Corporate Brand Positioning Consulting

Brand positioning consulting is the work of deciding what a company stands for, which customers and demand spaces it has permission to win, how that claim resolves into the product brands beneath it, and what the company therefore has to stop doing. Vivaldi has done corporate positioning work since 1999, for companies including IBM, Philips, Schlumberger, Harvard University, TrueBlue and SoundHound AI.

Brand positioning clients include

• Since 1999corporate positioning and brand architecture
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Brand Leadershipco-authored by our founder

When companies bring us in

Corporate brand positioning is usually bought by a CEO, CMO or chief strategy officer at a company that has outgrown its founding description of itself. The trigger is nearly always a specific event rather than a planning cycle.

• After an acquisition. Several businesses now sit under one roof and the market cannot say what the combined company is for. Schlumberger and TrueBlue were both this problem.
• Before a diversification. The company is operationally capable of entering a new space and nobody has established whether customers will grant it permission to be there.
• Ahead of a listing or an equity story. The brand has to carry a thesis that investors can price, which is what the positioning work did for SoundHound AI before its OEM launch.
• When a technology shift has dissolved the category boundary. The old description still reads as accurate and no longer tells anyone what the company competes on.
• When high awareness sits next to a discounted multiple. That gap is the signature of brand equity that is not converting into price, preference or permission.

Why most positioning work does not change anything

The typical output is a positioning statement: a target audience, a frame of reference, a point of difference, a reason to believe. The format is fine. The problem is what it is asked to do.

• It describes the present. Most positioning statements are an accurate summary of the business the company already runs. A position that could have been written from last year's revenue mix has not made a choice.
• It is validated for agreement rather than for consequence. Everyone signs off because nothing anyone is currently doing becomes wrong. A position that rules nothing out is decoration.
• It confuses distinctiveness with permission. A company can be fully capable of entering a space and have no permission from customers to be there. That gap is the most common reason a well-executed diversification fails, and it is not visible in a competitive audit.
• It sits at the wrong altitude. Corporate positioning gets treated as the sum of the product positions, so it inherits the product taxonomy and says nothing the divisions were not already saying.

The test is simple and uncomfortable. If the position had been in place two years ago, which decision would have gone the other way? If nobody can name one, the work produced language.

What our brand positioning consulting services include

Five bodies of work. Each can be engaged on its own, and most companies need three of them.

1. Establishing the current position honestly

Before anything moves, we establish what the market actually believes, which is rarely what the brand tracker reports.

• What customers, non-customers and intermediaries associate the company with, tested against what the company believes they associate it with
• Where the brand already holds permission it is not using, which is more common than the reverse
• What competitors have credibly claimed, and which of those claims are asserted rather than believed

2. Defining the field of play

We do not start from a statement. We start from the domain. A field of play is the area in which a brand can credibly build a future ecosystem of activity, found by collapsing mission, vision, purpose and essence into a single question: what is your role in the world?

• The demand spaces the company can credibly serve now, and the adjacent ones the position would open
• The vertical optionality the position creates, so today's trade-offs and the trade-offs available in five years are visible in the same frame
• The explicit list of what the position rules out, which is the part that determines whether the work was real

Two ideas from our published work sit underneath this. The first is that brands should own demand spaces rather than categories, because a category is defined by what companies make and a demand space by what customers are trying to do. The second is that the distinctiveness versus relevance debate is largely a distraction: a position has to be both, and arguing about which matters more usually means neither has been established.

3. Positioning strategy and the brand architecture beneath it

A corporate position that does not resolve into the product and business unit brands underneath it will be ignored by everyone with a P&L.

• The relationship between the corporate brand and each product or divisional brand, including which ones carry the parent and which are deliberately held at arm's length
• The naming and endorsement logic, which is where most post-merger positioning work either holds or quietly collapses
• The positioning statement itself, written last, as an output of the decisions rather than a substitute for them

4. Messaging architecture by audience

Investors, customers, recruits and regulators are being asked to believe different parts of the same claim, and a single statement cannot carry all four.

• A messaging architecture per audience, with the proof each audience will accept
• The equity story, where the position has to survive a quarterly call rather than a brand workshop
• Sales-facing articulation, since a B2B position has to survive being carried into a conversation by a person

5. Measurement, governance and the financial case

A position with no line to pricing power or acquisition cost is being defended on faith, and faith is the first budget cut.

• The measurement that links the position to price realization, acquisition cost and retention quality
• The decisions the position is supposed to govern, named, so it can be tested against real choices rather than admired
• Ownership, review triggers and the playbooks that let your teams run the position without us

How a brand positioning engagement works

1. Diagnose. Leadership interviews, customer and non-customer research, and a review of the portfolio, pricing and tracking data. The output is a clear view of what the market believes and where the brand holds permission it is not using.
2. Decide. Field of play and positioning options, tested with customers and stress-tested with finance. The output is a decision with the exclusions written down, not a menu.
3. Build. The brand architecture, the messaging architecture by audience, naming where needed, and the business case that ties the position to economic profit.
4. Embed. Playbooks, training, governance and a measurement model, so the position governs decisions after we leave.

Brand positioning results

Schlumberger: a 34% stock price rise after an acquisition

Schlumberger had completed a major acquisition and needed one architecture and one message rather than two sets of claims competing for the same buyers. Following the post-acquisition brand and messaging work, the company's stock price increased by 34%, and the unified architecture became the foundation for its ongoing global market presence. Read the full story: How Vivaldi drove a 34% stock price increase for Schlumberger post-acquisition.

TrueBlue: five acquired businesses, one position, a doubled stock price

TrueBlue had grown through five acquisitions, and the resulting collection of independent brands confused clients, candidates and investors. We unified all five business units under a coherent TrueBlue architecture, with a new positioning framework, a naming architecture and an internal alignment program. The stock price doubled, and client retention and cross-selling improved across the portfolio. Read the full story: How Vivaldi's brand strategy doubled TrueBlue's stock price.

American Express: a new segment without diluting the parent

American Express asked us to define the positioning for the Blue Card, with a requirement that was awkward on purpose: reach a younger, less affluent segment than the traditional premium base without diluting the halo of the parent brand. We built a consumer-centric positioning with segment-specific features and messaging, and settled how Blue should relate to the premium portfolio rather than leaving it to whichever team shipped first. The positioning drove more than a 25% increase in card usage and revenue per customer. Read the full story: How Vivaldi defined the positioning strategy for American Express Blue Card.

Brand positioning by industry

Why companies choose Vivaldi for brand positioning

Three reasons come up repeatedly in the briefs we win.

• The position has to survive finance. We build the measurement that links the position to price realization, acquisition cost and retention, because a corporate position defended only on sentiment gets defunded in the first difficult year.
• Strategy and identity are built by one team. Most firms own either the decision or the expression. We do both, so the identity system is briefed against the position rather than reinterpreting it.
• Permission is treated as evidence. Whether customers will grant a company the right to move into an adjacent space is a research question, not a workshop question, and it is the question most positioning projects skip.

How to evaluate a brand positioning consultant

Worth asking of anyone on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask which decisions the position will govern. If the answer is communications, the engagement is a messaging project. That is legitimate work and a much smaller purchase than corporate positioning.
• Ask what the position rules out. A firm that cannot answer this on their previous work has been producing agreeable statements. Get a specific example of something a client stopped doing.
• Ask how they establish permission. Permission is an evidence question. Ask what they measure and with whom.
• Ask how the corporate position reaches the product brands. Positioning that never resolves into architecture stays on the corporate site and nowhere else.
• Ask what they will hand to the CFO. A position with no line to pricing power or acquisition cost is being defended on faith.

Brand positioning consultancy, branding agency or management consultancy?

Related work

Positioning rarely arrives alone. Three connected pieces:

• New brand development if the conclusion is that the claim needs a new brand to carry it rather than a repositioning of the existing one.
• Brand playbooks and tools if the position is settled and the problem is that execution across teams does not reflect it.
• Verbal and visual identity design if the identity system was built for the position the company is leaving.

This work sits inside our brand strategy group, part of the Brand, Innovation & Experience practice at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field, where the argument is that brand is the face of the business strategy rather than a communications budget.

Brand positioning consulting in the US and worldwide

Our corporate positioning work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Most engagements are multi-market from the start, because a corporate position has to hold in every market the company sells in, and permission is usually asymmetric: a brand may be granted the right to move into an adjacent space in Germany and refused it in the US. That asymmetry is a finding, not a complication, and it belongs in the position rather than in a footnote.