60-Second Brand Strategies: De-Positioning

Want to know the most overall effective brand strategy? The one that chooses customers to choose your brand over the others? The one brand strategists don’t talk about? It’s called de-positioning and it strategically highlights a positive feature of your brand to weaken your competitor’s position against you. Here’s what you need to know. First, it’s not negative campaigning. In de-positioning, you never mention your opponents. Instead, you call attention to one of your brand strengths that competitors don’t have, or can’t do very well. For example, when people were already concerned about the cybersecurity risk posed by voice recognition software, Apple embraced privacy as its core brand value which effectively raised doubts about its current and future competitors’ intentions. Advantage: Apple—that’s how you use one big idea to crush your competition.