Leveraging Brand Strengths for Unique Market Positioning

So whatever your mission is, it should ultimately reflect your brand's strengths, what you do best, and what unique knowledge, talent, or resources your brand has. And you're doing this as an individual, say, a content creator, well, what content do you do? Are you best at creating? Are you funny? Are you knowledgeable? What is it that makes you unique? What advantages do you have? Your image should reflect your advantages because if you could just do it as well as everyone else, then what reasons should someone go with you as opposed to the next guy, right? So you want to focus on advantages, things that you can provide that others can't. Warby Parker, I can provide designer glasses as well.

Plenty of other people can, brands can do that, but at revolutionary prices. I have some advantage in my sourcing or something that has enabled me to do that. And speaking about price advantages or advantage, if you look back in time to the 1980s, where you had Walmart, Walmart was a general, you know, store type of retailer, you know, providing goods across many, many different categories.

And they went from being an Arkansas-based chain to dominating the U.S. and then the rest, you know, other parts of the world by underselling in terms of pricing. They would move into a particular area and soon, or what we would say, the mom and pop stores in that area would have to go out of business because they couldn't compete with Walmart's pricing strategy, right? They could underprice that. And why could they do that? As they gain economies of scale, they could purchase in higher quantities than their competitors and, in doing so, pay lower costs and other cost advantages that were part of their business process, which eventually became the dominant brand in that category.

And we, you know, in that same approach they use was then followed by the Home Depots, Staples and Circus Cities of the world, right? And pushing a lot of small brands out of business. Ironically, eventually many of these brands were pushed out, not Walmart, but other brands were pushed out by the e-retailers, right, that would come around later. But in the 80s and 90s, these brands saw tremendous growth because they were able to offer price advantages that others could not match.

That was their secret sauce, right? So you want your strength to reflect something you do well, right? And just so we understand the origins of this type of analysis, it's a part of what is known as a SWOT analysis, which is a very traditional marketing approach predating digital marketing back to the early days of marketing strategy and activities, where you categorize your company by its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So the first two, each quadrant is like four quadrants, and you say you have the strengths, you have the weaknesses. So the first two quadrants are internally focused, right, looking inward and seeing your strengths and weaknesses.

And the next two are outwardly focused. What are the opportunities on the outside? What are the threats on the outside, right? And so this is looking just specifically at the strengths. Ideally, if you do the full SWOT analysis, you want the strengths to, you want to match your strengths with opportunities that exist, right? So if you're at Walmart in the 1980s, late 70s, when they were starting to do this rapid growth, their strengths were that they could provide lower costs.

And as long as there were others, there was an opportunity to do that because there were other competitors that were able to do that, or then they were going to be able to capitalize on that opportunity. So you want your strength to match the opportunity. Consumers wanted lower costs, and they were able to provide it, right? The other consideration that you have is what do other people say you do well? You may have your own sense of what you as a brand do well, but is that validated, right? What do other people say? What's a great place to look for that type of information? How about reviews, right? Customer reviews.

Customers will tell you when they give you five stars, when they give you four stars, they'll tell you why. And what they're telling you is your strengths, right? And when they give you one star or two stars, they'll also tell you. And what they're telling you, particularly if a pattern shows, the pattern of comments relating to this particular complaint or a pattern of comments relating to a reason why they like you, well, then that shows you that this is, you know, if it's a pattern of negativity, well, then this is something that we don't do well, right? And you don't want that to reflect in your strength.

You want to fix that before you can reflect on it. If your brand does not do customer service well and customers consistently tell you that, well, you don't have a messaging and an image that is reflected by your messaging stating how wonderful your customer service is because you're creating unrealistic expectations. If they picked you because they had that expectation and you don't meet it, you're going to lose that customer for sure, right? This is the reason why they picked you.

You could not live up to that, right? Once you know what your strengths are, your images, right? That becomes your image. And once you know what your image is, you then have to determine what your brand voice is going to be. That brand voice is going to reflect your image.

So we're going to pause right now, and we'll come back. We'll talk about your brand voice. And when we talk about a brand voice, we also need to identify our audience because the brand voice is going to be relevant to the audience.

Depending on the audience, we might have a different brand voice, but we'll get into more details about what a brand voice is, and then what a targeted audience is, how you begin to understand information, or where you glean information about your targeted audience, and begin to develop that targeted audience in the next section.