In April 2016, our award-winning book True Storytelling was published, which included a chapter on the canvas we developed for brand positioning. The canvas allows you to position your brand based on authenticity in just 13 steps, all on one convenient A4 page.
With the True Story Canvas®, we created a tool that logically combines all the ingredients for brand positioning onto one A4 page. It provides an overview and shows how the different ingredients affect each other.
When it comes to brand positioning, the client is the one with the most knowledge about the brand. We cannot fully understand a company in just two weeks. Therefore, we always work in co-creation with the client to position the brand. However, we do have strategic ability, creativity, and experience to help our clients organize the ingredients and make sharp choices. The great thing about a canvas is that it has small sections that help you to formulate precisely. You cannot fit a half-page mission statement on our canvas, nor would you want to. No one in the organization will remember such a long mission statement.
Why should you pay attention to your positioning?
Most markets have an abundance of providers, and products and services are often interchangeable. Even if you have something new and distinctive, a competitor will copy it in no time. In such a market, most providers have their product, price, and quality in order.
'Positioning is a game people play in today’s me-too marketplace.' – Jack Trout
Only through a good positioning of your company, brands, products, and services will you stand out and be able to obtain a strong brain position. The possibilities of good positioning have to do with future-proofing (strategic fit), relevance to the target audience (needs), differentiation (competition), alignment with the current positioning (consistency), and competencies and culture (keeping promises). It involves occupying a distinctive, relevant, and credible position in the mind of your customer.
'Positioning is the act of designing the company’s offerings end image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market.' – Philip Kotler
Being true to yourself and acting accordingly = being authentic
If you want to be true to yourself, you must first know who you are and what you stand for. That is complicated enough for a person, but even more complicated for a brand. After all, a brand consists of the actions, activities, and expressions of several people doing so on behalf of the brand. How do you get all those people to be true to the brand's "self"? And how do you discover the authentic "self" of the brand? For this purpose, we have developed the True Story Canvas®: a canvas on one A4 containing 13 essential ingredients for positioning a brand.
The canvas covers the following items:
Positioning your brand in co-creation via the True Story Canvas® Workshop
As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, we believe that you should do brand positioning together with the customer. That is why we have developed a workshop around the canvas, where we jointly create the brand positioning in a four-hour "pressure cooker." Up to 8 people can participate in the workshop. Think of the important decision-makers within the organization, but also the people who are in daily contact with the customer. With every workshop, we are surprised by the sharp and distinctive positioning that emerges and the energy that arises from doing the workshop together. Because decision-makers are also the developers of the canvas, you see that brand strategy is more easily supported within your organization.