The Brand Positioning Workbook’s primary tenet and one of my key convictions is that in creating a company positioning platform, the search for the most intriguing, pertinent, and persuasive positioning concept or solution for a particular brand is a creative problem-solving process. All too frequently, positionings are created in a very deductive, linear, and reasonable manner, which usually results in obvious and generic positioning statements. Rational thought has its place and time in the process.
Additionally, each procedure must be data-driven. But reasoning and statistics by themselves won’t result in a distinctive and inspiring positioning platform. Instead, the team’s imaginative analysis of the data will result in truly original ideas. According to Wikipedia, creative problem solving is “the process of using one’s mind to look for an innovative and previously undiscovered solution to a problem.” And that’s precisely what you’re aiming for when you decide on your brand’s positioning. To find an original and, ideally, novel or fresh terrain in which to anchor your brand and that will resonate with and appeal to your target audience, you are considering various choices or hypotheses for what your brand’s positioning might be.
So where do you get the ideas for the divergent portion of the process, the ideation and hypothesis-generating phase, if building a brand position is an exercise in creative problem-solving?
This step is particularly crucial since the quality of the input—your or your team’s capacity to generate a wide variety of unique solutions usually determines the quality of the output (the final concept). The 26 tested and universal sources of brand associations, which were derived from the research of more than 1200 case studies of successful brand formation, serve as the basis for the approach outlined in the book. Early in my career as a strategist, I became conscious of and picked up on recurring trends in the positioning of successful companies. While others offered a new form of brand benefit (Pringles) or a new approach to promote their brand benefit, other brands use their country of origin as a strategy to differentiate themselves and support their brand promise.
Once more, it appeared that others could capitalize on prevailing cultural feelings to create appeal and relevance. Additionally, I noted that these trends were consistent across categories, regions, and time.
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