Disclaimer: This blog was originally published on LinkedIn.
The term “brandscape” isn’t just a fancy buzzword.
A brandscape is a crucial concept that defines your brand’s position in the ever-changing marketplace. Your brandscape—derived from the words brand and landscape—is a map of your brand’s territory in the online and offline world. Every brand aims not only to exist but to stand out and own an opening in this vast brandscape.
The question is: How can your brand go beyond simply being present to making a noteworthy impact?
Understanding the Brandscape
Before diving deep into the strategy, it’s essential to grasp the essence of the “brandscape.” Imagine a vast canvas painted with a myriad of colors, each representing a brand. Some colors overlap, some are bright and eye-catching, and others fade into the background. This canvas is the market, and the brandscape analysis is the keen-eyed artist who can distinguish between each hue, shade, and tint.
Your brandscape analysis must be thorough and precise. It isn’t about merely identifying what differentiators competitors are staking a claim to; it’s about understanding the undercurrents, the shifts, and the voids.
The Power of Differentiation
In a sea of similarities, differentiation is power. Companies that simply echo the sentiments and differentiators of others often fade into brand irrelevance. But those that dare to be different, that identify and embrace a unique position, rise above the noise.
For the CEO or marketing leader, understanding this is not just essential, it’s transformative. A business’ success hinges on its ability to stand out, to be recognized, and to be remembered. By seeking out and claiming an open space in the brandscape, companies not only distinguish themselves but also secure a vantage point from which they can better address their target market.
Conducting a Brandscape Analysis
A brandscape analysis is an evaluation of the overall environment in which a brand operates. It offers actionable insights that drive informed decision-making. Follow these five steps when conducting a brandscape analysis:
- Identify key players: Begin by listing your biggest competitors. This list should come from a combination of your stakeholder interviews and your customer surveys. It’s important to assess both who your internal team and your customers believe you compete against. This isn’t just about the big names, but also about the niche players who might be claiming a significant space in the brandscape.
- Pinpoint decision-making criteria: Pinpoint the differentiators most crucial to your potential customers. These are the factors that sway decisions, shape opinions, and drive purchases. To choose the top two decision-making factors that truly inspire a prospective customer to buy in your industry, leverage your research— specifically your customer survey.
- Plot the brandscape: A brandscape is a grid with X and Y axes that allows you to compare how your brand positioning stacks up against that of your top competitors on two important customer decision-making criteria. Use the X axis to measure one of those decision-making criteria and the Y axis to measure the other. At the end of each axis, note the range of brand positioning that you and your competitors communicate for that particular decision-making criteria—from the best offering in the market to the worst. Now, plot each of your top competitors on the brandscape based on where their positioning places them. This gives you a graphical representation of where each brand stands. Note: If there are more than two critical customer decision-making criteria to consider, you will need multiple brandscape graphs.
- Seek out the gaps: Once you have the brandscape laid out, it becomes easier to spot the gaps. These are the unclaimed areas teeming with untouched opportunities. Naturally, not every gap is an opportunity.
- Reposition if necessary: If a gap you identify in the market is viable and aligns with your brand’s core values and mission, consider repositioning. Adjusting your brand messaging to fill this void can give you an unparalleled advantage because you are taking ownership of a unique value proposition that is important to your targeted customers and not claimed by others. Keep in mind that if it’s a positioning adjustment that may be easy for your competitors to replicate, you’d better flood the market with your new messaging so you can steal as much share as possible before they catch up. Speed to market wins here.
Embracing Your Brandscape Position
Once you’ve identified your unique position in the brandscape, embrace it wholeheartedly. It’s a commitment—a declaration that you are here to fill a void, to offer something that others aren’t. It’s a chance to claim a space that is uniquely yours—a space that resonates with your brand’s values and vision and, most importantly, the market!
Moreover, finding and embracing your position often leads to further innovation. When brands realize that they can claim a particular space in the market, they are driven to innovate to solidify their position. This drive leads to groundbreaking products, services, and solutions.
Thus, a new brandscape position (based on a thorough brandscape analysis) doesn’t just benefit the marketing department; it also fuels the research and development, product development, and customer service teams, catalyzing creativity.
This revolution in mindset to own a position in the brandscape challenges businesses to introspect, re-evaluate their strategies, and dare to be different. And in this challenge lies the promise of a unique position in a crowded marketplace and the promise of a voice that is not just heard but also remembered.
The Domino Effect
But beware: Once a brand repositions itself to fill a gap in the brandscape, it often triggers a domino effect. Competitors take notice, markets shift, and new trends emerge. As a CEO or marketing leader, it’s essential to not only be aware of this but to anticipate it.
The brandscape is dynamic, and today’s clear opening might be tomorrow’s crowded space. Continuous analysis, agility, and adaptability are the keys to ensuring that a brand remains relevant and dominant. Given its importance, businesses should conduct a brandscape analysis quarterly to adapt to market changes, competitor movements, and emerging trends.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
Understanding your brandscape is one of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 BattlesTM Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
