Use caseSharpen positioning
Before a position is chosen, hear buyers describe your brand and its rivals unprompted, sort the benefits every serious brand must offer from those credited to one brand, and claim the ground no rival holds yet.
The frame of the study decides the answer, from how the brand is first raised to which rivals and needs are on the table and whose customers speak.
Buyers say what comes to mind about your brand and each rival before any claim is mentioned, which reveals the associations they already hold and where your brand blurs into a competitor.
You name the rivals buyers weigh you against and the needs worth probing, from reliability to after-sales support, and Pulse builds from that brief an interview that gives every brand in the set equal attention.
Buyers loyal to competitors sit in the sample next to your customers, because a point of difference only counts if people who chose someone else can see it too.
The world's most ambitious teams research with Pulse.
GrowwLeadership chooses a position from a short list, and this analysis narrows that list by removing claims buyers treat as standard or credit to a rival.
Themes are grouped by what buyers said, so the team can see which benefits buyers expect from any serious brand and which they credit to one brand only, each supported by buyers' quotes.
Some benefits you plan to claim, buyers already give to a rival, and some they believe of you and of nobody else. The second list is where a position can be built without borrowing a competitor's ground.
A need buyers rank highly that no brand in the set is credited with meeting is open space, and the team can test whether your product can credibly claim it before committing a campaign to it.
Understand what people currently think, feel and associate with your brand.
Three inputs feed a positioning decision: how the brand and its rivals are perceived, what customers need when they choose, and where competitors already stand. Perception work comes first, exploring the associations, strengths and weaknesses customers attach to each brand, often through interviews and projective questions, before measuring them at scale. Needs research separates points of parity, which every credible option must offer, from points of difference, where a brand can stand apart. Perceptual mapping places brands on the dimensions buyers use and shows which positions are open. Candidate positions are then tested for relevance, believability and distinctiveness with the target audience, and checked against what the product and service can deliver. Brand perception research is where the work starts, because a position can only be claimed from where buyers already place the brand.
When the executive team splits between leading on reliability and leading on service, each camp can point to buyers' words, and every quote opens onto its transcript. The position chosen is the one buyers' own descriptions support.
Buyers already credit some benefits to rivals, in phrases those rivals' ads have taught them. The creative agency reads those transcripts too, so its copy for the chosen position avoids language buyers associate with a competitor.
A point of difference has to show up among buyers of each rival before the team builds a position on it. AI-moderated interviews run many at once, so the brand team takes a difference to the positioning workshop only once it holds across each rival's buyers.