Brand Positioning

Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the advertising that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise. To succeed in our over-communicated society, a company must create a position in the prospect’s mind. A position that considers not only its strength and weaknesses but also those of its competitors.

– Jack Trout and Al Ries, in their article, The Positioning Era Cometh, The Advertising Age, April 24, 1972

Jack Trout and Al Ries coined the word Positioning. They mentioned it for the first time in their 1969 article titled Positioning is the game people play in today’s me-too marketplace in Industrial Marketing.

In 1971, David Ogilvy, one of the founding fathers of modern advertising, pointed out that our campaigns’ results depend less on how we write our advertising than on how a product is positioned. Thus, the 1970s ushered in a new era in marketing— The Era of Positioning. Accurate Positioning has become the most important step in effective marketing.

Later, the positioning pioneers Jack Trout and Al Ries wrote a highly influential article highlighting the positioning concept, The Positioning Era Cometh in the Advertising Age, on April 24, 1972. They wrote:

Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the advertising that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise. To succeed in our over- communicated society, a company must create a position in the prospect’s mind. A position that considers not only its strength and weaknesses but also those of its competitors.

A few years later, in 1981, they published the first book on Positioning, Positioning: The Battle for your mind, which sold over three million copies worldwide.

Evolution of the Positioning Concept

1. USP (Unique Selling Proposition) concept popularized by Rosser Reeves originated in the ’40s. However, USP did not consider the competition.

2. The next big Idea: David Ogilvy’s Brand Image as opposed to the actual product difference (as in the USP), came later.

3. Jack Trout and Al Ries came up with the next big idea of Brand Perception and Positioning , taking marketing to the next level in the late ’60s.

It’s All About Perception!

Marco De Veglia wrote about an interview he had with Jack Trout recently in his book, Brand Positioning Formula. So, here is the latest take of Jack Trout on positioning according to that interview: The world was getting more competitive, and in the world of competition, it is all about perception. You win or lose in the mind of your prospect, building perceptions. So, it is not a question of reality as much as perception. And that makes perception a reality that makes marketing more of a perception game. So, that is how the concept of positioning your brand in the customer’s mind is born.

So, Positioning is the process of establishing a product, person, event, company, or even an object in the minds of the members of a target market in such a way that it is perceived to answer the needs of that market better than the competition does. Positioning thus refers to the identification and communication of a differential advantage.

Profitable Positioning is a strategy for creating a unique product image, which increases total profits. Firms planning modifications of existing products or introducing new products will naturally, in keeping with their marketing objectives, strive to position their products’ entry to produce maximum sales and profits.

Product positioning is a concept borrowed from military strategy. We can find the earliest known writings about positioning in military strategy in the writings of a Chinese general, Sun Tzu, a contemporary of Confucius, the famous Chinese philosopher. In his classic work, The art of War, Sun Tzu, the master strategist he was, discussed the importance of positioning in the military strategy context— troop disposition, ground, terrain, relative strength of opposing forces, and the mental attitudes of the opposition. His primary target was the mind of the opposing commander. These concepts are very much relevant in the present-day marketing context.

What is A Brand?

Before we get to how to position a brand in the minds of consumers, let us have a common definition of what a brand is, as there are many definitions of what a brand is. Four experts define brands as :

A brand is the intangible sum of a product’s attributes. (David Ogilvy)

A brand is the set of assets and liabilities linked to a brand’s name and symbol that adds or subtracts from the value a product or service provides to a firm or that firm’s customer. (David Aaker)

A brand is a set of expectations, memories, and relationships that are taken together to choose one product or service over another. (Seth Godin)

Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room. (Jeff Bezos)

While all these are great definitions from experts in the field, they are not actionable. They do not tell you how to create a brand. So, here is a more actionable definition: A brand is the sum of all associations consumers have about your offering. Those associations form the brand image, which, together with the brand’s awareness (unaided) levels, form your brand’s equity.

Brand Associations

How do you know what associations consumers have with your brand? First, ask them what comes to mind when they think of your brand and you have your brand associations.

Brand associations are images and symbols associated with a brand or a brand benefit. At the same time, brand associations are not reasons-to-buy but can create a differentiation based on a brand’s perceived qualities that are not replicable. Brand associations are the attributes that come to the consumer’s mind when discussing the brand. They help consumers recognize the brand within its category because the consumer relates the brand’s association to the explicit and implicit meanings. Here are some factors that help form brand associations:

•Customers coming into contact with the organization, its products, and employees

•Word-of-mouth publicity

•Quality of the product

•Advertisements

•Product class or category to which the brand belongs

•Price at which the brand is sold

•Celebrity endorsements

Consumers develop positive brand associations if their experiences are positive with brand communication and the values that the brand stands for align with theirs.

Since brand associations are the thoughts that enter a consumer’s mind when they think about a brand, marketers are continuously striving to create a mental connection a consumer makes between a brand and some other factor, such as a concept, person, interest, experience, emotion, activity, or image.

Consumers will automatically form associations with your brand, whether you want that association or not, and whether you manage them. Consumers will automatically put your brand into mental categories and associate specific meanings with it based on their experiences, knowledge, belief systems, values, and what they hear from others (word of mouth), including their friends, family, peers, or the media. Therefore, you must proactively create positive associations for your brand to differentiate it so it can stand out from the crowd.

How to create a favorable and memorable brand association? The three fundamental elements of building brand associations are visuals, language, and personification.

Brand Personification

Brand personification is a projective technique where you ask people to think about brands as if they were people and to describe how the brands would think and feel. You start this process by exploring your brand’s personality traits. The key questions to ask and answer are:

•For example, if your brand were a person, not a product or service, would it be a man or woman?

•Street-smart or book-smart?

•Extrovert or introvert?

•What would be the age of that person (brand)? Young? Middle- aged or old?

•Would the person (brand) be caring and understanding or tough and authoritative?

•Also, you can think of your brand as a person, a celebrity, or a role model who best characterizes your brand’s attributes and features.

Here is a case highlighting the importance of brand personification, where researchers surveyed physicians to understand the brand personality of a prescription drug.

How Do You Personify A Brand?!

When using this tool, the moderator asks questions that project a human aura onto your product, such as,’where was drug x born? Where did it go to school? What kind of books and sports does drug X like? While it may sound odd, personification yields unexpected responses that allow you to see how people perceive a product.

For example, researchers asked respondents about a leading drug for treating acute coronary syndrome (ACS). In response to a question about where physicians thought the drug had attended college, several respondents suggested MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)— making the marketer aware that the product was perceived as technically sophisticated. Understanding this allowed the marketing to build a successful positioning strategy incorporating the concept.

Creating a brand personality and character will help you present your brand in human form, enabling strong associations in the customers’ minds and reinforcing the positive perception.

Brand Positioning

Philip Kotler, the marketing guru, defined brand positioning as designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the target market’s mind. In other words, brand positioning describes how a brand differs from its competitors and where or how it sits in the customers’ minds. Therefore, brand positioning is just how you differentiate your product or company in the customer’s mind.

Acknowledging the contribution of the positioning pioneers, Philip Kotler said there is a step that shall precede the 4 Ps of marketing. That step is another P for Positioning, the revolutionary concept that Jack Trout and Al Ries introduced in their book on Positioning. So, Positioning must precede all marketing activities. For example, brand marketing starts with Positioning, putting your brand in the customer’s mind differently from competitors, making it more interesting for your target audience.

Brand Positioning in Pharma

Why is Positioning a Must?

It is the information explosion that has led to this realization. The ever-increasing noise level in the marketplace, with the number of brands multiplying like rabbits, has made positioning a Must for survival and growth. For example, let us consider the pharmaceutical industry in India. Over 10,000 companies are churning out over 100,000 products. An urban doctor meets about 20 to 25 medical representatives on a typical working day who detail about 5 to 8 products. That means exposure to anything between 100 to 200 products. Add to this the information through newspapers, magazines, professional journals, radio and television messages, etc. The Total number of messages that he is exposed to, is truly mind-blogging. A marketer must virtually fight for the doctor’s attention for his product. While the human mind can cope with such an information overload, how it deals with and processes this excessive volume of information is certainly not helpful to the marketer. One is the screening and selective process of perception. The other is that the human mind rejects information unrelated to prior knowledge. The human mind has no room for something new unless it is in some way related to or matches with prior information and knowledge. The simplest example is that learning the alphabet of any language is essential for learning words in that language. Without prior knowledge of the alphabet, new words sound like gibberish.

Furthermore, it is said that people rank objects, events, and even other people in their minds. It is necessary to organize the ever- increasing information to cope with it. Therefore, consumers rank products in their minds. If the product is distinctly different in that product category and fits with a similar, equivalent perception of the consumer, only then is the product likely to be ranked higher in the consumer’s mind. The closer and more perfect the unique product attribute and the consumer perception fit, the higher the ranking of that product. It is here that the Positioning of the product is going to play a vital, crucial role. Much depends on how the product is positioned.

Positioning Prescription Drug Brands

Brand positioning is about the customer, not the brand, so it is customer-driven. It involves identifying the target group’s current needs, addressing those, and offering compelling reasons to choose the brand over competitors. The way to achieve this is to define product attributes (in the case of in-market brands) and design (in the case of new products) product attributes that are relevant to customers, which competition does not have, and communicate them effectively.

Since brand positioning is customer-driven, you must ensure that the customer plays an active role in developing your brand positioning to understand their needs and to make your brand more relevant. Therefore, brand positioning is the first step in developing and building a brand preceding all other marketing activities. Also, almost all strategic activities depend on clear, precise brand positioning.

A Different Ball Game

While there are many similarities in marketing CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) and prescription drugs, significant differences, too, exist. Consider these, for example:

•Pharmaceutical brands have patents that expire about ten to twelve years from launch, with research and development costing about $2.6 billion per drug.

•A very low success rate of 1 in 10,000 drugs screened for development.

•People want to buy CPG brands to express their aspirations, whereas they do not seek to buy a healthcare product but do so because they need to.

These differences apart, all positioning principles apply to prescription drug brands too. However, before we get to the positioning process of pharma brands, we need to understand thoroughly:

•The marketing environment in which your brand will compete

•The target market, including relevant trends in your category and disease state, by applying outside-in thinking, which means standing in the customer’s shoes and viewing everything the company does through the customer’s eyes.

•Feeling things from their perspective, walking in their shoes, spending a day in their life, and seeing how they see them to gain customer insights. Therefore, it is important to uncover their needs, wants, frustrations and pain points better than competitors.

•Compete by analyzing competitors thoroughly. As Sun Tzu, the Chinese General and military strategist, said, you need to understand your enemy intimately to beat them. Therefore, it would be great once you determine who your core competitors are, if you become them, stepping into their shoes so that you can deeply understand them. In other words, you should practice competitive simulation.

•Above all, you should understand your brand thoroughly inside out. You must understand the product attributes, strengths, weaknesses, brand perceptions, brand image, emotional and experiential associations, and how they align with the customer’s needs and wants and address their pain points.

Once you develop a deep understanding of the marketing environment, your target market, customers, and competition, it is time to do a complete competitive SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis so that you can identify points of parity and points of differentiation and create a winning positioning strategy.

Understanding the Marketing Environment

Usually, pharma marketers will have an informed opinion about the market, brand, and opportunity based on a quick, early, and knowledge-based assessment and may not have done the rigorous due diligence required to understand the environment, customer, and competition thoroughly. The marketing team would have obtained the customer insights from their KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). However, while KOLs are important stakeholders with relevant expertise in their specialty areas having valid perspectives, they often do not reflect the real world because they are not in the trenches treating patients daily, handling access issues, and managing the patient problems the average clinician encounters daily. As a result, companies do not completely understand the marketplace and fail to develop the market, educate prescribers and patients or convince payers. That internal product-centric approach may be one of the major reasons why more pharma brands fail. They need to ask questions like:

•How are your customers changing?

•How are their needs evolving, and how are they solving them?

•What are the competitors’ moves?

•Are there innovators entering the market that will transform or disrupt it?

It would help you significantly if you focused on trends most relevant to your customers, the disease and therapy areas, and your brand. For example, your analysis can focus on the following:

•Health factor s: demographics, culture, aging, obesity, language, exercise, smoking, drug use and addiction, social determinants of health (SDoH)—income, food, housing, transportation, etc.

•Healthcare system : Changes in policy, universal policy, universal healthcare coverage, underserved populations, Medicare, Medicaid, regulations, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policy, uninsured, overinsured patient populations

•Healthcare industry : vertical integration, consolidations, insurance reform, scientific innovation, precision medicine, genetics, research and development, services

•Other trend s include increasing consumerism in healthcare, health literacy, care anywhere, technological advancements, including wearables, telehealth, and value-based care, and how they affect healthcare.

Monitoring these changing trends will help you understand their impact on several things that affect your performance, such as changes in public policies, regulations, and government agencies; access to physicians, hospitals, and payers; and delivery of care to patients leading to improved patient outcomes.

Understanding the Target Market

What your market is may look like a very simple question, but it is a deceptively simple one. You must dive deep into its many layers to understand the market segment effectively and uncover the opportunities.

The dictionary defines the term market as the total of all the buyers and sellers in the area or regions under consideration. This definition implies that the market is more about buyers and sellers than the products. On further analysis, it is about the value sought by the buyer and provided by the seller, which means the market is more about customers than products. So, we must define the market from the customer’s point of view or in a customer-centric way.

Brian Smith emphasizes this point in his book Brand Therapy. You can’t create a strong brand strategy until you really understand your market, and you can’t understand your market until you define it the same way as your customer does.

Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies have a product-centric view of the market and developed a strong product-oriented culture. So, they define their market in product terms. For example, market data usually defines the market size as the aggregate of all the products sold in that market. Competitors are defined as other firms that make the same product type. And customers are those who currently buy from competitors or us. However, this product-based definition of the market has some major disadvantages. Consider these for example:

•In most pharma markets, product usage and the market for the products are very different things. For example, think of the number of untreated patients with mental illness, where competition may not be a similar product but therapies such as counseling.

•In addition, the product-oriented market definition tends to focus on healthcare professionals, when payers and patients increasingly play an important part in their healthcare decision- making.

Assessing Market Opportunity: Potential or Actual?

Assume that you want to introduce a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. What should you consider as your market? Your actual (directly competing market) would mean an aggregate sales volume of all non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. That is limiting the market and restricting opportunities.

Looking at the potential market would mean widening the horizon of opportunities. The potential market, in this case, would be the anti-arthritic market as a whole since NSAIDs are widely used in the treatment of arthritis due to their safety and efficacy. When you analyze doctors’ prescriptions, you will observe that the anti-arthritic market includes, in addition to NSAIDs, muscle relaxants, steroids, topical rubifacients, anti-gout preparations, analgesics, etc. With the help of prescription audit report figures, it is possible to quantify the size of each segment. You can find exactly how many prescriptions are written for every competing product in each segment.

Consider, for example, the gout segment of the anti-arthritic market. The prescriptions written for gout include, apart from the anti-gout preparations like Zyloric (Burroughs Wellcome then and GSK now) and Benemid (Merind then and