Marketing Artifacts: Brand Positioning Statements?

I recently struck up a conversation with a group of friends and former colleagues who are branding experts.  I’m working with a new company and wanted some examples of positioning statements.  The responses I received were intriguing.  A handful of folks sent examples.  One response from a VP of Global Branding was contrarian.

I have come to feel that positioning statements are mostly a waste of time and energy unless they are amazingly concise and contain 1 idea. The whole P&G  ‘For (target audience) who (list of needs) we provide (benefit) (benefit) benefit) because only we provide (reason to believe’ pro forma statement construct seems woefully cumbersome today and very communications brief driven.
 
3-5 great attributes you want your brand to stand for/represent seems to lead to better creative briefs and ergo better creative work both in terms of communication and product/service design than positioning statements.

Wow!  This from a guy who’s spent much of his career wrestling with these issues with F500 brands.   One of our colleagues, who spends his days shepherding marketing for technology startup companies, responded as follows:

Name these companies:
 
1) The computer for the rest of us
 
2) Networking networks
 
3) The world's information in one click
 
4) Personal video broadcasting network
 
These are not tag-lines. The companies who expressed these words successfully positioned the value proposition and differentiation within a simple ‘one-liner’. Founders and executives delivered these one-liners to everyone who would listen and whom they needed to fold into the cause – investors, landlords, lawyers, recruits, customers, and partners.

And yet another response (from someone who’s a hybrid technology/marketing guru) provided another dimension:

Information today flows every which way. 

The "shape" of the brand in the minds of customers may be more varied now.

Some percent of the variation is not good, but some may very well be.

Over-constraining the ‘position’ with too much specificity would not reduce variation (provide management control) anyway.

Therefore craft a simple, succinct statement that does a better job of absorbing or exploiting complexity (variation) rather than avoiding it.

So it seems the positioning statement is not going the way of the Dodo bird.  But it has evolved to something more practical.  In a world where brands are verbs instead of nouns, positioning statements have become the headlines that encapsulate the action instead of static monuments to marketing discipline.  The exercise of designing a “classic” positioning statement is often a good one … it forces focus on critical marketing issues (audience/target market, competition, differentiators, etc.).  But the result needs to be the brand experience, not a couple of awkwardly constructed sentences that collect dust in the marketing department.

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