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🧠 Piping Positioning - What your clients think about you.

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 252 - Piping Positioning, we wanted to talk about a buzzy marketing concept called "product positioning." Think of positioning as the mental real estate your bakery is renting in the heads of your customers.

Here's the catch - 🫵 you don't control what they think about you, but rather all the pieces of marketing create an experience they recall when they hear your name. Let me explain.

Having recently moved, I've been targeted in a half dozen ads about anything and everything home goods, but one brand keeps rising to the top - of both feeds and word-of-mouth.

Quince is an up-and-coming household brand that positions itself as "luxury and quality for less," 💸💸💸💸 going as far as to directly compare their prices against popular brands like West Elm, Pottery Barn, and Williams-Sonoma (⚖️ there's a lawsuit about this, actually).

How do they do the same thing at the same quality, but for less? Their approach of "radical transparency" explains it just about everywhere on their website. They source the same materials from the same factories as the higher-priced brands, and then cut out the middleman by selling directly from their website to consumers.

Other examples of brands that have done a great job at positioning - try guessing these before you peek (some may be location dependent):

• 🧠 Safe Cars = Volvo
• 🧠 Customer Service Chicken = Chick-Fil-A
• 🧠 Everyday products at a lower cost = Walmart
• 🧠 Quick Oil Changes = Jiffy Lube
• 🧠 Judge-free Gym = Planet Fitness
• 🧠 Gas with Great Convenience Store = Sheetz
• 🧠 Quick Burgers = McDonald's 
• 🧠 Quality Groceries = Wegmans / Whole Foods 
• 🧠 Streaming Service = Netflix 
• 🧠 Best Dating App = Hinge 
• 🧠 Social Media = Facebook

What made us all think of mostly the same brands? That's positioning. If I said "really high-quality burger," you likely wouldn't think of McDonald's, right?

“Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” - Jack Trout 

Positioning can take multiple forms and varies depending on who you're targeting (Volvo positions both as safe and as luxurious, depending on who their target market is for the vehicle). Price-based is the route Quince

🏷️ Price-based positioning is the route Quince is taking, and while we often tell bakers not to compete on price, you can position on price depending on your targets. For example, we're not the most expensive cookie class instructors, so we could compete there if we wanted, without touching our margins at all. 

Quality and premium positioning you see with brands like ⌚ Rolex or Apple - brands you know won't be cheap, but that's almost why you want them in the first place.

Application / Use-case positioning is a brand that comes to mind when you need to solve a specific problem. Which app would you use for online meetings? Zoom, right? What do you reach for when your nose is running? Kleenex? And then there's the funny backstory to Vecro (a brand so positioned that it's replaced its product name - hook and loop - with its brand). 

Take the concept of positioning into your week and see which brands have rented your mental landscape. The positioning formula is this:

• For [Target Audience], [Brand Name] is the [Category] that [Point of Differentiation] because [Reason to Believe].