The emotional aspect of brand positioning

There are a few hundred pitfalls when it comes to brand positioning – and during a career as a Marketer, we do fall into a few of those before we eventually figure out what works for a brand.

In most circumstances, positioning is still fairly straightforward – you figure out what product strengths you have vis-à-vis your competitors, you have an internal brainstorming discussion with your leadership team, you rope in a consultant to help with the process, etc. If you have the resources and the bandwidth, you would even be inclined to use more quantitative methodologies like perceptual mapping to ensure you know how your target customer is perceiving your brand or a competitor brand.

Around two years back, I started working for Flock – a team messaging product that competes with the likes of Slack and Microsoft Teams. The Flock brand was strongly focused on small and medium-sized businesses, which is the segment where the product would be able to drive maximum benefits - and which was doing fairly well. However, there was one other industry which had kept us captivated for quite some time. The industry in question was the education space (specifically premier B-Schools) where there is a paucity of time – a problem which Flock aims to address in the B2B space. As MBAs ourselves, we had clearly felt a need for a product like Flock during our B-School days – something which would help us save time and work better. For instance, collaborating on an assignment or a case competition was pretty tedious. All our information would reside on multiple products – Google Drive, email, WhatsApp, Trello, among others. Searching through any discussion or getting context on any decision was painful, to say the least. Long story short - we felt we had a clear product-market fit since we were addressing a pain-point all of us had directly experienced. We validated these through more qualitative and quantitative research – and all of it seemed to hint at what we felt we intuitively knew.

A few months later, I led a Marketing team which launched the campus variant of Flock to a few premier B-Schools. The initial reception was quite good – there were hundreds of users we acquired at every campus, and our witty marketing campaigns seemed to strike a chord. However, we realized that we were unable to retain users at the rate at which we wanted to. Some of the reasons were pretty obvious and we could fix those. However, plenty of users were still returning back to their earlier communication / messaging products.

The solution, as we realized later, was around the brand positioning. Since the core Flock product was into B2B, almost all aspects of our brand positioning were focused on logical arguments which made sense to the B2B decision maker. While we had made changes to the tagline and other brand positioning aspects to appeal to a college student, what it missed was a strong emotional connect - a key reason for why a user should use Flock campus over something else.

This led us to a journey of figuring out what emotions Flock could tap into. Through dozens of interviews and endless discussions, we realized that the nagging aspect of not having performed to their potential in various spheres of their lives was a common thread among many college students. This was also something Flock campus as a brand could tap into. Accordingly, we changed our brand positioning to show how Flock campus gave students more time to do the stuff which they want to do and be the person they want to be – whether it is playing a musical instrument, playing a sport, or even watching Netflix. This revised positioning was also reinforced through our marketing campaigns and other channels.

A few weeks later – we saw a strong spike in user engagement and retention in the colleges where we had launched the product, eventually culminating in a couple of these colleges being ranked in our Top 10 most active teams – albeit for a limited time. In hindsight, we clearly missed this core aspect of transitioning from B2B to B2C at the start – perhaps because of being accustomed to thinking about the product in a certain way. That said, this was also one of the more interesting marketing challenges that we got a chance to address.