How much of your time is spent thinking about what to post or share about your interior design or home industry brand?
Does the way you position your company’s services and products make that big of a difference to your audience? The answer is a big ol’ YES.
As it turns out, light tweaks in messaging and positioning can lead to huge results down the line. In this article, we’ll explain what you need to know about positioning and how it can become one of the most important tools in your brand marketing toolkit.
Positioning, explained using psychology and neckties
Paco Underhill is the bestselling author of Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping, one of the most popular books on retail and buyer psychology. At the time of publication, Underhill owned and operated a company that offered customer research the old-fashioned way: watching customers as they shopped and jotting notes down onto a clipboard about the behaviors observed. Creepy, but also fascinating!
In one experiment, research assistants monitored the aisle of a grocery store that housed cat food.
- At the time, the cat food was arranged by price, with the lowest-price generic brands near the top and at eye level and the more premium brands on the bottom shelf.
- When elderly grocery shoppers got to the cat food aisle, the assistants noticed these shoppers didn’t want to squat down to get a particular brand, so they went with the brand that was at eye level.
- Mr. Underhill’s firm recommended that the grocery store rearrange its cat food offerings to have the most premium brands at eye level. Same products, different positioning.
- When the store implemented this strategy, sell-through of premium brands increased significantly, improving store profit margins.
Another experiment coined the now-notorious phrase “butt brush”. A men’s clothing retailer wanted to sell more items and increase their average dollars per transaction. Their tie rack was located near the checkout register to make it easy to grab a tie before you made your purchase.
When a man stopped to shop for ties, he partially obstructed the checkout line. If another person went to check out, they would sometimes accidentally bump into the tie-shopper or have to say “pardon me” as they squeezed through. Nearly every time this happened, the tie-shopper’s trance was broken and he ended up abandoning the tie rack, losing the sale.
Mr. Underhill’s team made an counterintuitive recommendation: Place the tie rack six feet further away from the cash register. As soon as the retailer implemented this change, tie sales exploded, even with the same amount of foot traffic. These small tweaks led to more interest and more sales.
The same is true for marketing and brand messaging. When you’re able to correctly position what you do and make a case for why it’s valuable, many more of your existing followers and site visitors will take action and contact you!
Why positioning matters in marketing strategy
There’s a reason it’s important to hammer out your brand positioning early on in your marketing strategy: Positioning dictates everything else you should or should not do in your marketing approach. If it feels like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall – or you’re hopping on (and off!) the bandwagon of platforms like Instagram or Pinterest just because you see other brands doing it – the root of the problem is positioning.
Positioning gives you a clear roadmap on who you are trying to reach and messaging tells you exactly what to say to capture their attention.
- Are you an interior design firm focused on helping companies and office buildings create an atmosphere conducive to creativity and productivity? That’s positioning.
- Are you a local business who works with luxury home builders and clients for custom buildouts, sourcing one-of-a-kind decor? That’s positioning.
- Do you specialize in helping families with 2+ children create family rooms and living spaces that will be destruction-proof for years to come? That’s positioning.
Once your positioning is locked in and you have a clear idea of who you want to target, you can look at where your ideal clients are hanging out both online and offline, and work to define messaging that speaks specifically to their motivations and frustrations – how exactly you can help them solve their problems.
How to position yourself as the go-to brand
The exact positioning you’ll want to use in your marketing varies depending on who you are and what you’re trying to achieve, but generally speaking it’s good to include at least one (and preferably all) of the following points:
- Show off your expertise. Do you have years of experience with color theory or a portfolio of past before-and-after projects? Show that off. Your clients aren’t just purchasing your procurement services; they’re paying a premium to tap your ability to make amazing design decisions quickly and powerfully.
- Make your message about them. The truth is that most customers are thinking about themselves first when they’re shopping around for designers. Dial in to your prospective customers’ pain points, hopes, and dreams. Then speak to them in your language. When you do this, customers sense your empathy and that you “get” them, and they’ll gravitate toward your brand.
- Explain why they should care. Everyone wants to live in a nice space… but why? What does having a functional and pleasing space open up for them? A willingness to throw more dinner parties? A place where their children will want to grow and learn? Focus not only on the features of your services, but also the benefits your clients will reap for years to come.
It can feel easy to carve together a few sentences to put up on your site about who you are and move on to other more pressing projects.
But for your current and future customers, brand messaging and positioning create first impressions you can never take back.
Dial in your messaging first before you tackle other marketing or social media projects and the latter will become quicker and easier over time.
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Are you using a template to map out your brand? If the answer is no, we have a free Brand Guide you can download to get yourself set up for success. Grab your free copy of the template right here.
If you’d rather work with a professional, we offer a Brand Messaging + Positioning package for interior designers and home furnishings brands. Find some time on our calendar for a free 30-min brand review to learn more.