I have been having a think about the relationship between strategic positioning and branding - of course helped by reading material written by minds much better than my own so here is my summary which might be useful to other businesses out there:

 Organisations need an emotional match and connection to be made between the audience’s needs - social, functional and emotional- and their own offering. I just named three things - social, functional emotional; a need is a multi-dimensional construct of needs and aspirations.

And your organisation's offering has to clearly say on the tin how it matches; it needs to be a multi-dimensional construct too. The design and colours, messaging and contexts all have to align. Because people only take a fraction of a second to form an impression.

Branding and strategic positioning are correlated. If you are are well positioned in your matching then you have the basis of a good brand. Strategic positioning is all about matching your organisation’s abilities to the needs of the market. So identifying your true market is essential. Here differentiation is important in order to distinguish between yourself and a possible competitor as you don’t want to move from brand to a commodity. It is difficult to let go of a perfectly good service your business can offer - you don’t have to entirely but it shouldn’t muddy your positioning. 

How can you find out the needs of the market? Here we can learn something from Lean concepts - John Bicheno, in his book ‘The Service System Toolbox Integrating Lean Thinking, Systems Thinking and Design Thinking' says 

“Gemba” is the place of action - where value is created - often but not necessarily the workplace… … Contrast this with a traditional way. The Gemba way is to go to the place of action and collect FACTS , the traditional way is to remain in the office and to discuss OPINIONS. Or worse, review financial KPIs.”

It is also the way the detective works by going to the crime site to investigate. 

Back to businesses and organisations - you have to research what market you are in. So it is no use just asking your customers what they want, you have to also find out how they behave and then ask what prompted that behaviour.

So two things have to be done - you need to strategically align with your market and then accurately reflect that alignment in all aspects of your business - the context, the look, the messaging, behaviour, channels and marketing tactics. Much marketing is about evolving the branding with the evolving market as it doesn’t stay still. I talk more about branding in my forthcoming podcast.... watch this space.