Getting Started with Brand Positioning in B2B: A Practical First Step

For many B2B companies, brand positioning feels like unfamiliar territory — something consumer brands worry about, not SaaS or commercial/industrial providers.  They have built successful, and sometimes very large, businesses based on strong products, trusted sales relationships, and loyal customers. What do they need branding or positioning for? 

Pressure to grow can push brand positioning to the forefront. It may be that growth has plateaued or that investors are pushing for change. The marketing function in many B2B providers has historically focused on content and sales enablement. For them, tackling brand positioning can seem overwhelming.

Branding is full of buzzwords (brand architecture, brand acceleration, the list goes on). Understandably, many B2B marketers and senior leaders assume brand positioning is a large undertaking. But it doesn’t have to be. You can start small.

At its core, brand positioning is the process of understanding what is most important to customers and how you and your competitors perform on those dimensions.

Start by Assessing Internal Alignment

The first step in a branding positioning exercise is to gather and synthesize the diverse opinions within the organization. Different departments and stakeholders interact with the marketplace differently and develop their own view of customers and prospects. These insights are often narrow and siloed within individual departments.

The marketing team needs to assess internal perspectives to find the consistent themes and points of alignment.  Brainstorming sessions or one-on-one interviews with stakeholders across the organization explore questions like:

  • What are our strengths and weaknesses?
  • What makes us unique relative to competitors? What strength or benefit do we possess that our competitors do not?
  • What are the top reasons that customers buy from us?
  • Why do some prospects buy from our competitors?
  • What do prospects think of us?

When you weave together the disparate threads of varied perspectives, you reveal a broader picture of your brand position. The simple consolidation of internal perceptions goes a long way toward developing a shared understanding of your brand position.

That said, this exercise will not fill in all the blanks. There will likely be areas where you lack meaningful hypotheses about the market—or lack confidence in the ones you do have. Additionally, it is not unusual for conflicting views to arise.  For example, sales may think that customers are looking for one thing, while product management believes it is something else.

It takes time to gather the internal insights, consolidate them, and identify the gaps and differences of opinion. With this process completed, the next step is to talk to the market directly.

Mapping Market Perceptions

As important as internal opinions are, customers’ and prospects’ opinions matter most. Formally and systematically asking about perceptions ensures that you capture the important dimensions.  While every B2B market is unique, generally speaking, the core dimensions in brand positioning include:

  • Buying Criteria: These are the criteria decision-makers use to evaluate their options.
    • Product Attributes: The aspects, features, and characteristics that buyers need from the product or solution.
    • Brand Attributes: High-level traits associated with the company, not its products, such as trustworthiness, partnership orientation, financial stability, innovation, etc.
    • Outcomes: The specific goals that the buyer wants to achieve, and why they are buying the solution at all.
  • Awareness: The market’s level of awareness of your brand frames the nature of your brand challenges and opportunities. Do you need to work within existing perceptions of your strengths and weaknesses, or do you have a blank slate to start from?
  • Provider Performance: This is how well your brand and competitors are seen at delivering on the buyers’ buying criteria.

Comparing the market’s feedback with internal opinions typically validates some internal hypotheses, negate others, and fills in some important blanks. The data will also enable you to map the brand’s position by comparing the market’s buying criteria to your brand’s performance, as well as that of your competitors. This will allow you to identify:

  • Brand positioning where you have an advantage over competitors—it is a potential competitive differentiator.
  • Areas where competitors have an advantage over you, and trying to dislodge them will require significant resources.
  • Marketplace needs that are not met by any provider, and you have the opportunity to own the positioning.
  • Threshold conditions that must be met, but are not differentiating—delivering above the threshold condition does not improve your brand position.

Collecting the Right Data—Even on a Budget

To accurately evaluate your brand position, you need to gather perceptions directly from the market. Your approach can employ a modest or robust design, which may incorporate qualitative and/or quantitative elements. All things being equal, the best design has two elements.

  • It is blind, meaning that your brand is not identified as the sponsor of the research.
  • The data is collected from prospects and customers.

In the real world, B2B marketing teams are often tasked with brand positioning exercises without the budget required to do a best-practice study. Fortunately, even if you collect the data mainly from customers, the insights will still get you much of the way there. Three audiences that you can target include new customers, recent losses, and customers who recently churned. In the analysis, remember to factor in the potential bias toward your brand.

As you identify the segments to include in your research, watch out for scope creep—starting with a practical design and ending up trying to boil the ocean. It’s common for teams to jump from no brand insights at all to wanting insights on every segment at once. Generally, it is better to focus on 1-2 of your most important segments and then expand from there on an as-needed basis.

In Closing

Mapping your B2B brand position is a straightforward and structured exercise that objectively and systematically examines your brand and its competitors. You can manage it internally with focused effort, or work with an external partner to design and execute the research.

If you need assistance, Isurus helps clients use primary market research to map their brand and competitive differentiation. If you’re interested in learning how we can assist, please visit our contact page.

Key takeaways

  • Start internally: Gather internal perspectives across departments to identify common themes about how the brand is currently positioned.
  • Validate externally: Measure customer and prospect perceptions on buying criteria, brand awareness, and provider performance.
  • Compare objectively: Map how your brand performs on the buying criteria that matter most.
  • Focus on practicality: Begin with a manageable scope and expand insights as needed.