What makes you different? Two traps to avoid in brand positioning

We all have a sense of self. If pushed to describe ourselves, we might list a few words — patient, adventurous, shy, tall, a Swifty, a foodie, ‘in my comfy era’.

We do the same for brands. Even though they make essentially the same product, we probably don’t describe Volvo, BMW, Ferrari and Fiat in the same way. Safe, fast, stylish, cool, a bit naff, cute, driven by dickheads.

Where do these ideas come from? How do they form and change over time? Can we be deliberate about which ones we would like others to think of us as? In other words, are they aspirational, or truthful? And what happens when those identities are challenged?

These are the questions of brand. Good brands manage to both project a solid identity, but also to reflect what people already think about them. Rebrands often highlight this — arguably McDonalds’ successfully rebranded itself from ‘cheap but rarely cheerful’ to something far more family friendly. RyanAir would struggle to rebrand as a luxury, customer obsessed airline. The jury is still out on Jaguar.

But all brand work aims to capture, distill and reinforce one or a handful of ideas that people associate with a brand, and reinforce it consistently, across every aspect of their business. Those descriptive words and concepts gradually sink in so deep, that you probably don’t even realise just how powerful they are.

Don’t believe me? Try this quick mental exercise. Since we’ve already mentioned cars, we’re going to run with it. Imagine the following brands suddenly decided they were going to release a car in 2026:

• Apple
• Nintendo
• McDonalds

If you struggle with stuff like this, here’s an easier version. Here’s the above brand’s cars, as imagined by genAI, can you tell which is which?

Easy, right. And they also feel about right. Apple would make a sleeker car than McDonalds, and Nintendo’s would probably be fun but a bit weird.

What if you’re working at a company looking to either establish their brand identity for the first time, reinvent it, or refresh it? What if you feel like you’ve lost control of that identity?

Here are a couple of mistakes to avoid:

Dangerous Identity Mistake 1 — looking sideways, not inwards.

Those of you old enough might remember the console wars. A period of about 15 years where Sony and Microsoft went head to head, each racing each other to bring out the next blockbuster home games console. This started with the Playstation 2 and Xbox in the early 2000s, and went through the PS3 and XboX360, to the PS4 and XBox One in 2013.

Each company would tout the hardware under the hood, with the newest 1.32872 quad-quint-hard-core processors, 16 megaiggaflops of RAM, the newest AMD Ultraxmaxfaxstax graphics cards and other utterly incomprehensible tech. Their ads would ‘throw shade’ at the other company, mocking them to not being able to play the older generation games on the new console, or other such hilarious and calamitous oversights (as if they weren’t deliberate decisions at all).

Who won the console wars? Was it Sony, or Microsoft.

Actually, Nintendo did. There was a reason I mentioned them earlier.

Of the top ten highest consoles of all time, Nintendo has made half of them. They’ve sold over 200 million more units than their next closest competitor. Whilst Sony and Microsoft was talking about the futuristic, sleek, shiny design of their consoles, Nintendo shipped this weird looking hand held thing, which looks like it could have been made in the early 80s:

Eh? See Nintendo didn’t get pulled down into the mud. They didn’t get drawn in to talking about how many cores the processors in the Switch had. They didn’t spend millions of dollars on campaigns saying how their funny-looking little devices were objectively better than the Playstation, or XBox. They simply refused to play the same game as the other two, and still came out on top.

They created something aimed at a younger audience with games that they utterly adored. And it sold. Then they did it again, and again, always starting with their audience and customers, without ever really pausing to look sideways and their competition. I have no idea what the RAM is in a Nintendo DS — I don’t think anyone does either, and yet it’s the second highest selling console of all time. Followed by the Switch, then the Gameboy (my GOAT).

People, too, can be guilty of looking sideways — Instagram is literally fuelled by this very human urge. But this path rarely leads to happy lives, and it also rarely leads to great products and services.

A robust, resilient sense of self cannot come from your competition. We all probably agree with this. But how many of the following are also true:

• On sales calls you find yourself either positioning yourself in regard to competitors ”We’re like X, but for Y”
• You judge the strength of your product in terms of ‘feature parity’ — does it do everything the competition does and more?
• There is constant pressure to add more to your website — more pages, more sectors, more feature information — more, more, more
• Product marketing often involves a huge number of competitor battlecards, or tables comparing yourself to your competition
• A lot of your sales calls involve objection handling against competitors
• Every time a competitor announces something, there’s a frantic series of company wide messages about how to respond
• Meetings are held to plan how to respond to a recent competitor’s feature announcement, or fundraise
• You product roadmap largely consists of things that either competitors already offer

And so, a vicious cycle begins — your audience compares you to competitors, so you compare yourself to them. You spend hours of internal time and resources either looking at, or plotting against, competitors.

At best, it is a distraction. At worst, it actually makes your product or service inferior. Yes, competition can be a good motivating force, but it should not motivate you to copy your competitors — it should motivate you to create better products for your customers. To do this faster, better than them.

Every minute spent talking or thinking about what they might be up to, what they could be plotting, is a minute not spent thinking about your own customers and audience, their needs and wants.

You can also get caught up in a death spiral — assuming that your competition has somehow figured out exactly what the market needs, and replicating that, without pausing to ask if the market does in fact need that thing.

Were people looking for processing power in a games console? Or were they looking for fun?

To find out, you have to go out and speak to them.

Dangerous Identity Mistake 2 — Don’t put your eggs in one basket

Going into the final of the 1950 FIFA World Cup, host nation Brazil were such firm favourites against underdogs Uruguay that Rio’s Mayor had already made 22 gold medals emblazoned with the Brazilian players names, ready to hand out at the close of the match. Local and international newspapers had already been declaring Brazil the victors for days leading up to the match. Everybody wanted to see them win so badly that tens of thousands of people broke into the stadium, with the resulting crowd of up to 220,000 being the largest ever recorded for a football game. All because Brazil were the best, the champions, the top team in the world. Nothing could stand in their way, the final was merely a formality.

At the end of 90 minutes, Brazil, in their all white kit with blue trims, had lost by two goals to one. One journalist described the resulting stunned silence as ‘deeply disturbing’; fights broke out between fans; five of the Brazilian squad never played for Brazil again. The loss was deemed so devastating that the national federation permanently changed the colours of the Brazilian kit (to the yellow we know today).

There is a lesson here for brands.

The best. The cheapest. The fastest. The most powerful. These are concepts that sound and feel both absolute, and measurable. These latter words are ones you will find on a lot of company websites — big claims.

These claims are either measurable, or not. Either way they are damaging.

If they are measurable then it simply becomes a question of measurement (duh). Sometimes this is easy (cheapest). Sometimes this is hard (the most powerful). Either way though, by claiming to be the most X-est available, you actively invite people to measure you against others. Even if you do come out on top, you may not forever, and then when you’re beaten, what are you left with? If you haven’t figured out what else you stand for

If these terms are not measurable (the best computer for what? Excel use?), then the claims are just empty noise. In an attention-starved world, being all style and no substance, or all bark and no bite, might work for a while, but it is not a foundation on which to build something great and long lasting.

The strange thing is, the temptation to do this in marketing doesn’t often extend into our personal lives.

Most of us probably are not the smartest ones in our friendship group. We’re also not the most beautiful, or strongest, or funniest, or even kindest. And yet most of us are okay with that.

Why do we, as individuals, not claim to be the funniest person we know? How do we look at ourselves in the mirror knowing we’re not a chess champion, or polyglot, or world record holder?

For most of us, it’s actually pretty easy. It was never realistic to aim for those things. But, we tell ourselves, what gives us pride is that given our genes and upbringing, we do the best we can, and treat our closest friends and family in a way that we can be proud of, and they love us for it.

With ourselves and each other, we do not look at one specific attribute, or competition, or field of study, and measure our worth by our ability at that one thing. We take a rounded view and mostly think ‘yeah, I’m pretty good at this and this, and I like to think I’m okay with that’.

It’s also easy to spot people who didn’t get this memo. In a recent interview with Steven Bartlett, 26 year old Mr Beast, the biggest YouTuber in the world with a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars said he was largely unhappy. We all know someone that ties their sense of self-worth to something singular and mostly inherently achievable — be that career success, wealth, social media following, talent. We also see that if they get knocked back in that one area, or challenged, the results aren’t usually pretty. It can lead to defensiveness, aggression or worse depression and defeatism.

This is the danger of tying any identity to one (measurable) thing. If you want to be the richest person in the world, then you will probably fail, and even if you do succeed you probably won’t stay there for long. If you want to run the fastest ever mile, even if you do break the record, it will be broken eventually. If you truly believe you are the funniest person in the world, I would hate to be there for you when you meet your comedic match (and I don’t think it would take long to find that match).

Companies fall into this trap all the time.

In the UK, Supermarkets Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s have, for decades, spent millions of advertising pounds putting out ads professing to be the cheapest supermarket in the nation. Sometimes this is just on certain products, sometimes this is on the typical shopping basket of the average consumer, other times they say they’ve won an award for being cheap. And, after all these years, and all that advertising, everyone knows Aldi and Lidl are cheaper. Waitrose and M&S don’t even bother competing, as they are deliberately not fighting that fight.

If you say you’re the cheapest, and tie all of your marketing and branding around that idea, then it’s actually pretty easy to compete with you — simply offer the same thing, but cheaper. And every time that happens, a price war ensues. If your customers only think about you as the cheapest, then when you lose that crown, what reason have they got to still buy from you? But what if its really hard to pin down what your customer love about you (just that they really love you)? How do you compete with that?

Most big brands already know this. Nike, Apple, Patagonia, Volvo. These brands have spent decades avoiding competing on a single stat — price or speed for example — and instead have cultivated a loyal customer base that buy into something more intangible — eco-consciousness, coolness, beauty, safety. This isn’t an accident.

It is both an understanding that competing on one thing can be a relentless and unwinnable arms race, but also more profoundly this is not how most of us make decisions about most things.

It’s rare that we actually ever boil our decision making down to one specific thing. I’m moving house at the moment and the list of things we are taking into consideration is long — location, price, size, neighborhood, transport links, local schools, whether or not it already has a secret staircase activated by pulling a certain book on the shelf.

Almost everything we purchase is the same here — it’s not one thing, it’s everything. All those tiny details, the intangibles, the hard to explain, the flourishes and touches. Even in so-called ‘commoditized’ markets — those in which the economists say consumers cannot tell different goods apart — there is usually one or two ‘premium’ options or slight winners, where the theory says there should be none.

Cravendale sell milk so good the cows want it back. Does it taste better, or last longer? No idea, but I do find myself buying it just after pay day, as a treat. Now consider petrol — surely the commodity to end all commodities. Is it BP, or Esso, or Shell who sells most in the UK? None, it’s Tesco. This is weird if you think of Tesco as a food brand, but makes sense if you think of it as a ‘convenience store you go to at the weekends to get everything you need for the week ahead’.

Cravendale doesn’t sell milk, they sell premium milk. Tesco don’t sell petrol, they sell convenient petrol. The former therefore charges higher prices for the same thing. The latter gobbles up market share from giants who in theory should be able to offer it far cheaper.

Avoiding these mistakes

These seem obvious when pointed out, so why do so many brands fall into this trap?

Competition is a bitch. If the market you’re in is ferocious, then often brands will latch onto something, anything, that makes them stand out. Often this is something that can be quantified and measured.

Being known for something is good. You can’t be known for everything. But the sweet spot for brands is somewhere between a website overstuffed with feature comparisons and a website claiming to hold the crown for one thing.

The answer, I’m afraid, is doing some of the hard yards and speaking to customers. Lot’s of them. And listening not for the obvious, for those small turns of phrase and flippant asides. For example a customer might tell you something like:

“Oh definitely you are competitive on price. That really drew me in. See, the fact you have price caps every month mean I don’t have to worry about going over and getting a nasty surprise at the end of the month. That helps me sleep better at night”

The above feedback starts about price, but by the end is actually far more grounded in emotion — worry, anxiety, and the removal of those negative emotions. That is where great branding lies — being a company that does the work to remove anxiety, to let consumers trust them, to know they have their back.

A very quick process for doing this well might look like this:

1. Interview as many customers as possible, and write down everything they say. I mean everything. Don’t distill things into already known feature requests.
2. Find some commonalities between these interviews, then distil down to a few descriptors
3. Once you have your descriptors, write down the brands view on why those words are meaningful and worth pursuing
4. Rewrite copy, ads, product updates based on these
5. Rinse and repeat, forever

For some final inspiration, take a look at this 2013 video from Apple. This is as good a brand positioning video as any — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kFc5-D4PUs . Not a single product is shown, and yet the whole thing feels very Apple.

If you’re feeling brave, try thinking about the car that your company would make (assuming you’re not working for a car company). Or school, or pen, or computer. If it’s hard to imagine what these would look like, you’ve still got a way to go.