Strong Brand Positioning Examples: What They Can Teach You
- May 5
- 6 min read
Updated: May 7
Good positioning is one of those things that sounds simple until you try to do it. It’s not a tagline. It’s not a logo refresh. It’s the strategic decision about what your brand stands for, who it’s for, and why a consumer should choose it over everything else on the shelf. Get it right and it does a lot of heavy lifting by guiding your messaging, your pricing, your new product decisions, and your marketing spend. Get it wrong, or let it drift, and even the best execution falls flat.
The best way to understand what strong positioning looks like in practice is to see it. So, let’s look at two very different brands that got it very right: Dove Beauty and Liquid Death. They couldn’t be more different in category, tone, or audience. But both are strong brand positioning examples that hold up across every touchpoint and have the business results to prove it.
Dove Beauty: A Strong Brand Positioning Example Rooted in Consumer Insight
Background
Dove is a personal care brand that has been around since the 1950s. For decades it was known for its mild soap and moisturizing claims which are solid and functional but not particularly exciting. By the early 2000s, the beauty category was saturated and competitive, dominated by aspirational advertising that featured models with flawless skin and idealized bodies. Dove was swimming in that same sea and not making much of a splash.
What They Did
In 2004, Dove made a bold move and launched the Campaign for Real Beauty: replacing models with real women of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ages, not aspirational or idealized but genuinely real. It was a complete departure from what every competitor was doing, and it landed hard. Sales increased 10% in the first year alone.1
The positioning Dove staked out wasn’t about soap or moisturizer. It was emotional: we believe all women are beautiful. That’s a benefit that has nothing to do with what the product technically does and everything to do with how it makes you feel. Benefits can be very functional or very emotional. Dove bet on emotional, and it paid off because it was both meaningfully different from the competition and deeply relevant to their consumer.
How They Figured It Out: Research First
Dove didn’t just dream this up in a conference room. They invested seriously in understanding their consumer before making a bold positioning decision.
The foundation was a global study of 3,200 women across ten countries that examined how women perceived beauty and how they felt about themselves. The findings were striking: very few women described themselves as beautiful, and most felt the beauty industry’s standards were unachievable and left them feeling worse, not better. That insight — real, specific, and consumer-driven — became the foundation for the entire campaign.2
And they didn’t stop there. Dove commissioned three additional studies over the following four years to deepen their understanding and keep the positioning grounded in what consumers believed, digging in until they were clear on what their consumer was experiencing and could build something that genuinely answered it.
That’s the part that tends to get left out of the Dove story. Everyone knows the campaign. Fewer people know that serious consumer research made it possible.
Twenty Years Later, Still Going Strong
Here’s what makes Dove a particularly instructive strong brand positioning example: consistency. After twenty years the positioning still hasn’t changed. It’s evolved, but it hasn’t wandered. In 2024, Dove commissioned its biggest study yet to understand how beauty impacts women and girls today and found a new threat on the horizon: AI-generated imagery creating yet another wave of unattainable beauty standards. Their response? A public commitment to never use AI-generated content to represent real women in their advertising.
Same positioning, new chapter, and that’s exactly what brand longevity looks like.
What made Dove’s positioning so strong? They chose a benefit that was deeply meaningful to their consumer, an emotional one that worked better than a functional one. And it was backed with real consumer research rather than assumption. Then they stayed consistent with it for two decades, keeping it differentiated from competition and incredibly recognizable only as Dove Beauty.
Liquid Death: A Strong Brand Positioning Example That Disrupted a Saturated Category
Background
Liquid Death is canned water. That’s it. Water. Launched in 2019, it’s now valued at over $1.4 billion. If you’ve seen it, you don’t forget it because it looks absolutely nothing like water. The aluminum cans feature heavy metal-inspired graphics, skull imagery, and the tagline “Murder Your Thirst.”
But the brand didn’t come out of thin air — it came out of an insight. The founder noticed something while at live music events: performers on stage were refilling energy drink cans with water because the energy drink brands were sponsoring the shows, but what the performers really wanted was simple, hydrating water. That observation — informal, first-hand, and specific — revealed a real consumer tension: the desire to drink healthily but with the cool tone and branding of energy drinks. That insight became the foundation for the entire brand.
Disrupting a Category That Looked Full
The bottled water category was, and is, extremely saturated, with clean packaging, nature imagery, and wellness cues as far as the eye can see, every brand playing roughly the same game.
Liquid Death looked at that category and went in the exact opposite direction, not a little different, but completely, deliberately, outrageously different. And while their research wasn't a formal research study, nothing like what Dove commissioned, it was genuine observational research that led to a rich insight.
Their point of difference, then, was to borrow the marketing and branding cues from the unhealthiest categories imaginable — beer, fast food, candy, junk food — and apply them to a product that’s healthy. The founder has said they chose that approach because it was the funniest and the coolest. It also happened to be completely ownable. No other water brand could go there credibly. Liquid Death planted a flag and owned it from day one.
Packaging That Earns Its Shelf Space
Positioning only works if every touchpoint reflects it. Liquid Death nailed this. The aluminum can format alone set them apart and no other water brand was using it. Combined with the heavy metal graphics, the packaging doesn’t just stand out on shelf, it communicates the entire brand world in about two seconds. You know exactly what this brand is about before you’ve read a single word. That’s positioning doing its job.
Innovation That Stays On-Brand
Strong positioning also guides what you build next. Liquid Death has since launched new products including Killer Cola, a cola that’s significantly healthier than traditional sodas. Same attitude, same visual world, same “murder thirst” positioning. Completely on-brand. That’s not a coincidence, it’s the natural result of having clear positioning as a filter for every business decision. When you know what you stand for, you know what fits and what doesn’t.
What makes Liquid Death such a strong positioning example is how completely it lives across every element of the brand — the package format, the graphics, the marketing communication, and the innovation pipeline all speak the same language. There’s no disconnect between what they say they stand for and what you experience when you pick one up.
What These Strong Brand Positioning Examples Have in Common
Two wildly different brands and two very different categories. But look at what they share:
They made a clear, differentiated choice. Neither brand tried to appeal to everyone. Dove said: we stand for real beauty, and that will put us at odds with most of what the industry is doing. Liquid Death said: we’re going to look like a heavy metal band, and that will be weird to a lot of people. Both made the choice and went all-in.
They chose a benefit that was genuinely compelling to their consumer. Dove’s benefit is emotional: the feeling of being seen and accepted as you are. Liquid Death’s is more functional: quench your thirst, but their reason to believe is delivered in a way that is completely different through their tone and personality. Different types of benefits entirely, but both brands deliver them with a point of view that’s distinctly their own, and that’s what gives each positioning its staying power.
They backed their positioning with consumer understanding. Dove invested in in-depth research before making a bold bet. They didn’t hope the insight was there. They found it, confirmed it, and built on it. Liquid Death’s insight came from direct observation: the founder watched performers at live shows secretly drink water from energy drink cans and recognized the consumer tension hiding in plain sight. Different research approaches, same discipline — understand your consumer before you build.
They stayed consistent. Positioning isn’t something you change annually. Both brands made a call and held the line across marketing, pricing, packaging, and new product development for years. Consistency is what makes positioning compound.
It’s worth asking how well your own positioning holds up across every touchpoint. Is it showing up consistently in your packaging, your messaging, your pricing, and your innovation pipeline, or does it live only in a deck somewhere, disconnected from the day-to-day decisions your team is making?
1 Strixus. Dove Campaign for Real Beauty sales results.
2 Morel, Lindsey. “The Effectiveness of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty in Terms of Society and the Brand.” 2009.
