To create a world class brand in the Social Media Era, a marketer must differentiate their product to create a brand. Products have two sides to them. A product has a functional side and a product has a relational side. To create a brand, a marketer must create an almost human relationship between the brand and its customers.
Social Media is a great tool and it is also an enormous obstacle for a contemporary marketer. Social Media creates enormous scale for a marketer. Great scale helps and it also hurts, incredibly. On the positive side, one quarter of the entire world is located at a social media sight. To have this many people in one area at one time is a godsend for a marketer. The negative side is that social media has created the means for an absolute explosion of products. In an average supermarket there are 40,000 brands, and counting. The average consumer needs only about 150 of those brands. On an average day, a consumer is engaged with 3000 to 4000 messages. With this proliferation of products and messages, encouraged by Social Media, how does a marketer create a brand? A brand is created by a three step process. A brand is created by repositioning the product, branding it, and then positioning it. I have written articles about the first two. In this article, I would like to concentrate of third. In this step, to create a brand, a brand must be differentiated. A marketer has to be able to define their product in the mind of the customer, so that customers will select that brand, regardless of what competitors offer. This is where the concept of friendship comes into play. There are many people in the world, but we choose to have a relationship with our friends, and exclude the others, regardless of how attractive or talented the other people are.
This is a marketer’s goal in creating a brand. We need people to naturally gravitate to our product. To create this effect, a product must be “positioned” against the other products so that consumers see a clear difference between our product and all the other products in the market space that we are working with.
Positioning is a strategy of perception. To brand a product, a marketer must define their brand in the mind of the customer. To succeed in Social Marketing, a marketer must become experts in the field of marketing. To create brands in social media, a marketer must know how to brand, position, and differentiate products. To know this area of marketing, a marketer must become aware of the writings of Al Ries, Jack Trout, and David Aaker.
To illustrate how to position a product, I would like to give an example of what is going on in R and B music. I have been following the marketing strategies of three singers whom we shall refer to as R, K, and C. Each of these ladies is very successful. Each has great physical presence, sing, and dance very well. It is impossible to say that one singer is better than the others. The singer who becomes the pre-eminent brand in this space has to correctly position themselves. Let’s analyze the positioning strategy of K.
Don’t forget, positioning is about perception. How can K create a brand in which she is perceived to have the best music? There is not a test for the word better in music. Better is in the mind of the listener. To brand in this space, a marketer is going to have to create a perception of superiority. One way for K’s marketers to do this is to position K as “the stylish brand”.
It is at this point that we have arrived at the essence of branding in a Social Media Era. There has been an explosion of products. Seldom in the modern market place is one product overwhelmingly superior to another.
To create a brand, a marketer must create, through the resources available to them for that particular product, a “perception” that their product is superior to the other products in that market place.
The first step in a positioning strategy is to select an opponent to position yourself against. Positioning is a strategy in which you position yourself against just one opponent. R is the present leading brand in R & B. K has chosen to position herself against R. Let’s compare K and R. By comparing the two, K can create the positioning that is needed to become the leading brand. The positioning can be created in the area of their video strategies. The two singers have decided to come in different directions in their use of video.
They both have targeted professional, young adults, about ages 22-34. The music of both ladies deal in mature, adult themes. To take the edge off her music, R has decided to use humor and or farce in her videos. K has decided to embrace the edge, but to do it in very stylish manner. This stylishness is the means by which K creates her positioning.
To create successful branding, a product must be consistent in their branding. Kelly has decided to sing songs with edgy lyrics and to create videos that are also edgy. This is important because to create a brand, and its positioning, consumers must know what to expect from their brands time after time. There is a consistency to K. Though edgy, both the song mixes and the video are very stylish. Kelly demographic is a group of people who place importance on stylishness and are attracted to it. They are also mature, young adults, many of them married. This demographic demands music that communicates about the lives that these people live. In this age bracket, edgy music is not a negative. It is acceptable and desired.
In K’s video there are many attractive men and women, doing very stylish dance sequences. If she can consistently create stylish videos with attractive men and women, doing stylish dance routines, Kelly can position herself as the stylish brand.
In K’s demographic, these are people who are very body image conscious. The men and women who make up this demographic go to gyms and desire to be physically attractive. In K’s video, there are many attractive, well-developed male and female dancers. Her male dancers have excellent abdominal development, called “six pacs”. Six pacs are attractive to both male and female viewers. The women love them, and the men want them. Their existence in a video, insures that the video will be popular with both men and women that make up her demographic. The six pac can create positioning for Kelly. If six pacs consistently appear in her videos, this will dramatically set her and her music dramatically apart from the farce humor that R uses. Six pacs can create the stylishness that Kelly needs to become the pre-eminent brand in R and B.
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