Why does anyone care about your brand?

That’s the cornerstone question to ask if your goal is to build a strong brand-positioning strategy and grow your company.

At the highest level, that question breaks down to two elements:

1. Audience
2. Competition

A brand position must be relevant to the audience.

Relevance   noun rel·e·vance /ˈrel ə v(ə)ns/
The quality of being directly connected with and important to something else.

A brand position must be relevant to the prospect in the way it speaks to what the target audience cares about.

That means taking time to define your audience is the first and most important step in positioning a brand. This goes beyond the top-line demographics that are easy to pick—age, gender, and geographical location. Do the homework, and dig down into what is driving the target audience to the brand category. What is the psychographic makeup of your target audience? What are they thinking about brand positions in this category? In other words, go past the intellectual “features and benefits” that a brand’s service or product can offer and strive for the emotional connection to what the audience wants or needs.

A brand position must be relative to every other competitive option.

Relative   noun rel·a·tive  /ˈrel ə tɪv/
Having a particular quality when compared with something else.

Competition is brutal in every category. Your brand’s target audience has many options when considering to buy a product or service or become a customer. To stand out, a brand needs to own a position within the brand category that clearly defines that brand relative to the other brands out there.

At idc, we spend a lot of time and energy focusing on these two elements—audience and competition—working with companies in determining their brand positions, strengthening their brands, and growing their companies.