand’s value and positioning statement by considering how different types of brands have positioned themselves.

Returning to the bottled water companies featured in Creating Brand Value, here’s how they might address their target markets using their unique value claims:

• Voss: For upscale consumers looking to make a design statement with their water choice, Voss is the only brand among all bottled waters that offers the purest, most distinctive drinking experience because it derives from an artesian source in southern Norway and is packaged in a stylish, iconic glass bottle.
• Perrier: For middle-class consumers looking for an affordable and accessible luxury, Perrier is the only brand among all bottled waters that offers an elegant, sparkling, and refreshing water, with just a hint of zaniness because it’s naturally carbonated by volcanic gases held deep beneath the southern French soil and features clever bottle designs by artist Andy Warhol.
• Ethos: For socially conscious millennial consumers, Ethos is the only brand among all bottled waters that cares about solving the world’s clean water crisis because it donates five cents for every bottle sold to programs that help support water, sanitation, and hygiene education programs in water-stressed countries.

Each brand is uniquely positioned to speak to its sub-demographic with statements that differentiate it and reasons to believe in it. In the bottled water category—where, without branding, every option looks identical—this exercise is particularly critical.

Taking Your Brand Knowledge to the Next Level

Brand positioning is crucial to building your brand’s value. If you want to deepen your understanding of branding and how to resonate with consumers, take the next step in your educational journey by enrolling in our six-week Creating Brand Value course.

Through insights from industry leaders, real-world case studies, and interactive exercises, you can bolster your business knowledge and advance your career with a Certificate of Completion from HBS Online.

Are you interested in taking a brand value course? Discover Creating Brand Value—one of our marketing courses—and download our interactive online learning success guide to discover online programs’ benefits and how to prepare for one.