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When I spoke yesterday at the 2008 Forum Partnership Symposium about brand positioning (see part of the presentation above or click here), one of the points I made is that when building a brand position, it’s more effective to focus on being different than being better. In fact, I blogged about it over a year ago, in Part 1 and Part 2.

Our moderator, Ron Shevlin, had some good questions for me, and constructively disagreed with me on that point. My hope and assumption is that there will be a healthy follow-up discussion on the industry blogs about important topics from the Symposium, so please stay tuned!

Ron’s questions have left me thinking about ways I could better articulate and clarify my opinions and thoughts on the important topic of “better vs. different”–and in hindsight I’m not sure if I was as clear as I originally thought I was. In fact, to be honest, after seeing and discussing William Azaroff’s excellent presentation on Vancity’s leveraging of the social economy, I’m convinced that my opinion and Ron’s are actually not entirely different….but rather just confused by semantics.

There will certainly be more of my thoughts to come on this topic shortly, but for now, here’s one way to sum it up what I was trying to say:

If you’ve got 10 words to express what makes your credit union special, don’t use words that end in -er or -est, as in “we’re friendliER” or “we have the smartEST people.” Because if you do, all you’re doing is comparing yourself to other credit unions, and saying that you the same as them, only a better version.

Secondly, I believe your credit union SHOULD be better (nicer, friendlier, more competent, etc.), but that you simply cannot use this as the premise for your positioning strategy. Being nicer, friendlier, more competent, etc. are critical….but they are minimum requirements to even compete. The positioning should go beyond that and focus on a relevant difference.

More to come….

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 8:56 am and is filed under Bank Branding, Credit Union Branding, Bank Marketing, Branding, Credit Union Marketing, Corporate branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.