Somewhere in many Caribbean companies, resident marketing managers are looking at briefs that say, “We need a new website,” or “We need a rebrand”. Each request will have arrived with a deadline, a budget and a clear expectation that the result should be visible.
What is often missing is a decision about what each business is actually trying to be known for. And that is how a lot of money gets spent solving the wrong problem. A company commissions a sharper visual identity, a more modern website or a campaign with greater production value, then discovers that the undertaking has failed to change the market’s perception of it. This is because while a company can introduce attractive communication without the much-needed foundation, it will fail to build a clear idea of its underlying market position in the customer’s mind.
Execution is not the same thing as strategy
Positioning is what happens when the brand makes the deliberate choice about the place it intends to occupy in a customer’s mind, relative to the other options available. It establishes who the brand is for, what meaningful value it offers, the category in which it competes, and why customers should choose it instead of an alternative. It is not the tagline, logo or campaign theme. Those are expressions of the position.
Harvard Business Review has long framed effective positioning as more than identifying a point of difference. A company must also understand its competitive frame of reference, the expectations it must meet to be considered a credible option, and the distinction it can reasonably own within that frame.[1]
In other words, being different is not enough. The difference must matter to the customer and make sense within the category. This is where many Caribbean companies jump ahead and miss the mark. They move directly to expression: the visuals, the content calendar, the advertising and the website redesign. The problem is not necessarily the creative work. Instead, it’s that the creative work has nothing distinctive to communicate. Expression is what the market sees, but positioning is what gives that expression meaning.
Why companies keep skipping the difficult part
A new campaign can be presented to the board. A redesigned website can be launched. These are tangible signs that something has happened. However, work that has gone into positioning is less visible. Good positioning often produces something less dramatic: research, difficult internal conversations, a sharper definition of the customer, a clearer value proposition, and decisions about what the brand will not try to be. Those decisions are strategically important, but they are harder to display as immediate progress.
There is also pressure for marketing activity. The chief executive wants something new. Sales wants updated collateral. A competitor has launched a campaign. An agency has presented a creative route that everyone likes. Under those conditions, execution can feel like action, while positioning feels like delay. No one considers that the expensive revisions or, worse, the failure of the creative work could stem from faulty positioning.
The cost is usually continued ambiguity
The cost of weak positioning is not always a spectacular rebrand failure. More often, it is the quieter and more persistent cost of ambiguity as the company spends repeatedly because each new campaign must solve the same unanswered problem. Agencies receive briefs filled with broad adjectives such as trusted, innovative, customer-focused and leading. Sales teams describe the business in different ways. Website copy lists services but does not establish a reason to prefer the company. Campaigns change tone throughout the year because there is no central position against which ideas can be judged.
Analysis from Kantar’s BrandZ database, covering approximately 40,000 brands, found a strong relationship between perceived uniqueness and customers’ willingness to pay more.[2] That does not mean every company needs to be radically different in every respect, but it does mean a brand needs a meaningful reason to be chosen, and that reason must be clear enough for customers to recognise.
Harvard Business Review makes a related point: profitable differentiation can be created at any point where a company comes into contact with its customers, not only through the product itself.[3] This means that a business may differentiate through how it advises, delivers, responds, packages, simplifies or reduces risk. Positioning identifies which of those advantages the company can credibly build around.
Without that decision, execution tends to fall back on stereotypical category conventions. The bank talks about trust, the technology company talks about innovation, the professional services firm talks about excellence and the healthcare provider talks about care. And so it goes. The statements may all be true, but they are not distinctive enough to influence the customer’s choice.
What positioning first actually looks like
This is not an argument for a six-month strategy exercise every time a company needs a brochure. Rather it is an argument for sequence. The positioning does not have to be expressed in complicated language, but it does need to be settled before the creative brief is written.
A company that has done the work should be able to answer a few basic questions clearly…
Who are we trying to matter to?
No, “everyone” is not a useful answer, as even a mass-market company must understand the customers, situations or needs around which its strongest relevance is built. When the company knows whose decision it is trying to influence, the position becomes easier to define. That does not necessarily mean excluding everyone else from buying, just being specific about the audience whose needs will lead the strategy.
What are customers comparing us with?
The competition is not always another company in the same category. Depending on the customer, it may be versus using an internal team, a cheaper workaround, an international supplier, continuing with an existing provider, or even doing nothing for a while. So positioning needs to reflect the customer’s real frame of reference, not only the competitor list in the strategy document.
What do we offer that is both meaningful and credible?
A claim may sound appealing and still be useless. “Better service” means very little unless the organisation can define what better service looks like and deliver it consistently. A position must be grounded in a capability, approach, experience or advantage the company can prove. Otherwise, the positioning becomes another promise that marketing is expected to make believable through repetition.
What must customers believe before they will choose us?
A newer financial company may need to establish safety and legitimacy before it can lead with convenience. A private healthcare provider may need to demonstrate clinical confidence before promoting comfort. A professional services firm may need to prove depth of expertise before trying to sound approachable. These are all category requirements: the fundamental expectations a brand must satisfy before its difference becomes persuasive.
What are we choosing not to be?
You have to choose, because positioning involves exclusion. A company cannot be the most specialised and the most broadly accessible, the most premium and the cheapest, or the most traditional and the most disruptive all at the same time, as these opposing positions will create tension. Clear brands make deliberate choices about which qualities will lead. They accept that some opportunities may not fit the position, and that trying to appeal equally to every possible customer usually weakens the meaning of the brand.
Positioning must extend beyond the marketing department
A positioning statement that only the marketing team understands is not yet operating as a strategy. Sales should be able to explain the value without creating its own version of the message. Customer service should know what the promise requires in practice. Product and operations should understand which parts of the offer must be protected. Senior leadership should use the position to make decisions about growth, partnerships, pricing and new services.
This is why positioning cannot be treated as a line of copy created after the important business decisions have already been made. It helps shape those decisions in the first place. The words matter, but the organisation’s ability to deliver what they mean matters more. For a Caribbean company, this can become especially important when growth introduces new services, audiences, branches or markets. The temptation is to keep adding messages so that nobody feels excluded, which results in a longer list of claims and a weaker central idea.
Use the position as a filter
Once the position is clear, execution becomes easier to judge. The question is no longer simply, “Do we like this?” It becomes:
- Does this campaign reinforce the position?
- Does the website make the company easier to understand?
- Does this new service strengthen what we want to be known for, or pull it in another direction?
- Does the sales language make the same promise the customer will experience later?
- Does this creative idea belong specifically to us, or could a competitor run it with a different logo?
Instead of these questions restricting creativity, they give it a job. They also reduce the likelihood that every new stakeholder will pull the work in a different direction. The position becomes a shared standard for evaluating ideas, rather than leaving approval to personal taste or whoever has the most authority in the room.
Very importantly, it also improves the brief, and so the company’s internal creative team and agency can do stronger work when they understand the commercial idea they are being asked to express. Without a clear position, they are often expected to manufacture differentiation through visuals and copy alone.
The compounding effect
Execution that is built on clear positioning creates momentum, and each campaign adds another layer to an idea the audience has already encountered or experienced. The website, packaging, marketing materials and service experience reinforce the same reason to choose the company. The result is that over time the brand becomes easier to recognise, explain and remember.
Many Caribbean companies already use strong creative communication. The error is the absence of a sufficiently defined strategic choice guiding where that effort should go. Before debating fonts, taglines, campaign concepts or which agency should handle the next execution, you should ask the more basic question: what do we want the right customer to understand about us that would make choosing us easier?
Until that answer is clear, more execution will only give the confusion a better-looking veneer.
References
[1] Kevin Lane Keller, Brian Sternthal and Alice Tybout, “Three Questions You Need to Ask About Your Brand,” Harvard Business Review, September 2002.
[2] Kantar, “Can brand differentiation improve marketing effectiveness?” 10 June 2022.
[3] Harvard Business Review, positioning and differentiation research.
