Validate Brand Positioning Before You Invest

You’ve worked hard on your brand positioning. You’ve word smithed it, debated it in meetings, maybe even slept on it. And now you feel good about it.

But is it the right one? Is it going to drive the growth you want? Is this the positioning you want to spend real money behind…developing creative, writing messaging, and buying media?

That’s the question, and it’s a big one. Validating brand positioning before you invest can mean the difference between a confident launch and an expensive guess.

So where do you begin? Not with the positioning itself, but with the foundation underneath it: your consumer target. That’s the one piece worth nailing down and verifying on its own, before you build anything on top of it. Once your target is solid, then you can develop and validate the brand positioning. So, let’s walk through validating both the target and positioning.

Before You Validate Brand Positioning, Check That You Have the Right Consumer Target

You can’t validate a positioning if you’re not sure who it’s for. So, before any of this, make sure you’ve defined and verified your consumer target. You really don’t want to develop a positioning without first knowing who it’s speaking to. If you want to go deeper here, read the blog post on Best Practices for Defining Consumer Targets: Beyond Demographics.

But how do you know you’ve got the right target? It depends on your business objective. Get crystal clear on that first.

Say you want to grow penetration in the category in which you already compete. Your target might be a mirror of your current buyer…someone who looks just like them but doesn’t buy you yet. That only works if there are enough of those non-buyers out there to make the growth worth chasing – that’s the validation, is it big enough?

Or maybe you’re saturated in your category and want to expand into a new one. Now the question changes. What gaps exist in that other category that you could fill? And does your brand have permission to play there? For example, let’s look at Hunt’s. They made tomato sauce for years, then expanded into pasta sauce. It was a natural extension because the brand was already grounded in tomato sauce which is a base for many pasta sauces, so the stretch made sense to the consumer. Whether your brand can stretch like that is something you can test pretty easily with a quick survey or a few consumer interviews.

There are numerous different business objectives you can have which will influence your target choice, but you don’t always need formal consumer testing to pin down your target. However, every target choice deserves deep strategic thought about what you’re trying to achieve and which consumer will get you there.

Start With What Consumers Already Think

Before you can judge where you’re going, you need an honest read on where you are. What do consumers think you stand for right now? This is not just among your current buyers, but among the target you’ve chosen.  It’s also worth looking at those that buy competitive products, whether or not they buy your product.  Once you know that, you can see how far it is to where you want to go. Sometimes that gap is a short hop. Sometimes it’s a canyon. Either way, you want to know before you start building.

There are two ways to get at this, and both are worth doing if you can.

First, ask in an open-ended way what they think you stand for. This is often best done with images rather than words, because images carry personality, tone, and meaning that people struggle to put into sentences. A lot of research vendors run exactly this kind of test, using big banks of images and behavioral science to surface the subconscious associations people have with your brand. You can also go simpler and do it through consumer interviews, using images, words, or both.

Second, put a few positionings in front of consumers and ask which one represents what your brand stands for. You might include your current positioning, the one you’re considering moving toward, and even a competitor’s. There’s no single right set of inputs here. The point is to check whether what consumers think you stand for matches what you think you stand for. Sometimes those two things are further apart than you’d expect.

Here’s why this matters. The size of that gap tells you how much road is ahead. If consumers already see you close to where you want to go, the new positioning may only need a nudge. If they’re far off, you’re looking at a bigger investment to move them. Either way, you now know what you’re signing up for before you spend a dime.

Make Sure to Validate Your Brand Positioning Before You Launch It

Let’s assume you’ve drafted where you want to go. You have a new positioning, and it feels right. Now comes the part many people skip.

Launching a new positioning without validating it first is a gamble, and usually an expensive one. The good news? Validating it doesn’t have to mean a big, pricey research study. It can be fairly simple. But you do need to confirm that this new positioning will be compelling and motivating to your consumer target. Skip that step and you risk pouring resources into something that was never going to work.

You can test this quantitatively built around images and/or text, or a more qualitative approach where you interview a few consumers, again using images and/or text.

Which one you do depends on a few things…how much risk the change carries, how big your brand is, and how dramatic the shift is. If the risk is low, interviewing a handful of consumers can get you a clear read fast. If the stakes are high, or you’re making a major change to how the brand shows up, it’s worth investing in quantitative work to validate the direction with more confidence.

One rule, no matter which method you choose: test against your consumer target. Not a broad general audience. Not a different group that’s easier to recruit. Your target. A positioning that scores beautifully with the wrong people tells you nothing useful.

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Knowing When You’ve Validated Your Brand Positioning

So how do you know when you’re done, and that you’ve got a solid positioning?

A good test answers three questions:

• Do consumers understand the positioning?

• Is it motivating to them?

• Does it make sense for your brand?

When all three are a yes, that’s your signal that you’ve landed it. And if one of them wobbles, you’ve learned something just as valuable…you found the soft spot before your customers, and your budget, did.

Summary: Validate Your Brand Positioning and Move Forward With Confidence

Changing your positioning can unlock real growth. But you want to get there on purpose, pressure testing as you go rather than crossing your fingers at launch.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Always start with your consumer target. It comes before the positioning work, every time. Then come back and check your new positioning against that same target.

• Validation is always worth it before you invest. It doesn’t have to be long or expensive. It just can’t be skipped.

If you’re currently working on positioning, or planning to, do this: write down the single business objective behind your positioning, then write down who, exactly, you need to convince. If you can’t name that person clearly, that’s where to start. If you’ve got that nailed and you feel good about your brand positioning, check it with your consumer target before you invest resources.