Where can you find the data that will inform your brand positioning?

In a recent post, I highlighted the four key questions that your brand positioning research must answer. And I promised a followup post showing you some of the places you could find data to help inform your brand positioning. Here it is!

To review, great positioning is found at the intersection of the answers to the following four questions:

1. What does the brand community currently believe about or value in the brand?
2. What might the brand community believe or value about the brand in the future?
3. What does the organization currently claim about the brand?
4. What would the organization like the brand to become down the road?

So to make things as simple as possible, I’ve made a chart below that will show you many of the places I look first for data to inform brand positioning. At the top of the chart you’ll find many things you probably already have access to and just need to analyze through a brand positioning lens (like marketing materials or website copy), while at the bottom of the chart you’ll find some more complicated research sources that will take a bit more work (like surveys or interviews you’d need to conduct, for example).

If you’d like to learn more about these research sources or would like to learn how to write surveys and interview questions that will give you the answers you need, I cover this subject in much more detail in Chapter 3 of The Ad-Free Brand.

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This is the fifth in a series of posts drawn from my new book The Ad-Free Brand, which comes out later this month and is available for pre-sale now on Amazon.