How to position your brand differently among dozens of competitors?

Whenever you are given tips on branding, You are advised to change hundreds of things to distinguish your position in the market. In reality, all you need are tiny little changes.

If you want your customers to look at your brand as interesting and superior, you don’t need to change your product.

You are going to like this podcast because You are going to know how you can position your brand so that more people say yes to you with some tiny but very important tweaks.

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How can you look at one thing from two different angles? Two friends are arguing about whether it is ok to smoke and pray at the same time. They decide to settle the argument by asking a priest. One friend asks: “Is it allowed to smoke while praying?” – and he was told no. Of Course not, you should be focused while praying and do nothing else.

Now, here’s the twist.

The other friend asks: “Is it allowed to pray while smoking?” – and is told yes, you could pray anytime, anywhere!?Just small changes in framing lead to huge differences.?This art of ‘framing’ can get people to change the way they think and respond to you. It’s happening because our mind looks at something and thinks according to the situation, not just things alone.

If you know how to do ‘framing’, you can position yourself and your brand whole differently.

It has the power to get people to pay attention to you. ‘Framing’ is used intelligently by many successful companies to sell their products. They have a common product or service but they can win against all competitors. It’s because they know how to get people to look at their product whole differently and get them to say ‘WOW’.

In this podcast, we will find out how you too can look different even if you are the same as many others in the market.

You are going to learn how you can beat the big corporations by presenting yourself from a whole unique angle. In this long podcast episode, We are going to discuss 3 things.

1. How to get customers to pay attention to the interesting thing of your product?
2. How to position the interesting part of your product?
3. How to look better against your absolutely similar competitor without changing your product?

By the end of the podcast, You are going to know how you can position your brand so that more people say yes to you. Let’s discuss, shall we?

David Attenborough is one of the best people to teach about wildlife, nature and earth.

I was watching some of his series on Netflix recently. Such as Our planet, a life on our planet and Life in colour with David Attenborough. He can turn a seemingly boring and very common thing into a very interesting thing. When you watch his videos, he shows you the entire garden and a lot of flowers. And then he picks up just one flower and ignores everything away.

He gets your attention completely on just one thing by ignoring everything around it.

He would say, “Look at this sunflower.” And You can’t get distracted. Because he knows that if he presents everything as important, nothing is important. If you too are trying to get people to pay attention to everything, they will not be interested.

That’s how professional photographers teach amateur photographers too.

A professional photographer teaches techniques to draw attention to something interesting in a way that viewers eyes are attracted to it. They start with teaching how to crop. If you want to focus on the iconic, you need to get rid of clutter. You need to eliminate what’s not important. You don’t need to show everything.

Focus is everything and people will focus on what you want them to focus on.

Professional photographers teach to focus on something really emotional and interesting. Select to focus on something interesting and your photos will be interesting. If you learn this, your photos will be far better than most photographers out there.

In the same way, you don’t need to get your customers’ attention on everything that you present.

Just find one feature and make it interesting. Make it really interesting. If everything is interesting in what you offer, then nothing is interesting. Get people to pay attention to just one thing. That one thing can be just one solution, benefit, feature or promise. Ignore the rest. Then you should do what the professional photographers do next, which is called ‘positioning’.?Where in your photo should the main feature or object be positioned. Let’s dive in, shall we?

People find something interesting when it’s off the mark.

There was a famous English painter called John Thomas Smith. In 1797, he came up with a rule to create better scenic paintings. He named it the rule of thirds.?We don’t look at the picture in just one piece.?We create an imaginary grid of nine panels in one picture. Just like a tic-tac-toe board. Two lines horizontal and two lines vertical intersecting at four points and making nine equal-sized rectangular areas.

John Thomas Smith asks you to do something interesting.

Instead of the centre, you paint the most prominent object at one of the four intersections. Slightly off centre. Why? Because that makes it easier for our eyes to unsettle through the painting. Placing the iconic object right in the centre doesn’t allow you to know how your eyes should move.

Unequal partitions and placement lead to better attention on the whole painting.

You can place anywhere slightly away from the centre.?Every photographer and painter have their own style of placing objects. Understanding how our mind processes things are what is important to understand positioning and placement.

You need to follow two rules for good framing of your product

1. Crop. Focus on the iconic object and get rid of the clutter. Not everything is important
2. Position. Put the iconic object where people’s attention would flow with ease. You need to place your product slightly off the centre where people can comfortably look differently.

Let’s find out how different brands are positioning themselves.

Do you want to sleep better or meditate better? Or do you want to do both things better?

Surprisingly, a mobile app will suggest you do this. There are two mobile apps called ‘Headspace’ and ‘Calm’, which provide an almost similar solution. Both applications are meditation apps that you can install on your phones.

So, how do they communicate their solution?

The tagline of the Headspace app is ‘Less Stressed, More Resilient and Happier’. Whereas the tagline of the Calm app is “Sleep better, Stressless and Live better. Both are offering the same but guess which is doing a lot better than another one??

Headspace started two years before Calm.

But Calm app is a more popular app and it’s growing faster and recently valued at over $2 billion dollars. They grew faster than headspace because of their positioning. They both have the same market and they provide the solution. Yet, they both are seen differently by their customers because both apps are positioning themselves differently.

So, how both are sending a different message even though they both do the same work?

The Calm decided to focus on solving sleep with meditation. Headspace merely focuses on the whole meditation market and doesn’t focus on anything specific. As investor Sarah Tavel says, sleep is a problem for everyone. Whereas meditation is merely a desire for some.

People pay for the problem they want to solve more than the things they just desire.

Better sleep is just a more painful problem. It is a way more pathetic problem for those who can’t sleep. They know how it feels due to insufficient sleep.?Not everyone is interested in meditation.?If you compare both ‘better sleep and meditation’, better sleep is more of a need for people whereas being better at mediation is only a want.?

In the book ‘Offer Craft’, we show people how to find the pressing and important problem.

Most customers can’t tell their problems. It’s not because they don’t want to tell. It’s because they don’t know how to say it. The system in the book ‘offer craft’ will show you the exact process to find the most important problem they are facing and how to come up with the product or service that solves the same problem.

The Calm app grew faster than its competitors because the founder found out the exact problem people face and ignored the rest.

The book ‘offer craft’ will show you how to find that one important problem rather than so many problems. It’s available on amazon. Go to Amazon and buy the book. Why? Because when you get your customers to focus on the more important and pressing problem, you’ll win.?You can also position yourself with the benefit without talking about the problem. Let’s find out how.

You can build a website with e-commerce for free.

?Shopify and WordPress are two giant software platforms people use to create and host their websites. Millions of websites run on both these platforms. And from the solution point of view, both offer similar benefits.?Both provide almost equal features. You can blog using both Shopify as well as WordPress. You can sell your products through both of them. They both give the flexibility to build the website the way you want.

WordPress started few years before Shopify.

Most developers will even say that WordPress is richer in terms of features and more adaptable. But from a revenue point of view, Shopify is way ahead of WordPress.?WordPress started as a blogging platform and then added other features like e-commerce. Whereas Shopify started as an e-commerce platform and then added features like blogging. While today, both have the same features but their positioning is still offering the same as when they started.

Both have the same features but they offer differently. And that makes the whole difference.

WordPress’s tagline is: Create a free website or blog.

Shopify’s tagline is: Start a business, grow your business.

For WordPress, building a website or blog is positioned more importantly, and e-commerce is the secondary feature. And it’s the opposite for Shopify. Well, Shopify built the online store as their main feature and blogging are positioned as just a very minor feature.

Your features and benefit can make a big impact in people’s mind if you do it tactfully.

And as psychologist Solomon Asch shows, the first word sticks. Asch asked two groups of people to judge a person. Let’s find out what he did. Listen carefully and judge yourself.

The first group is asked: John is envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent. In general, how emotional do you think John is? The second group is asked: John is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn and envious. In general, how emotional do you think John is?

The results? The first group judged John as a much more emotional person. If you’ve heard the description closely, you know that the same 6 words are used to describe John.?Just their ordering is different. But a brand is formed with its first impression.?

People will connect your company’s positioning to the first main benefit you offer to them.

And not to all the features that you’ve built. So make sure you lead with your main most in-demand feature and not the first feature you started out with.

That takes us almost to the end of the podcast. Let’s find out what actions you can take after this podcast?

Just small changes in framing lead to huge differences.?This art of ‘framing’ can get people to change the way people think and respond to you.?You need to focus on just one important aspect and crop all the other things. Place your best object where people pay attention easily. You need to place your product slightly off the centre where people can comfortably look differently.

Also, people pay for the problem they want to solve more than the things they just desire.

People will connect your company’s positioning to the first main benefit you offer to them. And not to all the features that you’ve built. So make sure you lead with your main most in-demand feature and not the first feature you started out with. Don’t hide the most important benefit or solution amongst all the other clutter.?

If you show everything as important, your customers find nothing as important. It’s your job to get the attention where you want them to.