Five Cultural Factors That Can Limit Your Ability to Differentiate Your Brand

For those that aren’t familiar with brand positioning, it is the act of creating a perception of your  product in the mind of your target audience that differentiates it from its competition.

Regardless of the positioning development and validation process you employ, it’s critical for marketers to understand the culture of their respective company to understand how it may play a role in defining your brand. In fact, your corporate culture can have an outsized impact on your team’s ability to identify a unique, differentiated, and sustainable positioning for your brand.

In our positioning work across dozens of corporations, we have identified 5 cultural factors that can impede a company’s ability to develop impactful brand positioning:

  1. Decision by Committee – Inclusivity at the outset of positioning development is helpful for ideation, but giving everyone on an extended cross-functional team direct editorial power over positioning ideas ultimately leads to output that attempts to please everyone but delights/excites no one.
  2. Lack of Focus – In addition to the too many voices noted in factor #1, too often companies are reticent to give up any favorite brand attribute or customer type in a misguided attempt to be all things to all people. Lack of focus of the initial positioning leads to even less focused execution.
  3. Inconsistency Accepted – It takes consistency of execution to actualize brand positioning, yet many of our clients do not require that global messaging and creative execution be consistent across all markets. When team members or regions know they can choose to forge their own path if they don’t like your output, it undermines the credibility of any positioning development process from the outset.
  4. Competitive Politeness – While most companies take the time to ensure they fully understand their competitive landscape before embarking on positioning, they are often not willing to aggressively challenge the competition with their brand positioning and resulting messaging. Instead, they let the competitors dictate the terms for their new product by being unwilling to challenge a brand that has a positioning they feel they deserve more and not standing firm and consistent in their brand positioning when competitors predictably work to counter-position them at launch
  5. Scientific Detail Trumps Customer Understanding & Impact – While the right amount of scientific background or education can often be the key to unlocking a truly unique positioning idea for many brands, often the quest for perfect scientific completeness in supportive messaging leaves customers confused or just plain wrong in their interpretation of the key takeaway. By not adjusting the information to the audience’s education AND interest levels, you risk significantly diminishing its impact and ability to support a potential positioning idea.

Before initiating your next global positioning project, it’s important to take stock of the cultural factors that may impact your outcomes. While any one of these can pose a challenge to your positioning development, if you face a combination of these cultural factors, you may be facing an uphill battle.

If you’ve identified any of these challenges, our extensive experience can help enact the key changes necessary to minimize the negative effects of these factors.