Establishing a brand in a competitive environment can be challenging for any business, particularly small businesses and startups. Not every business represents a “new-to-the-world” idea, and not every company has the luxury of exclusive ownership of a market segment. There are literally thousands of examples this: a new entrant in a market establishes a brand presence, executes a powerful marketing strategy, and achieves operational efficiency and is able to capture a significant piece of that market, often becoming the market leader in the process. A great example of this is the rise of Google and the demise of AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, and a raft of others. In 1998, Google was the new kid in an established (if not quite mature) market for Internet search, and by 2004, it was by far the leading Internet search engine, handling almost 85% of the search requests on the web.

Google, and it’s brethren in the world of new entrants, found success by asking three key questions: 1. Have we established a “frame of reference?”, 2. Are we effectively leveraging our “points of parity?”, and 3. Are the points of differentiation compelling? These questions can serve as a simple framework for establishing a new brand in an existing or mature market and can provide a strategic approach for a company battling to gain market share against existing competition.

Have a look at your own brand with these questions in mind, and in the context of the competitive landscape and consider whether you have done everything you can to build your brand and capture market share.

1. Establish a frame of reference
Establishing your company’s or product’s category is the first step so choosing the proper frame and is crucial in this three-part exercise. Only with a explicit understanding of its frame of reference can a brand establish a competitive foothold; without a clear and strategic choice the product can not compete effectively. For instance, a company producing a new snack bar should ask if they are positioning their product correctly: is it a kid’s snack? An energy bar? A diet supplement? This is how they will determine against whom they are competing, and on what value offering they are competing. A good example of this would be Coke; this popular beverage competes in both the “soft drinks” frame and the “thirst-quenching drinks” frame. Companies can expand their frame of reference to preempt competition; when a new sports drink is introduced by a competitor, not only must they compete against other sports drinks, they must compete against Coke as a thirst-quenching beverage for a scorchingly hot day.

2. Leverage points of parity
First and foremost, your customers must first think of your brand as a legitimate competitor in the market space, and to accomplish this a company must demonstrate its points of parity with the established competition. This is particularly important when establishing a new brand, but can be challenging with innovative products which are difficult to fit into an established frame of reference. In the Google example, the company first had to show that its search engine could provide fast response time to a user’s query, as well as meaningful and accurate search results. These were the basic requirements of a search engine and without these, Google would never have been viewed as a valid offering. In addition, it is critical for new brands to attack and effectively neutralize established competitors’ points of difference, recasting these as points of parity. A great example of this is Visa’s introduction of  gold & platinum cards to compete with American Express’ prestige; In fact, Amex’s main point of difference was turned into Visa’s point of parity.

3. Differentiate in a compelling way

There are three essential types of brand differences: 1) brand performance associations, 2) brand imagery associations, and 3) customer insight associations. It is a combination of these three that allow companies to clearly illustrate how they are different from the competition and to do so in a memorable and compelling fashion. Brand performance associations are ways in which a an offering attempts to meet the functional needs of their customer; in other words, does the product do what it says it will do? With search engines, on a very basic level, the functional requirement is that a query returns accurate and meaningful results. Google’s (incerdibly) compelling point of differentiation was that the results were returned in a clean, spare interface, with no distracting elements or extraneous information. At the time, Google’s established competitors all used search as an individual function among many others: news, weather, widgets; Google made search about search and nothing else and this clearly addressed the performance association and provided a compelling differentiator.

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