Brand Positioning Strategy - From USP Promise to Execution

A brand positioning strategy is a road map or plan for how a product, service or company plans to attain differentiation and subsequent competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Positioning is often a confusing concept because of how popular use changes the meaning of the word. Positioning actually refers to a space within the mind of the customer marketplace that a company occupies.

To execute your brand positioning strategy and attain your business goals, you must align 3 distinct elements to your core positioning strategy. They are:

• Brand promise
• Brand communications
• Brand experience

If your business strikes a discordant note in any of these elements, your whole marketing system will be compromised. Let's take a closer look at them.

1. Brand promise

The brand promise encapsulates the dominant benefit a product, service or company wants to convey to the marketplace. Ideally, the promise should be believable, rooted in the intrinsic strength of the company, and meaningfully different from those of competitors.

Small businesses often struggle with getting this right. Many small businesses depend on their tactical marketing efforts to make up for lack of a truly differentiated brand promise. 
In the best run companies, it makes up part of the unique selling proposition (USP) - the central selling and differentiating logic that makes a company the choice of the marketplace.

2. Brand communications

Brand communications are all those ways by which a company conveys its brand and USP to the marketplace. It encompasses brand identity elements like logos, and color motifs, to marketing communications like advertisements, brochures, and sales letters.

3. Brand experience

Brand promise, brand communications and brand experience must be aligned and executed properly for any business to see benefits. Brand experience describes how clients, prospects, partners and even the media experience a company's delivery on its brand promise. For business owners, this is the most important part of building a brand after crafting your promise.

This is where business execution meets marketing. Your core processes of organizational effectiveness, operational performance, strategic positioning and systems integration must work together to yield an overall performance that delivers on promises made.

When Domino's Pizza launched its ultimate USP promise ("Fresh, hot, Pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes, or it's free!"), the company had to align every single part of the business to deliver on that promise.

The stores were designed without seating areas, the storage technology was developed to keep Pizzas hot in transit, product lines focused narrowly on Pizzas and items that could be delivered within the 30 minute guarantee, and manager incentives were unified around delivering on that extraordinary promise.

The company did not abandon that USP until it after it had already become a hugely successful company. That successful brand positioning strategy transformed a very small pizza store chain into a billion dollar company in record time.