Brand Image and Positioning

Brand Image and Positioning

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Brand image is the set of associations a buyer holds for a brand. Positioning is the deliberate aim to hold a defined image relative to other brands in the minds of a chosen group of buyers. The first describes what is in memory, and the second describes what a brand sets out to put there.

What it is

Kevin Lane Keller's 1993 model of brand equity gives the image half a precise shape. Brand knowledge in that model has two parts, awareness and image, and image is a network of associations held in memory. A brand has positive equity when buyers recognise it and hold associations about it that are favourable, strong and unique.

Positioning turns that description into a goal. Consumer behaviour textbooks such as Consumer Behaviour by Cathy M. Neal, Pascale G. Quester and Del I. Hawkins treat it as choosing the image a brand should hold for a target segment and keeping the whole marketing mix consistent with it. Perceptual maps, which place brands on attribute axes drawn from buyers' judgements, are one way to see where a brand sits, and repositioning is a deliberate change of that place. David Ogilvy, in Ogilvy on Advertising, made the practitioner's version of the case: a consistent brand image built over years is worth more than a run of clever one-off campaigns.

In effect

In practice, positioning is a short list of associations a brand wants a buyer to hold, decided before the identity and campaign work that will carry them. That is the distinction the Why We Project article on branding agencies and brand strategy agencies draws: strategy work chooses the associations, and identity work makes them visible and repeatable.

What it does not say

Positioning does not guarantee that buyers will read a brand the way it intends. A defined position has to be tested against how buyers actually see the brand, and a brand's image is formed by everything it does, not only by its stated position.

Sources

  1. Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700101
  2. Neal, C. M., Quester, P. G., & Hawkins, D. I. Consumer Behaviour.
  3. Ogilvy, D. Ogilvy on Advertising.