CREATING A SOCIAL MEDIA BRAND: WHY POSITIONING AND DIFFERNTATION ARE CRITICAL

Creating Social Media Brands: Why Positioning and Differentiation are Important



Social Media has created great scale and this is the reason why positioning and differentiation are critical to the creation of a brand in the social media era. In simple terms brand is the selection of your product and the rejection of all the other products in your market space. This is the beauty and it is also the challenge of creating a brand in the social media era.

Here are incredible numbers to think about. Let’s take just the food space. In an average supermarket there are 40,000 brands. An average consumer needs to only use 85. From this 85, there is only perhaps between 10-15 that a consumer needs to sustain their lives. Again, this is only the food space. What about all the brands in cars, clothes, electronics, music, etc. How does a marketer get a consumer to focus on the one brand that the marketer is managing? The answer to that is "positioning" and "differentiation".

In our social media era, much of the content of a brand is created by users themselves through the use of posts, blogs, video, vblogs, and pictures. If a person has 10 friends and each of these 10 each share one thing with them each day, this is a lot of content. This is a lot of brands for a consumer to focus on. How does a consumer stay focused?

Social media is about engagement. A critical issue that a marketer has to focus on is the virility of social media. A marketer in the social media era must clearly understand Reed’s Law. In simple terms, a network that begins with just 2 quickly becomes a network of 1,092. If a singer makes a song available on her Facebook Page, and that song is shared by friends through a post, it is going to be hard for a rival singer to compete without strong positioning and differentiation.

Many marketers feel these two terms are the same. I think that the social media era has made these two terms different. Because there is so much content, and because the networks are so virile, a marketer must be extreme in setting his brand apart. I think that a marketer must clearly understand that there are differences between the two if a strong social media brand is going to be created.

To create a brand, a marketer must understand that positioning is a frame of reference, and that differentiation is a strategy of perception. Let me illustrate by describing one of the most iconic brands in the American marketplace.

Nike created a sneaker that was designed especially for basketball playing. This brand positioned itself against sneakers designed for walking or running. The challenge for the marketers in creating a brand for this sneaker was how do you define this sneaker, in the minds of consumers, in contrast to other sneakers. How do you differentiate your brand after it is positioned?

Nike chose Michael Jordan, then a young basketball player with the Chicago Bulls as a spokesman. Nike showed Michael dunking a basketball during a championship game. This dunk became the logo for the sneaker. The slogan for the sneaker was "It has to be the shoes". The brand and its spokesman became icons in American marketing history.



Dean Hambleton

dnhambleton@gmail.com