Positioning and Brand Strategy

A compelling positioning strategy gives your brand a huge competitive advantage in the battle for the heart and minds of your target customers. In a cluttered environment where buyers have little time or inclination to ponder product or service decisions, it’s exceedingly beneficial for a brand to have a raison d’être–a reason for being–that’s both differentiating and highly motivating.

Our research-driven approach to positioning strategy development and clear definition of the essential elements of a brand strategy improves your ability to:

• Discover what is really important to targets, not what they say is most important
• Rank order all possible positioning options in terms of real market opportunity and find the “white space” opportunities
• Build a brand strategy that consistently and clearly communicates the positioning

The end result of a positioning and brand strategy engagement is invaluable prescriptive guidance about the innovative, preemptive opportunities that will set your brand apart and lead to growth.

Uncover Breakthrough Positioning Opportunities

Working alongside you and the brand team, we brainstorm tangible/rational and intangible/emotional brand characteristics that all represent potential positioning strategy options. With a set of characteristics in hand, we measure their potential influence on behavior and compare the perceptions your target buyers have of your and competitive brands.

To uncover the strongest positioning opportunities, we break the characteristics into five categories:

Positioning Opportunities–important to targets, on which your brand enjoys a competitive advantage.

“Price-of-entry” attributes–important but all major brands are perceived to be “excellent.”

Areas to de-emphasize–the attributes which your brand delivers, but are not motivating to targets.

Key weaknesses–which should be fixed if possible.

Major “white space” opportunities–important to target, but no brand is perceived to deliver.

Finally, we evaluate the different opportunities in terms of feasibility and costs to deliver.

Bring Structure to Brand Strategy

To build a powerful brand, you need to have all the elements of a brand strategy in place.

Beyond positioning, we assist in the further evaluation and testing of different positioning concepts, as well as tackling questions about your brand’s “essence” and “personality” that an agency or internal creative team need answered to bring the positioning to life via visual identity and messaging.

We provide expert and practical support to ensure your brand strategy fosters a clear, distinct image in the marketplace, and positively predisposes your target towards buying your products and services.

Positioning and Brand Strategy–Our Tools and Solutions

• Brand positioning/repositioning
• Positioning simulation
• Brand architecture
• Visual identity
• Corporate branding

Innovation In order to overcome the tendency for respondents to overstate the importance of rational attributes and benefits and give pro-social responses, Copernicus developed a novel three-dimensional approach to evaluating the motivations of key targets when it comes to selecting a product or service.