For C-suite leaders facing massive disruption whether from AI, tariffs, or global realignment the question of brand positioning is no longer just a marketing issue. It falls on the shoulders of senior leaders to guide the brand, like raising a child new to the world.
At the heart of branding is the question: Who are you, really? The unique way you answer that question defines your brand.
As a professional mom, I have found guiding a brand is a bit like raising a child within a family. You have existential values that are important to you. Clarifying them instills a strong sense of who you are, of what you are about. Usually, your values don’t radically change, but they do evolve as you grow over time. Each generation expresses those same values differently as culture evolves. Brands grow the exact same way.
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Defining a brand is one of the most rewarding aspects of marketing, and one of the most challenging. You are uncovering the foundational beliefs of the company. What promises does the company make? How are they different from its competitors? What is its purpose?
Defining this idea is profoundly important to a company’s activities and market impact, so this work must be done with top leadership’s direct involvement and embraced throughout the organization. Getting management aligned can be challenging. As we’ve seen with our hotel example, sometimes founders don’t recognize their own brand tenets.
When I was CMO at Babbel, the online language-learning company in Berlin, Germany, we needed to differentiate ourselves from the fast-growing, free competitor Duolingo. Gathering the executive team, I asked one of the founders why he created the app in the first place. The origin story often provides a clue to the company’s unique offering.
“I wanted to make a better mousetrap,” said the engineer.
“Better how?” I asked. “What did you want to offer?” I persisted. “Why did you feel people should learn languages?”
He didn’t answer why people should learn languages; he was motivated to invent a new online tool. Babbel was the first company to offer an online SaaS (Subscription as a Service) model for learning languages on an app. Yet being the first in a market differentiates a company only until a competitor catches up. I sought to understand how learning with Babbel differed from learning with Duolingo. First, Babbel charged a fee for its service, whereas Duolingo offered its instruction for free. (Since then, Babbel launched free trial periods and Duolingo added paid subscriptions.) In 2007, long before the rise of artificial intelligence, Babbel hired teachers to develop its online instruction, which meant each lesson was developed by human hands. Headquartered in Europe, Babbel created unique dual-language learning combinations so German customers could learn English in their native German, French customers could learn Italian in their native French, and English-speaking customers could learn Spanish from English, for example. Compared to Duolingo, which was built through crowd-sourcing its users, Babbel offered a premium learning experience. But with the rise of online translation services, would anyone still want to learn a language? After months of comparing our approach to more playful models and generic translation services, we found that learning a language with effective, teacher-crafted Babbel could transform someone’s life. Translations are simply transactional, whereas Babbel offers a premium and personal transformation.
Clarifying Babbel’s unique offering helped our teams double down on those same values internally in how we created our lessons and externally in how we crafted our message differently to the target markets.
While brand concepts are theoretical, there are practical tools to structure the discussion. People use many different names for these models, but the ideas are the same. The brand platform consists of several important features. You want to define what you’re all about (positioning or promise), how you express yourself (adjectives that illustrate the brand character), and why people can believe in this (proof points of how you deliver that promise). The promise your brand delivers has to match a consumer’s needs, so the better you know your target audience or consumer, the better you can determine how your offering will meet, or better yet, exceed their needs. As those needs change over time or from one culture to another, so too should the ways you bring these promises to life.
Branding is alchemy. Making a brand captivating, one that ignites passion, purchase, and loyalty, requires a blend of strategy and creativity. That process begins by creating a brand platform with your core team. The brand platform aligns all teams internally so they can each design products, features, and services inspired by and delivering against the promise. Kotler’s four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion—convey a brand’s positioning, also captured and communicated by the brand’s identity: its name, logo, colors, and tagline. All the owned, paid, and earned marketing—website, stores, social, CRM, advertising, and PR—bring the brand to life with engaging content in compelling and cohesive narratives that resonate with the target audience. From the sleek lines of the logo to the packaging material and carefully chosen words of a salesperson, every touchpoint reflects the brand.
As a marketer, your job is to compete. Compete differently with The Blake Project.
You can’t define your brand in a vacuum. Your offering sits in a competitive marketplace, so you want to position your brand with intention. Create a competitive grid with meaningful x and y axes, i.e. price x organic; technical x sensual etc., by asking these types of questions:
- Who are your competitors and how are you different from them?
- Are you more or less expensive?
- Are your materials all natural and sustainably sourced?
- Is there a key person or designer who sets the artistic direction or are your top-selling items crowd-sourced through community?
- Are you a minority-owned business?
This competitive process helps clarify whether where you think your brand sits matches where the market perceives it to be. If there is a gap and you intend to shift your position for market advantage, this competitive grid helps clarify this too. In this case, you need to identify where the current market perception is versus your competitors and where you seek to shift it.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Katherine Melchior Ray and Nataly Kelly, co-authors of BRAND GLOBAL, ADAPT LOCAL: How to Build Brand Value Across Cultures
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
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
