Positioning’s New 95-5 Rule: Why You Need A Stronger Brand POV
We all know the original 95-5 rule for marketing: that only 5% of your buyers are in-market at a given time.
But once they are in-market, which brands do they think of first?
This is where positioning and your brand’s POV come into play.
The competitive landscape is insanely noisy right now. And with AI’s impact on content, marketing, and tech development, the volume of that noise is only going up.
To have any shot at capturing mindshare with your target market, you need a strong brand pov and razor sharp positioning.
This is the only way for customers to see and remember you.
And according to the most recent data with our positioning and messaging app SmokeLadder, only 5% of brands hit that mark.
Now combine these two ideas:
- Only 5% of your buyers are in-market
- Only 5% of brands have strong positioning
Together it creates The 5-5 Squeeze – coming in from both sides:
- A narrow slice of potential buyers
- A narrow slice of brands that stand out
But a big challenge like this also creates a big opportunity for brands.
You can’t control how much of your audience is in-market. But a strong POV and positioning can earn mindshare before they’re ready so that you’re in the consideration set when it’s time to buy.
What Is Your Brand’s POV?
Your Brand’s POV (or brand point of view, or brand perspective) is a close cousin of your positioning.
Brand POV starts with an idea around:
- Why an industry is broken
- What big shift impacts everyone in the space
- How things would need to change to improve a market challenge
It’s the philosophy or belief that fuels the more structured output of your actual positioning.
Your Brand POV can be structured as:
- Old Way vs. New Way: How a particular process or action usually gets done and what new options can improve it (see, Figma’s push into collaborative design instead of sending files back and forth)
- Common Enemy: What big challenge exists in a space that we’ve grown to accept, should we eliminate (See, Slack’s battle against email)
- David vs. Goliath: Where a startup or challenger brand takes on a specific flaw of a market leader (See, DuckDuckGo’s focus on privacy over Google)
This is the kind of unique perspective that guides your internal team’s marketing and sales efforts.
It shows your brand’s depth of expertise in your category.
It creates a sense of authority around your thinking.
It also makes sure your positioning doesn’t fall flat.
Positioning Highlight Points – What Buyers Remember
While your brand pov serves as the seed of your differentiation, your positioning crystallizes it.
And to make sure that positioning cuts through the noise it needs to amplify that specific stance.
It requires hard decisions and tradeoffs.
It involves risk.
By definition when you plant a flag on an idea it naturally creates contrast from alternatives.
It means you separate yourself from the safety of the pack.
And while that may sound scary, it’s the exact thing that fuels growth.
The goal of your positioning is to:
- Focus on a specific set of high value points
- Separate from what key competitors offer
That’s the 1-2 punch to build a clear, memorable position.
Again, based on the data we have via SmokeLadder, we can see that brands don’t do this enough.
SmokeLadder scores each brand across 24 points of value they could potentially provide to customers.
For each point, we evaluate the strength of focus on a scale of 1-10. We give it a score and a qualitative description on why they got the score.
In this recent cohort of 500+ B2B brands (12,000+ individual points of value) we found that:
- Only 8% of points scored a 9 in terms of focus
- Just 1% scored a max score of 10
Meanwhile, 42% fell in the average score zone of 7-8.
And 49% fell in the weak (i.e. ignorable) zone of 1-6.
The story here shows that brands do not take enough strong stances.
It’s the analytical equivalent of what we all feel:
Every B2B brand sounds the same.
To fix this it might look like the weak points should get the most attention.
But the bigger opportunity lies in the average zone.
These are the points of value that a brand tries to focus on but doesn’t take far enough.
It’s more difficult to spot these because they often sound pretty good.
To boost them from a forgettable 7-8 to a stand out 9-10, brands need to:
- Emphasize the value in their lead messaging
- Demonstrate how they deliver this value in their offerings
- Provide case studies where customers speak to this value
- Share content that shows depth of knowledge around this value
To put this another way:
Find your standout points of value and double down on them.
Make sure those are the points that every potential customer walks away thinking about – and telling others about.
Overcome The 5-5 Squeeze With A Stronger POV and Position
The 5-5 Squeeze affects every brand.
POV and positioning give you a chance to thread that needle.
With a strong, well-articulated stance you give your customers a reason to notice and remember your brand.
It allows you to capture some of that precious mindshare so that when they finally get in-market they already know who you are.
And when they put together a consideration set they have a reason to include you.
To see where you stand do a quick assessment:
- Do we have a strong POV about our category?
- What are the key highlight points of value that our customers remember?
- How do our biggest competitors stack up and how much do we overlap?
- Where can we turn some 7-8 value points into 9-10’s to capture more mindshare before customers are in-market?
The landscape isn’t getting less noisy, every brand has to find its edge to break through.
