Never Test Positioning

I have led positioning development for a few dozen brands over the course of my career. In almost every case, I have been asked whether we ought to test our positioning statements before choosing a final direction. Early on, I always recommended that we do so, based on the belief that more information is always good. A few years later, my answer switched to a polite, “Hell, no!” For many marketers, this answer seems counter-intuitive, so I’d like to explain why testing positioning is a costly mistake.

Let’s start with what positioning is: the idea your brand wants to own in the mind of its customers. It is an aspiration for what can be achieved, not a headline or message. You craft a positioning statement to capture the full potential of your brand over time. This is not something you need your customers to tell you: this is something you should build based on your study of the market, your customers’ needs, and your brand’s value relative to those needs.

Testing positioning will tend to drive your brand towards familiar or vague territories. If launching an oncology brand whose competitors trumpet their overall survival data, research will say the best positioning statement is one that emphasizes that claim. The oncologists evaluating your statements are much less likely to pick the statement that describes your brand’s ability to optimize the patient experience to keep them on therapy longer (for example) because it sounds less objective and scientific, and also because they may have the notion that adherence is their job. But if your insights from attitudinal and behavioral research is that patients tend to progress because adherence is a challenge, then your strategy — as opposed to your messaging — may well be to differentiate by solving that problem.

So what research should you do to inform and develop positioning? As I mentioned above, the process should start with a deep understanding fo your customers’ current attitudes and behaviors. What do they do today when treating the patients you want to help? How do they define success, and how often do they achieve it? What sticking points keep them from competitors or leave them dissatisfied when they do? What challenges are they ignoring because they think they are inevitable? What habits have they developed? Pair this with their response to your target product profile and you will get direction on how they conceive of your product fitting into the landscape as they see it today.

But that alone isn’t enough to come up with a transformative positioning idea. To do that, you can’t just offer an improvement on the world as it is, you have to imagine your brand’s potential to change the world for the better. That can’t come from your customers: it requires conviction from the leaders of the brand team. (Part of what Ratio does is try to unearth those transformative ideas, and put a structure in place to help the team identify the one they can commit to.)

But what if your organization insists that positioning must be tested? In that case, don’t think of positioning research as choosing a winner, think of it as a chance to refine your best ideas. While you should not ask your customers to tell you what idea you should commit to, they can help push the options you’ve developed in ways that makes them more relevant or exciting. This type of research, typically called “co-creation”, can also give you an idea of the language you should use to convey your positioning when you begin to execute your communications.

Bottom line: understanding customer needs, frustrations and desires are crucial input to building strong positioning, but successful brands are driven by vision and commitment, not research-driven consensus. Be ready to fight for a bold vision of what your brand could be, and don’t let “pick a winner” positioning evaluation hold you back.