Branding before Growth: Crafting a positioning statement for your startup.
Using frameworks and workflows from classical marketing to help brand your product in an era of growth focus.
Growth.
It’s been one of the biggest buzzwords in Silicon Valley for a while. Traditional marketing has been usurped by new techniques that embrace emerging technologies and social media platforms. Developing your domain authority for killer SEO, building a creative - yet pinpointed - AdWords campaign, testing and retesting your landing pages, or writing engaging content for a viral blog: growth tactics can take your company to the next level.
And while having a kick-ass growth team can make-or-break the success of your company, ignoring old-school, fundamental frameworks and tactics is leaving money on the table.
Focusing on growth before branding can lead to avoidable missteps. If you’re new to classical marketing, one of the easiest ways to begin branding is to craft a positioning statement that identifies your target users and your unique value proposition. If you can define clearly your specific users and benefits, it will add deeper value to your growth tactics.
Remember STP? A quick primer.
Positioning is part of a broader workflow called STP. This marketing 101 framework involves segmenting all possible user demographics into categories, based on pertinent divisions like age, habits, or affiliations, and then picking the segments of users you wish to target. “Segmentation” and “target” are the “S” and “T” of the trusty STP model. And the “P”? That’s positioning. What is positioning? Let’s look at the definition Google uses:
“Positioning is an effort to influence user perception of a brand or product relative to the competing alternatives and substitutes. Its objective is to occupy a clear, unique, and advantageous position in the consumer’s mind.”
That’s powerful stuff, if you can pull it off! A clear position of your brand or product will directly influence the tone of your messaging in your email and paid acquisition campaigns, the AdWords and SERP keywords you choose, and the social media spaces you inhabit. Luckily, there are many frameworks you can utilize to help your team position your product successfully.
The great thing about frameworks? They are more of a loose guide than tight handcuffs. Following frameworks blindly because “that’s how it’s done” is why traditional marketing is falling by the wayside. Using frameworks as a template to help your team prioritize critical issues and customize your strategy is how to take advantage of these tools.
Criticisms of positioning statements include that they are both too wordy and too simplistic simultaneously. Perhaps, yes, if used in a vacuum. But used as a foundation to direct your strategy and deepen your understanding is where you’ll find true value.
Below are some great positioning statement frameworks to help your team brainstorm:
1. The Gold Standard Positioning Statement
This is the one you learned in your marketing class or Googled last month when you were reading a branding blog. It’s basically a positioning statement Mad Libs. This template is used in famous examples of major corporations’ brands, and is the template used by Google and Square.
For (target user) who (statement of user’s need or product’s opportunity), (product or brand name) is a (category) that (key benefits), unlike (alternative, substitute, or competitor), (product or brand name) (statement of differentiation).
Here are a few examples:
GMAIL (2004)
FOR Google users WHO get a ton of email, Gmail IS A free webmail service THAT lets you search rather than sort UNLIKE other webmail providers, Gmail gives you 1 GB of storage so you never have to delete a message again.
AMAZON (1997)
FOR web users WHO enjoy books, Amazon IS A retail bookseller THAT provides instant access to millions of books UNLIKE traditional bookstores, Amazon provides a combination of extraordinary convenience, low prices, and comprehensive selection.
The key to these positioning statements is to make your “For” and “Who” (a.k.a. your target segment of users) as specific as possible.
Take Chipotle for example. Simply stating “FOR people WHO like to eat” wouldn’t be a useful demographic, because that segment seems to encompass the vast majority of the world’s population. But saying “FOR burrito lovers WHO value quality and freshness” starts to paint a more vivid picture of the audience Chipotle should target.
If this framework seems too vague and open-ended to provide value for your team when crafting a positioning statement, there is a modified version that reframes these small words into deeper concepts, our #2 framework:
2. The Modified Standard Positioning Statement
Transforming the above “gold standard” framework into concrete sections with specific, tactical definitions can help solidify your team’s thinking. It will also help you narrow and organize your talking points when pitching your product not only to potential users but also to investors and media.
Let’s use as an example Visual Supply Company (VSCO), known for their photographic technology and applications, as well as their community for visual artists.
AUDIENCE: Modern creatives seeking beautiful and efficient visual art tools and a community of like-minded artistic individuals.
PROBLEM: A lack of creative platforms that empower and support all levels of visual artists.
CATEGORY: An art and technology brand with a suite of mobile applications and a community of similarly focused users.
VALUE PROPOSITION: Applications that emphasize creativity, quality, and originality; made by Oakland’s finest creatives.
DIFFERENTIATION: As opposed to other visual media sharing applications, VSCO is not focused on supporting the vanity of self-promoting likes, but rather on a community that promotes inspiration and authenticity.
While you can still use the words “For,” “Who,” “That,” and “Unlike” in these sections in order to write a cohesive statement, this framework helps your team break down and define each section more effectively. This modified framework can be used in tandem with the standard framework to position your brand or product more holistically.
3. The User-Centered Positioning Statement
Focusing on needs and feedback from potential and existing users is at the foundation of this positioning statement framework. It uses direct quotes from consumers to guide your value proposition.
While it’s not as focused on building one cohesive statement, it is another way to visualize your branding in a manner that’s responsive to users. Below is an example of a re-branding activity undertaken by French conglomerate Danone (branded as Dannon in the U.S.) for their Activia yogurt.
The benefit of this framework is that the Unique Value Proposition is developed as a direct response to the user. The previous frameworks are product-focused, selecting targeted user segments based on an already developed product or brand. This framework uses direct user feedback to solve a real problem, and molds the product or brand to this feedback.
Conclusions: What a positioning statement isn’t.
There’s a lot of literature on the web equating positioning statements with mission statements and slogans or taglines. But these are actually a continuum of branding, where a corporate mission statement directs a product’s or brand’s positioning statement, which in turn, helps dictate a catchy slogan.
A positioning statement also isn’t the end-all, be-all of your branding. Simply writing a statement isn’t going to solve all your marketing problems. Developing thoughtful segmentation, picking the right targets, writing landing page-ready unique value propositions (UVPs), and considering the 4P’s (or 5!) are just the tip of the iceberg to then propel your growth forward.
What traditional marketing tools or tactics do you think are overlooked or under-utilized in startups these days? Are there emerging branding strategies you champion? Let me know in the comments!
Super big kudos to John A. Parks and Mara for reigning in my writing; endless applause to my editor Elizabeth Braden, who always is reminding me to stop hyphenating adverbs; mad props to Tradecraft for supporting me through my Silicon Valley journey; et merci beaucoup to my mentors at HEC Paris for inspiration and knowledge.
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