Your brand need to stand out.
The way to stand out is to be different, to be unique, to be distinct.
And for you to be all those things, you need to first understand who you are up against.
That means knowing and understanding who your competitors are.
You need to learn who’s also on the playing field with you if you want to play against them.
Research them, learn about them, get to know them.
But, the point of learning about who your competitors are is not actually to defeat them.
It’s actually to understand the space you’re going to compete in.
In every customers’ mind are spaces they could fill in including your brand.
The way for your brand to be relevant and for them to remember who you are is for you occupy one of those spaces in their minds,
You do this by first learning which spaces are already taken and which spaces are up for grab.
But you need to choose wisely, you need to pick a space that are relevant not just to your business but also your audience.
This is called positioning, it’s the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the competitors.
The way you could create a positioning is to write your own positioning statement.
To write a positioning statement, you need to answer these four questions,
1/ What you do? (niche/category)
2/ How you differ? (benefits/differentiator)
3/ Why you do it? (support/reasons to believe)
4/ Who you do for? (target audience)
A complete positioning statement would look like this,
To (target audience), we are the (category) that provide (functional/emotional/experiential benefits) because (reasons to believe).
When you write a positioning statement for your brand, it’s like a way for you to place a flag for your brand saying that this space is yours.
But that’s just the first step, which is to reserve it, you’ll still need to earn that space.
Having a clear brand positioning also helps you get clarity and focus on the decisions need to be made for your brand.
Your brand is made up of all the decisions you made along the way, and you want to make as many good decisions as possible.
The way you can ensure that is to have a clear direction and focus in decision, and having a positioning statement helps a lot will all that.