Understanding the distinction between brand positioning and brand proposition is critical to crafting the right strategy for any ambitious professional services firm.

Confused?

Branding is a notoriously ill-defined discipline.

Terms like brand positioning, brand proposition, brand purpose, and many other Ps are bandied about – often interchangeably in the same slide show – by people who really should know better.

This isn’t a textbook, so I won’t bore you by trying to define the lexicon here. Instead, I’m simply going to illustrate how brand strategy can solve specific kinds of brand reputation problems faced by professional service firms by deciding whether the problem is mostly about brand positioning or mostly about brand proposition.

The literal meanings are a good place to start.

Usually, professional service firms find themselves with a brand positioning problem to solve due to a new strategy.

Well placed

Brand positioning is mostly about where you want your firm to be ‘positioned’ in the market landscape–by your clients and prospects, of course, not just in your heads.

In professional services, the client’s perspective of the brand landscape is often, at first glance, dominated by clusters of firms rather than individual names—Big Four, Magic Circle, Strategy Houses, etc.

These are often powerful brands, even if no one owns or controls them. Clients naturally do this because it’s how our brains are wired to navigate the world—we look for patterns to help manage the complexity.

Often, they can be helpful to individual firms, but sometimes, they become a problem because the cluster brand reinforces its positioning problem. It matters less if the term is malleable—like Big Tech or Big Four—but terms like Magic Circle, which emphasise particular geographies, can simultaneously be valuable assets and brand positioning straight jackets.

Then, dig a little deeper. You’ll discover other positioning features that apply to these clusters and their firms—smaller, bigger, premium, mid-market, innovators, UK firms, US firms, etc. Again, these tags can be tailwinds or headwinds depending on market dynamics and the firm’s strategic ambitions.

If your firm has a brand positioning problem, then this should be the primary focus of your brand strategy.

In more crowded sectors, these labels can also extend to more specialist aspects of brand positioning—litigation specialist (law), tall buildings (architects), fixed income (banks)—and depending on the sector and the perceived importance of specialist knowledge and expertise, these can get incredibly tightly defined.

Brands are well positioned when the market perceives them to be roughly where they want to be in the competitive landscape. Obviously, firms have a brand positioning problem to solve if they aren’t.

Strategy made visible

Usually, professional service firms find themselves with a brand positioning problem to solve due to a new strategy.

Whether out of choice or necessity, they expand to a new geography, discipline or specialism. Or, they see an opportunity to move to a different place in the food chain – usually higher up it, but occasionally towards more significant revenues with lower margins.

If your firm has a brand positioning problem, this should be the primary focus of your brand strategy.

Brand repositioning takes time and demands consistency, but it is well worth it if the firm’s strategy has been carefully thought through.

Good examples of successful brand positioning strategies include Latham & Watkins repositioning the law firm, first from a premium West Coast brand to a premium national US brand, then again from a premium US brand to a premium international/global brand.

Nokia has successfully repositioned its brand twice in its history, from a paper pulp business to the largest mobile phone brand in the world and, following the demise of its mobile phone business, into the world’s third-largest digital network equipment brand.

Once one of the defining brands in the executive search sector, Korn Ferry has repositioned the brand to become a much broader ‘organisational consulting firm’.

A successful proposition-led brand strategy will focus much more on perceived differentiation

Well-chosen

Brand propositions are different. Propositions come into play when you’re positioned roughly in the right place in the brand landscape. Now, the question is how competitive your brand is vis-à-vis the other firms also ‘positioned’ in this space.

This is the more familiar aspect of brand strategy because it’s much closer to how most consumer brands use their communications to compete and applies equally well to professional service firms.

A successful proposition-led brand strategy will focus much more on perceived differentiation than a positioning-led one. It has to balance specificity with application across the firm’s core services – not always easy.

Good examples of successful brand strategies mainly focused on brand propositions include McKinsey’s efforts over the last decade to build credibility in all things digital to complement its data—and finance-based proposition.

Accenture has also made a considerable effort to add creativity to its technology brand proposition for both the Web 2.0 era and, even more so, the coming Web 3.0.

PA Consulting has successfully focused its brand proposition around innovation with its ‘bringing ingenuity to life’ brand strategy. 

Horses & courses

Of course, the real world is messy, and your firm may have positioning and proposition problems to solve. The advice here isn’t to ignore one of them but to distinguish between them in devising your brand strategy and implementation. If you try to focus on both, you will likely not do justice to either.

End