The below steps are after that your brand has been or out in the marketplace.

If you are an existing brand, you understand that marketing strategy is the way to serve your customer’s needs effectively.Thus, researching and reassessing your brand positioning is essential for commercial success.

Identify your current category

For example, to separate your energy drink from other soft drinks, start with the customer.Who are they, why do they like your product, what do they do with it, and why do they buy it?

Determine your current positioning in the market

Even if positioning has not been purposefully established, or done incorrectly, customers will still have perceptions of your brand.To understand current positioning, talk to the customers, read the reviews, or monitor social media.

Select and narrow down your key competitors to compare your brand against

Think about not only your direct competition but indirect competition.If customers are not going to buy your product or service, what else could they buy, which will fulfill their needs?.Going back to the soft-drink example, If they do not buy your soft drink, could they get the same utility out of bottled water?

Try your best to assess your key competitor’s positioning in the market

What is special about your competition’s brand, and how can they win your clients over? What are they offering that you are not?.Note here that you shouldn’t aim to replicate them, just be aware of what they are doing.

Now do the analysis and review (your brand vs. your competitors)

Compare your and your competitor’s positioning. To do this, think about Points of parity (POPs) and points of differentiation (PODs).POPs are how what you are offering is similar to the competitor’s offerings, with PODs being the opposite, how your product is different.

In your review, take time also to identify your uniqueness and strengths

Coming from the previous point. Your PODs will be the ones written below;

Identifying your strengths. Taking advantage of strength in your messaging. Copywriting. Brand communication. Develop a new positioning statement and strategy.Building on everything you learned from your research, develop a positioning statement that will reflect your desired brand positioning.Reflecting on your marketing plan, create a new brand strategy that will bring you to your goal market positioning.

Does Not Matter When the Brand Enters the Market

Although the previous points are relevant to you, if you are just entering the market with a new brand/product,you have the opportunity to create a new category in the customers’ minds.You can enter an existing market and take it by storm, avoiding the mistakes of your predecessors. Although finding a market gap and creating a new category is not easy, a first-mover advantage gives you a lot of benefits. Some of them are having few opponents, low cost for customer acquisition, you are hard to catch up with,and whatever comes next is compared with you. And even competitors that enter the market broaden and mature it, bringing more customers and higher revenue. Remember that a new market category is not the same as creating a solely new product. Let’s take the example of Red Bull – many soft drink companies (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Lucozade (UK)) marketed themselves as awakening or energy-boosting. Still, none of them created ‘energy drinks’ for American and European markets.Creating a new category, Red Bull had the first movers advantage, used it well, and now owns more than 40% of the world’s energy drink market.

Although a sufficient amount of marketing research insists that the first movers’ advantage is the only way to secure a place in the customer’s mind, this statement is far from being true. Think of giants like Target, Google, and South-West Airlines, none of them came first. The brands that follow and enter the market as second or even third movers can still capitalize on the market by learning from the mistakes of the first movers. There are too many successful cases of brands entering the market later, but still achieving tremendous success. Some notable examples that come to mind are Google, Nike & even Apple. The challenge here is to, although diving into a new category, become a Facebook to someone’s Myspace, rather than a red fidget spinner to a blue one.Choose a thriving category, find the big demand that is not yet fulfilled, and show your customer that you are outstanding, rather than a duplicate.

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