Strategic brand pillars turn positioning into decisions

Why positioning has to work beyond marketing

Positioning is not simply an inspiration for communication. It is a powerful organizing construct for a business. Good positioning helps employees understand the business's strengths, align around them, and use them as a filter for decision making. That alignment is the second of the three steps in how challenger brands position to beat the market leader.

It follows directly from the first. Once you have chosen from the six sources of competitive advantage, the business has to deliver that advantage, and delivery happens in product, service and operations as much as in marketing.

How to build strategic brand pillars

Strategic pillars are built from the bottom of the benefit ladder up, not from adjectives down. The process has five steps.

1. Define the strategic pillars required to deliver your source of advantage.
2. Start from the bottom of the benefit ladder and work your way up, from groups of features to the emotional and functional benefits they deliver.
3. Group the top-level benefits into the fewest themes possible, and craft about three to five strategic pillars.
4. Articulate your strategic pillars as instructions to employees.
5. Use your strategic pillars as a filter for strategic decision making.

Read top to bottom, the finished ladder has four levels. The source of advantage sits at the top. Beneath it are the three to five strategic pillars. Beneath those are the emotional and functional benefits each pillar groups together. At the bottom are the feature groups that deliver those benefits. Every pillar should trace down to something the business actually does.

The fourth step is the one most often skipped. A pillar written as a description tells employees what the brand is. A pillar written as an instruction tells them what to do.

What strategic brand pillars look like in practice

Four examples show the range.

1. Formula E. Under the category label City Street Racing Series, three pillars: Real street rivalries, for tight, challenging racing and driver and team duels. Raw electric performance, for pushing the limits of electric technology. Renewable energy within reach, for technology driving real change.
2. Wahed Invest. Under the promise "Wealth for those who work for it", five pillars: Power in your hands, Invest in yourself, Rock solid stocks, Make your principles pay, and Break up with your bank.
3. Al Jazeera. Under the idea of clarity by contrast, four pillars: Diversity makes the difference, Context reveals true causes, Uncommon voices, common truths, and Wherever it leads, whoever it takes.
4. Turkish Airlines. Three pillars: Bridging worlds, From the heart, and Beyond expectations.

Al Jazeera's own guidance on its pillars states their purpose plainly. They explain how the network delivers its positioning, they are primarily for internal use, and they should be used as criteria to decide whether content, output, products and promotion align with that positioning. They should also be communicated to all new and existing employees as a way of making clear the behaviors the organization wants to see.

A brand pillar written as a description tells employees what the brand is. A pillar written as an instruction tells them what to do.

How to take strategic pillars beyond the marketing team

Pillars written by marketing and kept by marketing do not change decisions anywhere else. Four steps engage the rest of the organization.

1. At the start of the strategic process, create a cross-functional decision committee with stakeholders from across the organization.
2. Engage and educate colleagues on the broader role of your positioning, as an organizing construct for the business and not just a communications device.
3. Create a stakeholder engagement map that identifies when and how you will seek input from each department.
4. Use the strategic pillars as filters for deciding what the organization needs to start, stop and continue doing to deliver its source of advantage.

The last step is where pillars earn their keep. A filter that never rules anything out is not a filter. Why brand ideas so often stall at this point is covered in why brand ideas fail inside the business.

Why aligned businesses earn higher margins

Focus on what you do best shows up in profit. Research published in Harvard Business Review as The Coherence Premium plotted companies by how closely aligned their capabilities were against their EBIT margin between 2003 and 2007. The more aligned a company's capabilities, the higher its margin tended to be.

Businesses that focus on what they do best outperform those that do not. For a challenger with fewer resources than the leader, that is the argument for pillars in one line.

"A good strategy includes a set of coherent actions. They are not 'implementation' details. They are the punch in the strategy." Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy

What comes after alignment

Pillars make sure the business delivers its advantage. The final step makes sure buyers notice it, by expressing the advantage across every touchpoint. That is the subject of dramatizing your differences.

Adapted from How challengers can position for growth, a Creative Business Company whitepaper.