Episode 181: Brand Axis: where are you positioning yourself?
How are you going to be different from your competitors? In today's episode, Fiona shares a quick tip on how you can identify the gaps in the market, and strengthen your brand. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Brand positioning axis
Examples & how to do it
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Murray Claire
Hello and welcome to episode 181 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. I super appreciate you spending the next 10 minutes or so with me. I know, I always say these episodes should be 10 minutes on a Tuesday, but I can definitely waffle on. So I am really going to commit to making this episode less than 10 minutes today. So before we get stuck into that, I just want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on this beautiful land on which I am living, recording, working, doing all the things. And I don't know if you can hear it, but there are literally an army of cockatoos that are outside my window right now and a whole bunch of other birds. I am recording this at dusk and it is just the most beautiful, beautiful thing that I'm looking out on. So yes, I want to acknowledge the owners and custodians, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders past present, and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. All right, let's get on with today's quick tip episode because I definitely wanna make it 10 minutes less.
So I work with lots and lots and lots of different businesses. I love the variety in what I do. I love just how many wonderful people I come into contact with. I also teach a lot of people when it comes to marketing and brand and all sorts of other things. If you're interested in any of our courses, you can find them at my dailybusinesscoach.com/shop. So today, I wanted to talk about one framework. So a tool that you can use if you are coming up against kind of resistance, or if you're coming against indecision, or maybe you're about to lodge something new, and you're not really sure how you should go about it, or maybe you're just starting a brand from scratch. You're starting a business. You wanna build a brand and you are just sort of caught up a little bit in like, how are we different?
How are we gonna differentiate ourselves? So this is a great framework and it is a quick and simple and easy one to do. So when it comes to creating a brand, creating a business, and I know that those are two separate things, but when you're starting a business and you're thinking of, I wanna really build this brand, or you have an established business, and maybe you are creating a new category, you're launching something new, or maybe you're going into new territory, or you're doing, doing a bit of a refresh of your brand, which is exactly what we're doing at My Daily Business Coach right now. And I'll be talking about that in a future episode, but one of the frameworks or tools that you can use is the brand positioning axis. And that is really literally thinking of a line horizontally, a line in the middle of that vertically.
And you've got an axis. So it's literally a cross-section, and this is where you can start mapping out how your business or your brand is positioned in the marketplace. So often at the start of kind of creating this stuff, you'll come up with a competitor analysis and you'll look at your competitors in the marketplace, sort of, where do they sit? What is your positioning? How are you gonna be different? How are you better than hopefully your competitors, how are you different? And one of the easiest ways to do this, cuz sometimes this can be where people really get stuck. They're like, well, I'm not that different. We are offering the same product as the people down the road, or we are offering a very similar service to 10,000 other people that are doing the same thing. What you can do is create a brand positioning axis, also called a competitive landscape map, or I'm sure a bunch of other things, but basically, it is a chart of where you sit, where your business sits in comparison to your competitors and you might create multiple of these charts.
So you wanna start off. One of the easiest ways to start off is literally putting a kind of Y-axis and X-axis. So one vertical one across, and you might plot really simple things that are related to your industry. So let's say you are selling candles. Let's say you're selling candles at the top of the Y-axis, which is the one going vertically. You might put a high end and at the bottom, you might put a low end. And so you literally like high-end candles and then low-end candles. So at the high-end candles, you might have, I dunno how you pronounce it. Like Cire Trudon is that the one that's from like the 16 hundreds? And it's about $169 for a small candle. You might have all sorts of other candles. And if you don't know the brands of these, literally take yourself on a little research trip to a candle store or to a big makeup store.
If you're looking in, you know, Australia, you might go to Mecca, Mecca Cosmetics, you might just have a search online for high end candle brands and just have a look at how they position themselves, how they come across, what are their taglines, everything else. So you start with a really simple map. So high end, low end. So that's on the Y-axis, that's on the arrows going up vertically and then across this, cuz you're kind of plotting a whole map out here across on the X axis. You may have two other opposing elements. So you've got the high end, low end and you might be edgy. And then on the other side mainstream, and so maybe there is a really high end candle that is also very unusual and it is in the, so it would be in the top left quadrant if you follow me.
So you've got high-end and edgy and it's gonna be up there maybe also then a low-end mainstream. And so you might look at, I'm not sure a brand that is offered by like target or, and that's a target in Australia. I know that the target in the US is very different or maybe the target is a little bit up. It's not as low-end, but maybe you're looking at another kind of mainstream store. So maybe it's mainstream and it's low end for example. And I'm just putting this all out. I'm causing no offense to anyone. Please don't come at me with, “Oh, we are not low end or high end or whatever.” This is just an example. I'm not saying these brands are actually that, but so you've got this map and you've got high-end low end.
And then you've got edgy and mainstream all like cutting edge and mainstream. So that is one example. You could then create a whole bunch of other maps like this, to think about other elements that are important to your audience and to your sector. So if you're a business coach, let's say you might put expensive, not expensive, or inexpensive at the top. And then you might have across the X-axis. What's another thing you could have a niche and general, or you could have like life coaching and then super practical, purely business, or maybe like financial coaching or something. So not that again, if these things are not, I'm not putting this stuff out there in concrete, but I'm trying to get you to think about how you could create brand axis for yourself. Or again, it's called a competitive landscape map to identify really where there is potentially no one covering a quadrant where you're like, “huh, there are no business coaches in this quadrant.”
I would suspect that that would be wrong because there are business coaches everywhere for everyone. But if you were bringing out, I don't know, something new to the market, say like a new type of food product or you are bringing out a surfboard brand or something else you could plot where do the other surfboard brands sit. And again, you might make various axis and kind of look at this and kind of go deep over time. So you could start with really basic things like, is it expensive? Is it not expensive? Is it mainstream? Is it cutting edge? And then you could move on to very niche things. So what material is it made out of? Where it is made is the location important location, specific location, independent like, so you could create all sorts of things, but it gives you an idea and a visual way of mapping out.
Where does your business sit in the market? What sorts of things are important to your audience? And also if you're creating something brand new in your business, it allows you to really identify the white space. It allows you to identify the gaps that are out there in the market because maybe there is a part of the quadrant that you're looking at and you're thinking, there really isn't a brand that fits in there. I often used to talk about a magazine in Australia called Mama Disrupt. Obviously, I have nothing to do with this magazine. So I'm just, again, sort of putting this out there as an example, but Mama Disrupt was really kind of closing the gap between the traditional, parenting mom magazines, and then kind of business women's glossy magazines, that sort of thing. So it had a whole bunch of really interesting information.
It was well designed. I think it's still going. It is well designed, I should say. And really, if they were to map this out, it really was an area that no one else was doing. I mean, there were a lot of parenting magazines. There were a lot of magazines about mum's life. There were a lot of magazines on entrepreneurialism and there were magazines that had been around forever, like Murray Claire and sort of in the fashion scene a little bit. And so it kind of brought the best of those and put them all together. And it really was, is, and I'm not sure I don't buy that many magazines anymore, but it really was playing in a space that was not really being filled. I know in the US, there is a magazine called Parenting, which is very much, it's very different to Mama Disrupt, but it was, it's very much kind of coming out as like cool parenting and parenting after sorting of an early toddler, baby land it's parenting in general, like for the rest of your times, cuz it is interesting that a lot of parenting magazines it's like from the time you give birth to your child's basically gonna school and that is it.
It's like I'm still a parent for the rest of my life. Anyway, I am getting on to the 10-minute mark. So I need to stop because this is a quick tip episode. So yeah, that's the tool. It is a competitive landscape map or you can call it a brand positioning axis. And it's really about understanding where you sit in the market, what are the attributes that your audience cares about? And can you plot things out so you can see, this is where we are. This is who our competitors are or this is where we are and we don't really have that many competitors. So let's go for gold with that message. All right. That is it for today's quick tip episode. If you wanna have a look at the transcript and go through those things that I mentioned, any links to anything we mentioned will be there. You can find that mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/181. And if you found this useful, please share it with a friend. And if you share it on social media, please make sure you tag @mydailybusinesscoach. So we don't miss it. All right. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusiness coach.
