What’s a Brand Key Model? 2023 Guide to Positioning Your Brand
Last update: 17 November 2023 at 02:59 pm
5.00/5It is often a challenge for companies that have numerous products, such as multi-brand groups, to present and position themselves as a unified brand.
Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) producers like to use the brand key model to raise their profile to customers. The brand key model is a slightly more modern and detailed alternative to Esch’s Brand Wheel, which can also be used to analyze the brand model of different brands in several categories.
For successful brand positioning and brand management, it is essential to know your competition. It is equally important to know your own brand and, above all, your own customers.
To see this side more clearly, the brand key model is a good tool. The Brand Key can also help in the search for the right positioning in the midst of a confusing and sometimes over-saturated market.
Defining the Core Ideas of the Brand
What does your brand stand for? What are its values and morals? You should be able to describe both what your brand creates and stands for in a single sentence to create its “genetic code”.
A brand’s “genetic code” can be found everywhere from its brand positioning to product development. From its visibility, the “genetic code” of your brand should therefore create a brand essence.
If you want to define your brand essence, it’s worth asking yourself three questions:
- What are your goals?
- What exactly do you do?
- How do you do what you do?
Brand Key: Brand Positioning of the Profile as a Successful Positioning Model
Once you have defined your brand DNA, four elements for branding follow directly.
- Benefits: What advantages do customers derive from buying your brand (brand offers)?
- Values: What values does your brand represent? (Your brand values, your “personality”)
- Reasons to believe: What are the reasons to believe? What is your brand promise to your target market?
- USP: What unique selling proposition or propositions differentiate your company and brand competes from other similar services or products and other brands in your particular market?
You should create and formulate all four questions as precisely as possible. The more compact you can formulate answers to these questions, the easier it will be for you to work with and decide on the basis of these answers in the future.
This part of the brand key actively helps you to better understand your own brand and, if necessary, to readjust the brand image.
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Four Questions – Infinite Answers
Take a look at your “benefits.” Today, a low price is no longer a truly unique selling proposition for brand positioning. Nowadays, consumers also expect products to be of a certain level of quality, and you have to make this a part of your brand key.
Instead, functional or emotional benefits are much more important. Yes, you read that right. Emotional benefits, because the decision for a certain brand can cause a positive feeling in the consumer’s mind – and this is a valuable asset.
This can be almost anything from environmental sustainability to fair trade to supporting young single parents. Think outside the box!
Or have you found a way to implement a specific feature into your products that no one else has thought of before? Let your customers share in your creativity! Get some consumer insights to help you in your brand strategy.
It’s a little more difficult to articulate your personality as a brand. However, in the brand key, this is one of the most essential elements, because the personality of your brand will – indirectly, as well as the essence – influence all further decisions in your communication and product development.
Compelling Facts Can Help You Understand
While there is plenty of room for creativity in marketing, customers want guarantees. Reasons, or reasons why your brand actually delivers the promised advantage over other brands, demand hard facts.
In this process, try to find an answer to why your product brand, in particular, is the best choice for your target group in your chosen industry. Here, it’s worth cutting back on the creativity mentioned at the beginning and sticking strictly to tangible facts.
On the one hand, these are easier for you to use in communication, and on the other hand, they are also much easier for customers to understand. They are also objectively comparable to other brands.
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Once you have checked off these three elements, there remains one last look back at your brand: the unique selling point.
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish this from the functional benefits or brand values, but defining this characteristic as precisely as possible is worthwhile. After all, it gives you the opportunity to stand out from your competitors.
With the USP, you actively help your clientele to choose you among all the other brands via competitive reasoning.
Brand Essence: A View of the Competitive Environment
Now that you’ve taken an in-depth look at your brand from the inside, the next step in the brand key is to also look at your competitive environment. Again, there are four factors to look at.
- Root Strengths: the relative value and advantages on which the brand is based
- Competitive Environment: alternatives that the customer sees (for example: a sales idea from competitors)
- Target: the person who will always prefer your brand
- Consumer Insight: the knowledge that you have about your customers (for example: data of previous purchase insights)
A look at the visual of the brand key model will tell you that Root Strength is the foundation of the model.
Accordingly, you should also work your way up from your roots. What is it that you base your branding on, what are the benefits or values that have characterized your brand since the beginning? Again, the more precisely you formulate, the easier it will be to use these contributions later.
The competition and the target audience are equally important elements in the brand key model. This is not surprising, as they are, in doubt, the same customers you are vying for with your competition with their brands.
Equally Important, but Not the Same
You should always look at your competition from the perspective of the target group. How does your customer see the target market and alternatives to your brand?
The more honest you are with yourself, the more accurate your picture will be – and the better you can position yourself in the middle of the market in the future.
It is similar to the target, your target audience. It’s no use if you want a certain clientele but they simply don’t harmonize with your brand (so far?). Behavior lived values, and socio-economic factors are just as influential elements you should define in your target person as personal attitudes to brand-relevant issues.
The last factor, which is also the link to the inside view of your brand, is the knowledge you have about your customer.
However, this is not about your “template customer” but the real desires and needs of your customers, to which you want to give an answer with your brand, can or will eventually. Here, thorough acquisitions help establish future processes that bring your position closer to your target.
Brand Key Conclusion
The brand key serves as the foundational framework that guides a brand’s identity and strategy in the ever-evolving marketplace.
By thoroughly analyzing competitors and understanding consumer behavior, it provides crucial insights into the market landscape. This defined structure aids in developing a brand’s functional aspects, ensuring that it resonates with its target audience.
Through a combination of market research and consumer understanding, the brand key becomes the cornerstone upon which all marketing initiatives are built. Brand key models lead the brand towards a distinctive position, enabling it to stand out amidst competition and establish a compelling connection with its consumers.
So whether you’re presiding over a long-established brand that you want to reposition as a brand or you’re just breaking into the market with your start-up, the brand key is an optimal tool to break down your company, your customers, and your competition.
The necessity of such an analysis for brand management and the correct brand positioning of the company on the market is probably clear to everyone.
Only through a deep understanding of all categories explained above, the right position of the brand can be found, thus facilitating navigation in the marketplace. Thus, necessary expansions of a brand, as well as individual company departments become clear. Additionally, you can always call on a branding agency to help with strategy and development.
You, too, can use the brand key model to make a name for yourself and optimally address your target customer!
