Positioning and branding: how to set yourself for success

Here’s a situation: you have a hiking trip planned with your friends next month, and you’ve just realized there’s no clothing in your wardrobe that could fit the occasion. The moment you have this thought, your mind immediately pulls up a variety of images.

You might recall something you used to wear, as well as items you’ve seen in ads. Some are from mass market brands, some are premium, and some might be luxury. Images from ads, taglines, or store displays may come to your mind. Even without specific memories, you still sense how the brand might fit you.

Oftentimes, we know the answers without any intentional thinking. This is due to “matchmaking” between our identity and different brands — the process we continuously perform in the background mode. As a result, when we find ourselves think specifically about any brand or product, it means the subject of our thoughts had already passed the “first filter”.

Most creators and sellers struggle with understanding and articulation of what’s happening when their audience make purchase decisions, not to mention leveraging it in their brand strategy.

In this piece, we’ll cover the essential positioning and messaging work that will help you see clearer how customers make purchase decisions and increase successful matches with your audience.

How we choose brands

Likely, you’ve read or heard from experts across the board that a strong brand is a premise of a successful business. We’d say it depends on what “successful” means to you. In our terminology, it’s about having a growing clientele that repeatedly purchases from you because they trust you and feel that your brand is the right fit for them.
To get there, you first need to understand how buyers make purchase decisions.

There are some practical considerations, such as:

• Does brand A have anything that can help me with my goal B? (When we’re not sure what will do the job for us).
• Does brand A have a certain type of product? (When we’re already looking at a specific type of solution).
• Does the price fit my budget?
• Does the particular product meet my functional and aesthetic expectations?

All of the above is important and often influences what we end up buying. Yet, it’s a rare case to make purchase decisions based on pure practicalities.
When it comes to connecting with people, we might sense what kind of a person is in front of us before having a conversation. Therefore, if you want to make a great impression, you’d likely care about multiple elements: how you look, what you say, your tone of voice, what your face impressions and bodily movements show, and so on.

Same goes for establishing relationships with brands — you need to care about solving particular problems and gaining specific outcomes, while also making customers feel secure and confident in their decision, along with a bunch of emotions and feelings they attach to your product.
What brings all this into one system is the work on brand experience.

💡 A powerful brand strategy is always rooted in a combination of brand experiences that speak to what matters to the audience now, while enabling them to feel, think, and act so they get closer to their goals — in both perceived and objective ways.

The key to creating a relevant brand experience lies in targeting:

• The right audience
• With a relevant offering
• At the right time
• In a way that resonates emotionally

It’s not a one-time activity — once you know your market positioning and have mapped journeys of your customers, you’d start consistently reinforcing your brand expression across all interactions with leads and customers.
After you get the full picture first time, next thing you need is a commitment to maintaining consistency and pursuing continuous improvement, which will eventually yield you a sound and solid brand reputation.
And, boy, it’s difficult. It really is. Just not as difficult as we tend to think.
As soon as you see the logics behind branding and positioning, it will lose the charm of something either unattainable or too far away to think about it.

Positioning

The first layer of this work is positioning. You need to have clarity on the value you deliver and how it differentiates you from the rest before you think about design or brand messaging. Otherwise, you risk investing in a “nice package” without understanding what’s in it.

Before we get into it, let’s avoid any possible misinterpretations around terms. If you’ve ever looked up positioning, you might know that there’s a bunch of associated terms — some people call it brand positioning, others say business, and some use product positioning. These may sound interchangeable but they aren’t.
Each refers to a different type of work. You start with the foundation, which is your business positioning. Then, if you offer more than one product category, targeting different audiences, you would need to develop a product positioning for each category separately, while connecting them back to your core business positioning.

For instance, you might run an online store that sells physical apparel, and you might also have digital clothing for virtual avatars. Each of these two product categories would require its own positioning work. Target audience, competition, and your differentiation — all will be different.

As for brand positioning, although some experts use it, we deem it confusing. There’s no brand positioning on its own as brand development comes after you define how your foundation is set — which is your business and product positioning. The same goes for any changes — you can’t shift your positioning only at the brand level because it would involve also the essence of your offer, not only how you communicate that.
Instead, we use the term “brand identity”, which includes brand character, story, voice & tones, and design — all rooted in your business positioning.

Now, let’s mention one more thing for the sake of clarity: the right market positioning defines how your business is the best choice for a specific audience, while brand design and messaging help communicate it to customers in the most relatable and authentic way.

Below, we describe steps toward the creation of a sustainable brand identity, starting with foundations of positioning.

Your people

Your product might work for different people in different situations. Yet, it’s critical to define where it suits the best. Based on you understanding of this segment, you will then make all key decisions about selling and marketing your offering. Otherwise, if you rely on the average of all people that have bought from you, it’d be extremely hard to define and communicate your differentiation.

When launching a product, we begin by understanding desired outcomes, challenges, and behaviours in the market to define those we can address in the best possible way. From there, we determine the target audience that prioritizes those outcomes, experiences challenges, and manifests those behaviors.
If your product is already selling, you might have done this step — so your task now is to refine the full picture of your audience.

Here are questions to define your best-fit customers:

• Who brings you most profit?
• Who makes the most sense relative to your growth plans?

Then, get to learn them:

• Their emotional and rational needs: What do they want to achieve with your product? How do they want to feel? How much effort are they willing to make? What risks do they associate with the purchase?
• Their current behavior: How does your product fit into their daily life? What other options do they consider to achieve the same outcome?

💡Make sure to focus on the segment of your audience where the mutual benefit is the highest. Pay attention to those who align best with you in all areas — profit, brand values, and long-term vision.

The market you’re in

To build a strong differentiation, start with defining all alternatives your customers might turn to in order to reach desired outcomes. For instance, if you’re selling hiking clothing, the alternatives might include specialized stores with hiking gear (your direct competitors); the ones that sell various sportswear; mass market brands that sell everything, including a few sport items; thrift stores; hiking groups where people can find used gear; a friend willing to lend you a thing for a single use, etc.
The cornerstone here is to look beyond direct competitors and consider the full range of possibilities your customers could explore. When you have the full picture, you can come up with the offering that will cover more needs and desires — and, therefore, will differentiate you among others way better.

💡Finally, don’t guess. Googling or using AI-based search is great but it won’t give you a realistic view at the space of your customers’ alternatives. So, ask. Reach out to your best-fit customers, offer an incentive if needed, and find out how they see their choices.

Why choose you

Now, you need to identify why your customers should buy from you. If you have never worked on this specifically or haven’t revised how you communicate it for a while, the next best time is now.

Why? First of all, you probably work in a crowded market, which means that it’s easy to get lost among numerous brands, which are also trying to get attention of your potential customers. Secondly — and this works for any market — if you don’t clearly explain why someone should choose you, your audience will fill in the gaps themselves. What they come up with is often far enough from what you actually offer, which means the higher probability of losing potential clients and referrals because of misunderstanding.
Start with the right focus: look for aspects of your offer that can set you apart from the alternatives in ways that matter most to your customers.

This is where you will find them:

• Core offer — Which outcomes do you help achieve, and what challenges do you help overcome? How do your products, services, and communications contribute to this?
• Relevance — How do your offerings align with your audience’s current needs and lifestyle? How do they fit within their cultural context?
• Self-perception — How does your brand make them feel about themselves? How would they look in the eyes of their colleagues, friends, family?
• Risk aversion — What would make them secure about choosing your offering?
• ”What-if” guarantees — How do you make sure they won’t experience losses if anything goes wrong within your area of responsibility?

💡 To sum this up, your differentiation comes from how well you help customers reach their goals, how your product fits into their life, and how it aligns with their self-image. Even the most outstanding design can’t differentiate you on its own, but if it reflects your brand’s essence and communicates your narrative, it becomes part of what sets you apart.

Creating brand identity

Despite common belief, the creation of a brand identity isn’t solely about visuals — it’s the unique way your positioning turns into something people can see, hear, and feel — and, of course, relate to. Design is important, yet it’s one of the pieces.

Below is an overview of the entire brand identity puzzle:

• Brand character — If your brand were a person, what kind of person would it be? What kind of personality would it have?
• Brand story — Your perspective on the market, why you exist, and what drives you. A strong story connects your brand values, your business philosophy, and the actual product or service you offer.
• Brand voice and tones — Before defining visuals, you need to define how your brand sounds. This sets expectations for how you communicate in different contexts — whether it’s a sales page, social media post, or customer support email.
• Visual identity — This is the design part that includes logos, fonts, colours, imagery, and overall style. When done right, these elements don’t just look good — they reinforce your differentiation, making the brand authentic, memorable, and relatable.

💡 Visual identity design and brand messaging can only work when they’re treated as one, not as separate pieces. To reinforce that approach internally, some businesses describe both branding and messaging guidelines in one document, serving as an ultimate source on all-things-brand. In our agency work, we also recommed this approach and leverage it in cases where it can add value for our clients in the long run.

Insights into the Patagonia brand

Branding and positioning work would differ across niches. In fashion industry, we can see that the most successful brands have managed to build a strong emotional connection with their audience as a result of continuous delivery on their promise and regular reinforcement of their global impact. Let’s look into a great example of such a brand.
Patagonia is an American company that provides gear for outdoors. What stand out about it are their outstanding reputation and a wholesome brand that feels like a living thing, whose underlying philosophy is woven into everything they say and do.
When you search for Patagonia, you may see phrases like “Patagonia is a designer of outdoor clothing and gear for the silent sports: climbing, surfing, skiing and snowboarding, fly fishing, and trail running” — this is one part of their positioning. At the same time, you might come across messages like “Earth is now our only shareholder” — another layer of their positioning, which highlights their mission.

When you go to their website, you see how Patagonia categorizes their offer. It’s not built around product types, but around activities: fly fishing, climbing, surfing, and more. They add emotional videos and images, showing how people live outdoor experiences. Altogether, they make it clear who they are speaking to.

Then, they go further and show what they’re driven by — securing the planet and promoting a sustainable lifestyle. You’ll find this in different parts of the website: in the “Culture” and “Planet” sections, as well as in numerous other messages across their website. This way, they add depth to their brand messaging, saying: “Our customer is also a person who profoundly cares about the planet.”

Finally, all comes together in a statement that reflects both — their positioning and their brand identity:

Patagonia supports and reinforces this message in multiple ways: showing and describing how their gear is made in videos and articles, encouraging to join their mission, and finally inviting everyone to apply it to everyday choices. This creates a network effect — when someone wears Patagonia, they send a signal to everyone else: “I stand for a sustainable lifestyle”.
This way, choosing the brand becomes a way to express own values and communicate them to the world.

Mapping out brand experience

Every interaction — whether it’s your website, Google ads, product packaging, or a customer support response — shapes how people experience your brand.
If you want to effectively guide people to purchase and turn them into repeat customers, you need to thoroughly plan the brand experience based on your customers’ needs and desires at each step, as well as how those needs evolve. And it starts with taking an extra mile toward understanding your audience.
That said, for every stage of your customer journey, starting from the point where they’re just about to meet you to the point where they are already a regular customer, you need clarity on:

• When and where your audience is more open to see and hear from you.
• What they want to accomplish and feel.

Based on the findings, you can then define:

• Channels where they will first hear about you and those you’ll use to communicate with them further (social media, word-of-mouth, paid ads).
• How and where you will support their evaluation process (retargeting, website content, case studies).
• Where and how you can do more to convince them to buy (testimonials, guarantees, upfront incentives).
• How you will keep them engaged after purchase (onboarding, email follow-ups, community engagement).

💡Consistency matters. If your ads say one thing while your website states something different, you create confusion — and it kills conversions more than anything else.

Aligning brand messaging

Let’s assume you know your customer journeys and you’re working on the messaging for a specific touchpoint — for instance, your website. The overarching goal would be to encourage them to think, feel, and act in a certain way.
Now, let’s remind you that, at each stage of the customer journey, your potential or active customers would have different needs and feelings.

For instance:

• If someone isn’t even thinking about the outcome you target, messaging should focus on educating and reframing their perspective.
• If they’re actively comparing options, they need clarity on what sets you apart.
• If they’re close to buying, they need confidence and reassurance.

On balancing familiarity with authenticity

Your brand messaging should grasp attention because it feels natural and drives curiosity. The best way to start is to find out how you can make yourself familiar — and then move to uniqueness. Oftentimes, businesses do it in reverse, underestimating the difficulty behind the first part, and end up achieving none of those.

Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer behind Coca-Cola’s iconic bottle shape and modern US trains, came up with the concept of MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable). He found that while people say they love novelty, in every new product, they tend to seek what’s familiar. Think of it as an anchor that helps people connect new ideas with what they already know.

One of the great examples of MAYA in action comes from Spotify. Their famous Discover Weekly playlist was initially meant to recommend completely new songs. Due to a bug, new songs got mixed up with familiar ones. Spotify figured it out and fixed the bug — and the user engagement significantly dropped.
They did more tests and realized that, indeed, people preferred discovering new music when it’s blended with songs they already know.
Check out if you want to hear more about MAYA.

To create familiarity, you need first-hand information from your customers, including language your audience use and visuals they tend to see from a range of sources. You can turn to such sources as:

• Direct interactions — like customer support chats & user interviews.
• Different media — articles in niche media, forums like Reddit, social media like Instagram, Facebook, or Linkedin, visual discovery platforms like Pinterest.
• Competitors (especially those who’ve been around for a while) — to understand industry practices.

💡A great way to structure this is to keep a dictionary of key phrases that your audience naturally uses. Then, you can play around with that and balance what’s familiar to them with unique elements.

Optimizing for efficiency and quality

For this to work, your entire company needs to be aligned — starting with marketing, sales, delivery, and customer support. It’s not some corporate-world strategy asset people create for the sake of checking the box. It can actually fix numerous problems across your funnel. Because most of them come from gaps in internal understanding, insufficient collaboration, and lack of discipline.

The magic wand here is the document. Not just a document, though, but the one that serves as a single source of truth for everyone communicating about your offerings to the outside world. This would be your brand messaging guidelines.

What should be in it?

• Positioning — Who you serve, how you stand out, and why it matters.
• Brand identity — Character, story, tone of voice, and visuals that define how you show up.
• Customer journey — Key touchpoints between you and your customers and what happens at each of those as they proceed to reaching their goal.
• Brand voice and tonalities — How your brand sounds and how communication should be adapted in different contexts.
• Messaging snippets — Examples of copy and visuals showing how messaging should be used at different stages of the customer journey and across different teams.

In this article, you’ve already read about each of the above. So it should be easy, right?
Sure — if you’re thinking the documentation part. At the same time, it’s not enough. It needs to be the one and only go-to place to turn to for any communications-related task.

To make brand messaging guidelines work across teams, you’d also need to describe and continuously stick to rules for using and changing it:

• Everyone follows it unless there’s a big change.
• There’s a clear process for updates. So if something changes, updates in messaging would get into use only after everyone is on the same page.
• It’s reviewed regularly to keep marketing, sales, delivery, and customer support aligned.

Creating messaging consistency in practice

Now, imagine you’re running a hiking gear business. You have an online store, and you’ve decided to improve its design and copy to increase conversions and repeat purchases.
Let’s assume the structure of your ecommerce website includes a homepage with the seasonal highlights, separate pages for each clothing item, and a “fitting room” section where you publish recommendations on how to combine clothing.

For the sake of focus, we’ll look into how you attract new audience and won’t go into retention of existing customers:

Homepage

If you have a relatively new brand in fashion and you’re working on your customer acquisition strategy, you might choose advertising as one of the key channels. In this case, most people would likely get to your homepage from search ads after using either general requests, like “hiking clothing,” or more specific ones, like “patagonia hiking shoes women waterproof”.
They may also find you when they ask AI to gather information and recommend suitable brands. Besides, you might use affiliate marketing — for example, you can partner with a travel agency brand. They could write an article listing “11 best hiking brands” and mention yours in the list. Then, someone researching the space might read the piece, get curious, click the link, and land on your homepage.

Example of brand messaging:

• Patagonia is mentioned across multiple articles and listings named like “great outdoor brands”. The brand is usually described with consistent accents, for instance: “Well-built, stylish, and functional designs with a strong focus on sustainability”.
• When Patagonia pops up in search, you would see concise and purposeful messages, such as: “Shop durable outdoor clothing and gear for men, women, kids and babies at Patagonia.com. 1% for the Planet”.
• On the website, they say: “We design our durable clothing and outdoor gear for everyday use, from lounge-worthy T-shirts to warm, climbing-specific jackets to go-anywhere pants, all backed by our guarantee.”

Product pages

If you use shopping ads, each product page can be your active selling point. The audience that is searching for a specific type of hiking clothing will see your product card showing up among other options. Besides, you can use affiliate content to market specific products as well. For instance, an influencer can post about “9 trends for your next hiking trip this spring,” featuring products that align with a particular trend — including yours.

Example of brand messaging:

• On the website’s product pages, Patagonia shows picture and videos of each clothing item. They also have clear descriptions — only key information — and highlight Patagonia’s approach: “Built for years, not seasons. Easy returns & repairs. We guarantee everything we make. We’re in business to save our home planet”.

Articles

These would likely focus on people earlier in the journey. Just like in cases with affiliate pieces, but with the difference that you’ll be speaking directly to that audience. They’re not looking for anything specific yet — they’re trying to understand what types of clothing might work for their hiking plans. Maybe they Google or ask ChatGPT for advice, and your article on how to combine layers for cold-weather hikes shows up. To increase this likelyhood, you might use SEO approaches when creating such articles.

Example of brand messaging:

• Patagonia writes on practical topics, such as “How to layer for cold weather”, and creates pieces about adventurers, such as “Riding out the storm”.

To sum it up — we can see that different parts of the website address different stages of the customer journey. The person who is reading about layering clothing for cold weather has different priorities compared to someone searching “patagonia hiking shoes women waterproof.” If you understand these differences well enough, you can find ways to communicate differentiation accordingly in each touchpoint — including your website.

Conclusion

Businesses that have managed to build thriving brands didn’t make it because of nice logos and taglines. First, they figured out how to fit in and continuously make lives of their customers better. Then, the design joined and served as a powerful tool to reflect their deep understanding of their audience and better communicate with them on emotional and rational levels.

Here are a few more highlights from the article you’ve just read:

• Understanding your market positioning is a must if you want to address the right audience with an offer that clearly differentiates you from all alternatives and addresses what’s relevant for your customers.
• Consistent brand experience is a key component of any successful brand strategy — it helps you communicate in the right place and the right time that you’re their best choice, while considering what matters to your audience at each touchpoint.
• On-brand design and communications make sure your audience understands the value of your products and connects with your brand.
• Brand messaging guidelines allow you to save time and avoid broken funnels, caused by misalignments in your communication across teams and respective channels.

None of this is a one-time task — it’s an ongoing process toward building a notable brand identity with strong reputation. To do so, you need to continuously learn, improve, and align — across people inside your company and in every touchpoint where your brand meets your audience.

Bonus tip:
All descriptions of your brand identity, including brand character and story, should come from your values, beliefs, and vision. Sure, it should align with your positioning, but if the later comes in conflict with the core, it has low chances of success in the long run.
So if you haven’t done this yet, start now: describe your mission, vision, and brand values. Work on this with your team, do as many iterations as needed until everyone feels good about it. Make sure that your everyday company’s work reflect the brand values and mission you identified. After that, comes the rest: brand character, story, brand voice and tonalities, and visual identity. These elements will only work if they reflect who you really are as a business.
That’s how you lay a foundation for a wholesome and trustworthy brand that is here for a long run.

Our agency helps brands come to life by working from the ground up — from defining market positioning, adjusting messaging, and designing visual identity to creating websites and ecommerce stores that align with who they are.
Around 70% of our clients found positioning so difficult that they kept postponing it so it ended up blocking their growth for a while. Yet, even more clients seem to struggle with the amount of time and money they put into creating and fixing messaging — and it doesn’t bring nearly enough ROI.
If you’re facing similar challenges with brand growth or struggling to see marketing and branding ROI, let’s let’s discuss how we can help clarify your positioning, strengthen your brand messaging, and design visuals that effectively reflect your brand.

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