Brand and Positioning
Positioning is the decision about what you are, for whom, and instead of what. Brand is what people carry away from every encounter with the company. Founders often treat both as a later, cosmetic exercise, which is how a product ends up hard to explain in a sentence. The concepts here cover the choices that make a company legible to the people you want and, deliberately, uninteresting to everyone else.
10 concepts in Brand and Positioning
- PositioningThe context you set for your product, what kind of thing it is, who it is for, and what it should be compared against.
- Tagline vs. Value PropositionA value proposition states what a specific customer gets and why it is worth switching for; a tagline is a short memorable phrase built on top of it. Writing the tagline first produces slogans that decorate a decision nobody has made.
- Tone of VoiceThe consistent register a company writes in across every surface, from product copy and emails to error messages and sales conversations, expressed concretely enough that two different people writing on the same day sound like the same company.
- Naming a CompanyChoosing what the company is called: the first brand decision a founder makes, usually the fastest, and the most expensive one to reverse later.
- Visual IdentityThe visual system a company is recognized by: mark, type, color, and how they are used together. It is how the brand is recognized, not what the brand means.
- Social ProofEvidence that other people already trust you, used to lower the risk a new buyer feels. Logo walls, counts, testimonials, and reviews are all the same mechanism.
- Brand PromiseWhat a customer can count on getting from you every time. Distinct from positioning, which says who you are for and against what, and from a tagline, which is how you say it.
- Messaging HierarchyThe decided order in which you say things: one primary message, a small number of supporting ones, and proof under each. The ordering is the work, not the writing.
- RebrandChanging the name, the identity, or both. Sometimes the correct response to a company that has genuinely outgrown its brand, and often an expensive way to avoid a product problem.
- Brand ArchitectureHow the company name and its product names relate: one master brand everything sits under, a family of separate brands, or some deliberate mixture.
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