Sweet Spot Positioning

Your brand position is in the minds of your customers and other target audiences you wish to influence. It is relative to other competitive brands and offerings that compete for that position. The first step in any brand positioning exercise is to determine where the brand is now. What space does it occupy and how does it compare with other choices.

Asking a brand to occupy a totally unique position that it can maintain over a long period is both naïve and worthy. Naïve because every brand in the category is trying to occupy the ideal brand position. Worthy because you will never achieve top brand status if you don’t push yourself to do so.

One approach to sort out the branding issues that any brand faces is to focus on the development of a Sweet Spot. This can be found at the intersection of Customer Needs, Market Dynamics and Client Realities.

Customer needs reflect what your target audience is looking for in the way of a product or service solution. The ideal solution needs to be something valuable and important to the target.

Market dynamics include competitive forces and other industry driving trends, technologies and industry standards that define the terrain in which your brand participates.

Client realities are those financial, cultural, structural and technological parameters that define your organizations capacity to compete at any given point in time.

A thorough examination of these three areas will enable a smart management team to discover your organizations sweet spot which will ideally meet the following criteria:

• Compel Purchase
• Build Brand Affinity
• Last a Long Time