PPB July 2019

Example: Salesforce enables leaders to grow their businesses faster. This is a large and resonant promise for Salesforce’s target customer. A less big alternative might have been “track customer communication carefully” or “largest storage capacity among CRM solutions.” With its big promise, Salesforce is a beloved brand with a tremendous market capitalization. 2 NARROW: It must be narrow enough to own. While your brand positioning must be big enough to matter, it also must be narrow enough for you to dominate. Choose a positioning you uniquely can own—one where you are not just better, but you are different. Example: Dollar Shave Club chose a meaning narrow enough to own. They unabashedly targeted Millennial males not loyal to the status quo way of buying shaving materials. With a subscription- based razor delivery model, Dollar Shave Club outflanked Gillette by not distributing through traditional retailers. 3 ASYMMETRICAL: It must use your lopsided advantage. Promise and deliver from your place of dramatically asymmetrical strength. (It’s asymmetrical because your edge comes not from being OK at a lot of things, but from being excellent at one thing.) Your positioning must pinpoint precisely what only you can bring to your customer that others cannot copy. Example: GORE-TEX has an asymmetrical advantage in waterproof fabrics. By inventing and patenting the technology for their fabric in 1969, they claimed the gold standard in waterproof fibers. As a result, GORE- TEX waterproof fabric is used in products manufactured by Patagonia, L.L. Bean, Oakley, Marmot, The North Face and others. 4 EMPATHETIC: It must address a deeply relevant and meaningful need. Your positioning must genuinely have your customers’ interests at heart. Ironclad brands genuinely care about their customers and seek to serve them with authenticity. Example: Airbnb empathetically addresses a large and previously unserved desire. Based on a promise to “belong anywhere,” Airbnb marries two deep, human needs: the need to belong and the need to feel safe in parts of the world beyond our experience. The Airbnb promise is meaningful for guests, who get to experience a new place through the lens of a local, and hosts, who get to share their world with someone they’d otherwise never meet. 5 OPTIMALLY DISTINCT: It must strike a balance between familiar and novel. Your brand positioning must be recognizable enough that your customer can easily grasp it, and yet new enough that it breaks through clutter and sparks intrigue. Familiarity gets you into the customer’s mind, while novelty attracts the customer’s attention. Example: Chobani yogurt blends the distinctness of Greek-style yogurt with the familiarity of mainstream American yogurt. Fage made the mistake of being very different—a difficult- to-pronounce name (“Fa- yeh”), large cartons, plain whole milk SKUs—and never broadly tapped into Americans’ yogurt-eating habits. Mainstream American brands like Yoplait had become ho-hum, uninteresting—overly familiar. Chobani blended familiar (traditional American fruit flavors and single-size servings) with novel (Greek yogurt’s thick texture), growing it to be one of the largest brands in the yogurt category. 6 FUNCTIONAL AND EMOTIONAL: It must serve the customer on both functional and emotional levels. Your offering must be at the critical intersection of your Ironclad brands genuinely care about their customers and seek to serve them with authenticity. | JULY 2019 | 41 GROW