Brands that lead today do three things exceptionally well.
They create an emotional advantage that customers cannot get elsewhere.
They establish a distinctive advantage that customers recognize as meaningfully different.
They build a connective advantage that keeps the brand relevant over time.
These are not communications outcomes. They are strategic decisions.
At The Blake Project, we see this pattern repeatedly. Brand positioning determines how a brand competes, what it stands for, and why customers choose it over alternatives. When positioning is unclear, everything downstream suffers. Strategy fragments. Culture drifts. Creative work loses focus.
This is why brand positioning belongs on the leadership agenda, not buried inside a marketing plan.
What Most Organizations Get Wrong About Brand Positioning
Most organizations misunderstand positioning in predictable ways.
Some treat it as messaging.
Others confuse it with a value proposition or a tagline.
Many delegate it entirely to marketing.
Positioning is none of those things.
Brand positioning is a set of strategic choices about focus, trade-offs, and competitive intent. It answers hard questions. Who the brand is for. What it will compete on. What it will deliberately not pursue.
Avoiding those decisions does not preserve flexibility. It creates drift.
Brand Positioning As An Executive Alignment Issue
Strong positioning requires leadership consensus.
When executives are misaligned internally, customers experience inconsistency externally. Different stories emerge. Different priorities compete. The brand becomes harder to understand and easier to replace.
This is why The Blake Project approaches positioning as an alignment exercise first, not a creative one. Effective positioning aligns leadership, strategy, culture, and execution around a shared point of view. It becomes a decision lens for the organization, guiding everything from product development to customer experience to communications.
Research-Informed Brand Positioning
Strong brand positioning is not built on opinion alone.
When available, insights from brand, customer, and competitive research are integrated directly into positioning work. Research sharpens leadership judgment by grounding decisions in customer drivers rather than internal preferences.
These drivers include functional expectations, emotional motivations, experiential needs, and self-expressive desires. Understanding them is essential to achieving relevant differentiation, not differentiation for its own sake.
Research helps leadership teams answer the most important positioning question: how to be different in ways that matter most to your target customer.
When research already exists, whether brand equity studies, customer interviews, segmentation work, or competitive analysis, it provides a shared factual foundation. It elevates discussion, reduces anecdotal debate, and accelerates alignment.
When research is unavailable, outdated, or incomplete, The Blake Project can design and conduct the appropriate research before positioning work. The goal is not more data. It is clarity about relevance, competitive white space, and credibility.
In all cases, research informs decisions without replacing leadership judgment. Positioning remains a strategic choice. Research ensures that choice reflects market reality rather than internal bias.
How Research Drives Relevant Differentiation And Creative Clarity
Research is used to:
- Clarify priority customers and high-value segments
- Identify the customer drivers that truly influence choice and loyalty
- Distinguish meaningful differentiation from superficial novelty
- Pressure-test proposed points of difference before they become brand commitments
One of the most practical outcomes of this work is creative clarity.
When positioning is grounded in real customer drivers and relevant differentiation, creative teams know what to emphasize, what to ignore, and what the brand should never say. This clarity reduces wasted effort, sharpens briefs, and improves creative effectiveness across channels.
Creative clarity is not about limiting creativity. It is about focusing it.
Inside The Brand Positioning Workshop
This is the context in which The Blake Project’s Brand Positioning Workshop was developed.
The workshop is a highly facilitated, full-day working session designed to help leadership teams create emotional, distinctive, and connective advantage. It is built for organizations that recognize positioning as a leadership responsibility, not a marketing deliverable.
Working alongside management and marketing leadership teams, The Blake Project’s experts align stakeholders around:
- Target customers and priority audiences
- Competitive frame of reference
- Brand essence and brand promise
- Brand personality and archetype
- What the brand stands for and what it stands against
- How the brand will compete and win
The outcome is a clear, defensible brand position that guides strategy, culture, and growth.
The Criteria For Positioning Success
To gain an advantage in the customer’s mind, a brand benefit must meet four requirements:
- It matters deeply to the target customer
- The organization has the capability and intent to deliver it
- Competitors are not delivering it, and would struggle to do so
- It is clear, compelling, and believable
If a benefit fails any one of these tests, it is not positioning. It is aspiration.
From Brand Awareness To Brand Insistence
Awareness alone no longer drives growth.
Brands win when customers insist on them. That insistence is built through the combined impact of relevant differentiation, value, accessibility, and emotional connection. We believe these five areas of emphasis and activity are the primary drivers of consumer brand insistence and are critical to becoming a category-of-one brand with No Substitutes.
Positioning is the foundation that makes brand insistence possible. Without it, even well-funded brands struggle to own a meaningful difference in the minds of those that matter most to their future.
A Proven Compass For Brand Leadership
The Blake Project’s Brand Positioning Workshop has been validated by more than 250 corporate, product, service, B2B, B2C, nonprofit, celebrity, government, and place brands worldwide. The outcomes have been trusted by CEOs, senior marketers, founders, executive directors, and public leaders to align organizations, sharpen focus, build a durable competitive advantage, and achieve enduring profitable growth.
Organizations use the outcomes of this workshop to:
- Gain confidence in strategic direction
- Respond to competitive threats and disruption
- Elevate perceived value and differentiation
- Accelerate growth
- Align stakeholders around a single, ownable point of difference
- Anchor brand culture
- Guide internal and external communications
- Introduce new brands or enter new segments
- Extend brands into new categories
- Revitalize underperforming brands
- Shift messaging and market perception
- Create or expand a competitive advantage
What The Workshop Delivers
Within one week of the workshop, leadership receives a concise executive summary documenting every positioning decision, including:
- Target customer definition
- Brand essence
- Brand promise
- Brand personality
- Brand archetype
This decision document serves as a strategic compass for leadership, a rallying point for employees, and a foundation for communications, experience design, and brand identity. Agencies and in-house marketing departments consistently value it as a critical input to creative development. It also informs business strategy.
Gain clarity and confidence in your brand’s strategic direction. Email The Blake Project for more on how this workshop can help you achieve an emotional advantage, a distinctive advantage, and a connective advantage.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth, and Brand Education
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