Brand positioning: the sentence that decides your visuals

Brand positioning is the place you choose to hold in your customers' minds compared with every alternative they could pick: the cheap and cheerful option, the specialist, the beautiful one, the fast one. It is usually written as one sentence, a positioning statement, and that sentence quietly decides your visuals. A bakery positioned as "the neighbourhood's everyday loaf" and one positioned as "slow, naturally leavened bread for people who care" should not share colours, type or photography.

What brand positioning means

The term was made famous by Al Ries and Jack Trout, whose 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind argued that people organise brands into mental slots, and a brand wins by owning a clear one. You can't be everything. You can be the obvious answer to one question. Positioning is that choice; brand identity is how the choice looks and sounds.

How to write a brand positioning statement

A widely used template comes from Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm (1991). It forces every part of the position into the open, which is exactly what you want before any design begins.

For [target customer]
who [need or problem],
[brand] is a [category]
that [key benefit].
Unlike [main alternative],
we [what makes us different].

1. 1

   Name a real customer

   Not "everyone who likes coffee". "Remote workers in the neighbourhood who need a reliable table and good wifi" is a position.

2. 2

   State the need in their words

   What are they trying to do or avoid? Use the phrases they would say out loud.

3. 3

   Choose your category

   The frame of reference customers use to compare you. A café, a coworking space and a bakery are compared with very different rivals.

4. 4

   Pick one benefit

   The single thing you want to be known for. A list of five is not a position.

5. 5

   Say why you, specifically

   Compared with the obvious alternative, what is true of you and not of them?

Turning the positioning statement into visuals

Each part of the sentence maps to a design decision. Work through it word by word and write down what each implies. This is how a position stops being a slide in a strategy deck and becomes something customers can see.

Two worked brand positioning examples

Here are two bakeries on the same street. Their products overlap, but their positions do not, and their visuals follow. Notice that neither is better: each simply makes a clear promise to a different person, and every colour, font and photo choice keeps that promise.

Signs your positioning isn't clear yet

• Your statement would still be true if a competitor's name replaced yours.
• The benefit is a list rather than one thing.
• Design discussions go in circles because nobody can say which option fits better.
• Your visuals look like the category's defaults. Why every feed looks the same explains how that happens.
• Customers describe you in words that don't match your statement at all.

If any of these ring true, rewrite the sentence before redesigning anything. The brand personality and brand voice that follow from a clear position are much easier to define, and a brand strategy built on it holds together.

Keeping your positioning in every design

A positioning statement is only useful if it reaches every post, not just the launch. In Gradiently, the brand kit (part of Pro) holds your description, audience, what the brand does and its voice, alongside your logos, colours and fonts. The Designer writes headlines in that voice and lays them out in your Mark, so a quick Tuesday post still sounds and looks like the position you chose. Choose a Mark whose ground, materials and type voice match your key benefit, and the visual half of the position is consistent from then on.