The Power of Brand Positioning with MOF Strategy Director, James Lees

The world is inundated with brands; as of January 2024 there are 5.5 million private sector businesses registered in the UK alone. And although luxury is a more curated collection, it’s still a vast one.

Carving out a place in the mind of contemporary consumers is the goal of every wannabe-timeless brand. Even for those who already are, the goal is still to stay front of mind. Clever marketing campaigns and cool, immersive digital experiences are vital to modern businesses but intelligent brand positioning…

• Cuts through the noise
• Closes the gaps in your brand experience
• Acts as an unbreakable thread, linking every iteration of your brand to a timeless spirit

Three central tenets to a durable brand. But how do you do it?

Be Distinctive and Be Relevant

Branding is all about two things: distinctiveness and relevance. 

How is your brand distinctive from other brands in the market? And how is it relevant to your audience? Exceptional, forward-thinking brands need to have a harmonious mix of both. 

Because a brand can be relevant and forgettable. Or distinctive in something no one would think twice about. 

So when we talk about brand positioning, it’s a journey to discovering how your brand relates to an audience – their lifestyle, their needs and aesthetic sensibilities – and how to do that while being so unique that you exist in a category of one. 

Too many brands get caught up in copying their competitors. Consider the luxury industry’s cascade of metaverse dabbling, where many marques raced to take up space in these shiny new virtual worlds through activations that weren’t true to their spirit. Today, we only remember a handful of them in specifics, and most aren’t thought of favourably.

Even brands who extend similar offerings, whether it’s watches, supercars or seven-star experiences, will serve a distinct desire or lifestyle. Aspirational or otherwise. 

Every travel or hospitality brand has its individual belief of what travel should be and its own flavour of how to achieve that. And it’s the same in fashion. The type of lifestyle depicted in a label’s imagery, video and how they talk about fashion and concept is all informed by their distinctive positioning – born from a philosophy that is uniquely theirs.

The Branding ∞ Conversion Balancing Act

In an industry as primed for innovation as luxury is, businesses habitually prioritise their tech and digital experiences over time for branding work. But when there’s a disconnect between positioning and digital projects, a brand’s overall perception will crack.

The classic, maybe even original, idea of UX was fixated on flow. There was a widely accepted theory that the best kind of experience was one the user didn’t know they were in. 

Much of this way of thinking is purely about removing friction in pursuit of seamless movement that gets the user to the outcome rapidly, ideally in just one click. 

But if you do that with a luxury brand, you kill it. 

And one of the murderer’s could be, and often is, buyer’s remorse. Where you have clients or customers who have bought something too hastily, without having understood its value or the story behind it, not only will they question their relationship with your brand but the perceived value of the product or service is cheapened. 

Whereas when customers are seduced by a product over time, with clever, emotive storytelling – whether it’s being enlightened on how the stitching is painstakingly done by hand or how a concierge will interact with guests from day one of a trip – they’re much more likely to believe the hype. And also, internally, rationalise or post-rationalise their purchase. 

So when there’s a disconnect between the digital experience and brand expression, it’s usually because one side of that core tension is winning out and it’s the wrong one.

When you remove every ounce of friction in favour of conversion, you optimise things to death. 

Smart luxury brands, even when they’re heavily ecommerce-based, will give a trove of information just on a product listing page. Perhaps through video, a stitching guide or other storytelling vehicles – anything that forces the customer to lust after items in these transactional moments. 

Precision Over Pretty Words

On the other hand, luxury can be guilty of fixating too much on branding and in quite flawed ways. 

The language of luxury can be very self-indulgent. And it can be difficult to achieve an elevated essence without reams and reams of meaningless copy and empty statements. It may sound meaningful, but if it’s not been crafted from the consumer perspective and relies on clichés or tired phrases, you’ll lose them by the end of the line. 

Precision without pretension is everything. 

Phrases that saturate industries, like ‘surprise and delight’ in hospitality or ‘putting the customer first’ in retail, they’re tedious. Remove them from your vocabulary. It’s just noise. 

Simultaneously, brands need to realise that there’s some aspects of service that you can’t communicate through words, that need to be felt more than heard or read. 

Hospitality, for example, at its very core is about service. So claiming and reiterating your high-quality, best-in-the-world service is table stakes. It’s expected. 

Brands need to go beyond the bare minimum with their messaging – again, highlighting their distinctiveness from competitors and their relevance to the customer. 

Being classified as luxury doesn’t excuse brands from the necessity of strategic positioning. Without precision, balance, distinctiveness and flexibility, things like internal cultural change, outward-facing innovation and bold creative all become impossible. Without strong fundamentals, everything becomes complex and murky. No one 'gets it', but it's hard to explain why. A skeleton without a soul.

You simply can’t jump into compelling solution design unless you have a sense of the spirit that animates the machine. And that clarity—when things seem effortless and natural—that’s the big difference between good and great.

Choose to be great. Get in touch via hello@matterofform.com to speak with one of our consultants.