marketing defines the brand, and product brings the brand to life by building a great product.

1.) The positioning model describes the first three components of the brand definition: positioning, customer benefit, and personality.

2.) The brand pyramid adds the two remaining elements: aspiration and emotion.

1.) In simple terms, how do you describe your product or company?

2.) How does it benefit customers?

3.) How do you define its personality? (The question behind the question: how do you want your product to relate to customers?)

Use clear, precise sixth-grade language. Consumers are busy and don’t have time to parse complicated ideas.

Be brief. Most teams begin with lots of complicated ideas. The key is to simplify and focus on a few, easy-to-communicate ideas.

Defining the personality of your product describes how you want your brand to relate to customers.

Why does the brand model incorporate emotion? The simple answer: it makes things memorable.

Acknowledging emotion in the brand framework helps make products memorable.

In the long-term, if you fully deliver the product and its emotional benefits to your customers, how might your product dent the universe? Think twenty years into the future.

The headline provides an executive summary of the model. In cases where you develop an advertising campaign, it is the title of an ad campaign.

The “something bigger” was to deliver an entertainment experience that transported you to the magical place movies can take you — to escape reality.

Think Big. Apple delivers revolutionary innovation, Nike enables customers to fulfill their full human potential, and SpaceX is working to save the human race by colonizing Mars. The “something bigger” is meant to inspire your team to build a great product and company over fifty years.

The important thing is to take your best shot at defining the model, then explore the various ideas with consumers via focus groups, surveys, but most importantly, A/B tests.

We continually A/B tested different positioning and branding approaches on the non-member homepage. We focused on two key metrics:

1.) Trials/Visitors. Historically, 2% of visitors to the non-member site started a free trial.
2.) Conversion from free to paid membership. At the end of a free trial, about 90% of customers converted to paid membership.

Customers weren’t interested in sharing their movie tastes with friends, and when they did, their friends thought they had terrible taste!

“Today, brands are not the preserve of a marketing department. Brands are too important to be left to the marketing department — or any other ‘department,’ come to that. Organizational ghettoes do not create vibrant world-changing brands.” — Thomas Gad