By M. Isi Eromosele

Competitive pressures, new channels and changing customer needs have eroded the positions of many companies’ brands. As a result, many organizations are rethinking their brand positioning. However, despite increased marketing expenditure spent to reposition their brands, many companies fail to produce any improvements in either overall image or market share.

In order to achieve success, companies need to focus on attainable rather than overly ambitious positioning.

There are many factors that cause the rethinking of brand positioning by organizations. Changing customer needs frequently erode a brand’s established position. Simultaneously, intense competitive pressures are created by new product innovations market entrants. Additionally, new technologies are helping create and intensify the use of new marketing channels.

Companies fail at accomplishing their stated rebranding objectives because they frequently target ambitious goals that outstrip the actual ability of the brand to deliver on its promise to customers.

A second reason is that the goal is too far removed from the customers’ present brand perception to be a realistic brand objective. The above underline why it is imperative for companies to work at attaining a brand positioning that is very achievable, not just appealing.

When repositioning a brand, it is essential for organizations to capture not just the emotional and obvious needs of the customers, but the circumstance of the scenario in which those needs occur. This would be the customers’ frame of recommendation.

Significantly, the frame of recommendation sets the limits for customers to consider which brands they will choose. Most customers have a specific definition of what a brand represents and what it can be relative to their frame of recommendation.

When a company repositions a brand too far from this frame of recommendation, this creates customer confusion that results in the failure of the positioning. Sensitivity to the frame of recommendation for a brand could help ensure that a company’s repositioning implementation will reverberate with its customers.

Success is also attainable by building emotional bridges that can carry customers from where they perceive a company’s brand to be to where the organization wants it to be in the future. Bridges are frequently best built when they leverage the unique emotional benefits or identity elements of the brand’s equity that are relevant to its customers. Emotional brand benefits can provide the most powerful source for brand consent. In repositioning, a company must, in effect, become warden of the brand, as customers redefine their relationship with the brand.

After developing the brand position, a company must fulfill its promise about the brands performance capabilities. This is particularly crucial in service industries, since there is a need for organizational realignment as well as infrastructure changes. These changes usually occur at the same time the customers are presented with the brand’s new position.

In focusing on achievable instead of appealing brand positioning, a company cam help ensure attainable market share results, even as the brand is being enhanced. However, the new brand position must fit comfortably within customers’ frame of recommendation and it must not to overreach.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2011 Oseme Group