Many small business owners do a great job of developing their business plans. They are excellent at addressing the operational and product issues of their small business. In many cases the small business owner’ business plan rivals that of a big brand. However, when it comes to marketing, small business owners often come up short. Here we will discuss how to market your small business like a big brand through brand positioning.In general, small businesses do not market themselves like a big brand because they fail to have a real brand positioning. Brand positioning has been defined many ways. To summarize brand positioning should be thought of this way: “What is your biggest advantage, against the most fertile competitors among the most promising target?”Small businesses typically address only one of those two key aspects of brand positioning. They either focus on a target market without regard to their competitors for that target market or they focus on their competition without regard to a specific target market they can reasonably attract. If you want to market your small business like a big brand you must think about the intersection of those two factors.To be good marketers, small businesses need to think about the fertile competition. Who in the category is doing good business? More importantly, who is doing good business that your small business can realistically attack. This is what “most fertile competitors” means. Part of successful small business marketing is understanding exactly which competitors you can steal market share from. They need to be competitors who are somewhat successful or there is nothing to steal from them.This is how big brands think all the time. Who can we steal market share from? They analyze the category and look for vulnerabilities in other brands. Then they attack those brands. Learn from the big brands in marketing your small business.The second part of the positioning statement is “among the most promising target”. Small business can learn a lot about how to market like a big brand when it comes to analyzing the target market. Big brands spend an enormous amount of time and resources analyzing target markets. They focus on one specific niche and go after it. Big brands try to know their target both in demographic and psychographic terms. Most importantly, big brands seek a target market that their product or service is designed to capture. If it’s not a good fit they move on or they develop a product or service that would be right for that target market.To reiterate, brand positioning is defined as “What is your biggest advantage, against the most fertile competitors among the most promising target?”
So brand positioning is the intersection of your company advantage against a well defined set of competitors and among a group of consumers that are right for your brand or product.Good brand positioning is one of the best ways that a small business can market like a big brand. It takes some time and research. There may be miss-steps along the way. However, the rewards of a good brand positioning cannot be overstated.