Let's talk positioning. What it means & why it matters more than you realise

There's a lot of confusion about brand positioning so im here to clear that up and share some examples of how it affects your business 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Hazes Let's Talk Biz podcast. I just had a Milo. It's 10pm. You know I love recording at nighttime. I just had a cold Milo, which let's be honest, it actually has more Milo than milk in it. Probably not the smartest thing to do right before I'm going to record an episode because now my throat is not feeling the smoothest. Don't know why I did that. Poor decision on my part. Anyway, let's keep moving. So I really want to talk today about a few things that are associated with brand, with your positioning and how important it is to hold your positioning. And also, do you actually need a brand? Because a lot of people that I hear talk about, I don't know if I need a brand. I'm not I don't have a product-based business. I really want to go into that a little bit further as well. But before I do, I want to give a little shout out to some of our business lounge members because we have Abby who owns Peckpi Kids, she currently has a huge 40% off sale, and she's only just taken over this business a few months ago. She's never been in e-com before, she's always been a service-based boss. This is her first e-com bids. She is absolutely killing it. She is putting in the work, she's got two young children. I'm just so, so proud of her. So if you have children or if you have friends or family that have children and you think it would be great to gift them beautiful, bold, bright, fun swimwear, um, reusable nappies, reusable swim nappies, children's clothing, accessories, just things that are bright and bold and colourful and fun. It's for it's like colour-drenched childhood. She's wanting to bring the fun and colour back to children. Go and check them out. It's PECP P-E-K-P-I kids, and you'll find her on Instagram. You will love her page. Make sure you go hit follow. I also want to give a shout out to Pear, and it's P-A-I-R-R-E. Now, Bridget came in to Business Lounge, I'm going to say around maybe eight months ago, nine months ago, with an idea, and she wanted to create a whole luggage range. And what we actually did was we peeled it right back. And I'm really, really glad that she took this direction. And I know it felt a bit uncomfortable for her initially to peel it back to just one product, but truly, I believe that this is what sets your place in the market. If she had launched with an entire luggage range, number one, the cost to bring that to market would be insane. When you have multiple SKUs, multiple colourways, different sizes, it just would have been an insane startup cost. Instead, we really peeled it back to why she wanted to start this in the first place. And this took a lot of refining. So if you're somebody who you feel like you really haven't found your positioning yet with your brand, and you find that sometimes you want to go left and then you want to go right, and it just feels like it's constantly changing, it is an evolving process until you find the one that just clicks. And that was what happened with Bridget. Excuse me. So when we talked about this deeper, it turned out that the whole reason she started this brand in the first place is because she has young children, and travel time can sometimes be very chaotic. And when she was traveling, she found that you know juggling passports and trying to stay organized was one of her biggest struggles, and she didn't want travel to feel chaotic. It was something that was supposed to be this beautiful experience for the family, and she wanted to be nice and calm. And family-sized passport wallets are not really a thing. I mean, I have one because I needed six passports in my wallet, and let me just say, I don't want that to be seen in public, it's really ugly. And what Bridget has done with Pear is she has created the most beautiful elevated leather luxury passport wallets for families. So she has a two, a four, and I believe a six or an eight person passport wallet, I can't remember what size, and they are gorgeous. It's the type of it's really a piece that will last you forever. You'll be able to pass it down for generations. You will very likely be able to keep that through many, many years and decades of travel because of the quality and the craftsmanship that has gone into this. It really is the perfect gift for somebody who's going traveling because it is so gorgeous. Go and check it out. She's actually launching this Friday night to her email list, and then she's launching Sunday night, I believe, to the public, and she has a very cool giveaway on her page as well. So her Instagram handle is pair.label, which is P-A-I-R-R-E.label. I highly recommend if you're a traveler, if you also have had this problem where you just find that you can't get a beautiful luxury passport wallet for more than one passport, she's your girl. Go check it out. Now I also want to give one more shout out to Anella. She has a brand called Heva Beauty, which is H-I-V-A Beauty. She came to me, I'm going to say about a year ago now. And when she first came my way, she booked a one-on-one sprint with me. She didn't have a brand yet, she didn't have a business yet, she had an idea. I think she from memory, I think she may have had a couple of ideas. And we got on our one-on-one call together, and we talked it out, and we kind of landed on this idea that she's launched with. Spend the money on the mold. See where you can cut corners elsewhere, but there are some things you don't skimp on. The way you present to market is one of them. Another one is the photography. And it she took her time with this, she took her time through formulations because she really wanted to get it right. She took her time with the mold and making sure that it looked exactly how she wanted it to look. It is stunning. It's the type of product where I would put it on a flat lay and photograph it just with my you know keys, my coffee, my lip gloss, just because it looks so cute. I would take a photo holding it with my fresh manicure because it looks so cute. So this is a positioning conversation that I wanted to get into on this today as well. But before I do, let's celebrate Anella because she just launched, she just had her first month launch, and she had over 500 orders. I think it was over 550 orders. She brought in over I think it was 24,000 US dollars in her first month, which is just insane. So honestly, round of applause for Anella. Just celebrating her so hard. She deserves it. She held her positioning, she held her ground, she was patient, she had a very clear launch strategy, she did all the right things. So her results make so much sense to me. So while we're here, let's just segue into positioning because this is something that comes up for a lot of people. I see it happen a lot in business, where you start off wanting to be at a certain level. Like let's say you do want to be luxury or premium positioning, or maybe you want to enter at a lower market and you want to be more entry-level, and then somewhere along the way you start switching and changing, maybe because you're seeing other competitors out there and you really love the way that their brand looks, and you think, I want to be that too. But what you've got to remember is that you are not another brand and they are not you. And you have your own audience, you have your own quirks, you have your own nuances with your brand. And it's important that you remember that. It's very easy to get distracted with what else is happening out there in the market. Let's bring it back to why you started your brand in the first place and who you created it for. And don't steer away from that vision, lock in on that vision. If it's outside of that and it's just bystanders on the side, don't all of a sudden, or don't all of a sudden switch and change. You go, oh hang on, I'm gonna make sure it suits you too. No, we don't do that. That help that dilutes your positioning and it will dilute your brand strength. A great example of this is when I had a children's clothing label, it was called Princess Ratbag. I started this brand with zero dollars. I've talked about this before. I started the brand with zero dollars, not even a website the night that I launched, and I made over $15,000 the first night. A lot of people go, why, how, how could you do that? And that's a story for another time. If you want to hear it, let me know. But when I started this brand, I knew that I wanted to be premium pricing and premium positioning because this was a children's clothing item. I I launched with one product, you guys. One product in maybe eight different colourways, but one product essentially, one skew. And I knew that I wanted to charge $80 to $90 for this skirt, this children's skirt. And so to do that, I have to hold a certain positioning. I can't be there as a budget brand. I have to make sure that every touch point of my brand speaks to keepsake, speaks to the whimsy of childhood and how special it feels when you receive it from the unboxing experience to the brand feel when you interact with the brand to the imagery to the website, everything. Everything had to feel like it was that real whimsical luxury for child for children and something that you could pass down. And so when I did my photo shoots, I started with no budget, as we know, and I the way that I got beautiful photography when I first started was I reached out to photographers and I said, the first five to come back to me, I'll give you I think it was two or three free skirts because I loved these skirts for photo shoots. I'll give you two or three free skirts in exchange for some photos. I think it was like five photos or something. And they snapped up that I that offer because they were paying a lot of money to bring these skirts in from America anyway. And I got back the most beautiful photos, and I used those when I first when I continued the launch, when I first started my website. Before that, I was just selling on Facebook. Got the most beautiful photos, and then when I had the money to start my to do my own photo shoot, I made sure that it felt like it would be on the cover of Children's Vogue if that existed. And because the photos were so gorgeous and I put so much effort and intention into it. I had Donna Hay magazine ask if they could use our skirts and our photos in some of their editions. I had Studio Bambini put us on the cover and throughout the magazines, and Studio Bambini essentially was the children's vogue. So we really held that positioning well. My photo shoots were gorgeous, and I loved I involved our customers. I did competitions where you could win a place to be the face of Princess Ratbag, and I had three different age ranges, so three different girls would always win, and then I would fly them in for the photo shoot. They would be the face, they would get free products, they would have beautiful photos, and it they just they loved it, I loved it, beautiful it was win-win. And then I would just invite customers in general. I would say, Alright, we're we're doing a photo shoot in the park. This is called the summer punch range. We're gonna set up a children's party table. We want your kids to just play, be free, and photographers will shoot some candid content. And it created the most whimsical, beautiful photo shoot. This was one that Donna Hay picked up and used in her magazines. And oh my gosh, like stunning. I was very proud of this work. Now it would have been about a year into the brand. I think I had about 70, 80 stockists at the time. It was doing, I think it would have been close to the half a million dollar mark at this point. And this was where my mum had Terminal Canter, so I sold the business, and I just had no interest in continuing the business. I sold it for $50,000, which is crazy, right? But I just didn't want any part of it. And the new owner, look, I think that to be fair, I feel like I've always had an eye for brand. I'm not sure why, I'm not sure where it comes from, but I feel like I've always had an eye for it. And I understand that not everybody does. So the new owner diluted that positioning by taking photos on her phone from here on. So anytime new styles would come in, she would put her daughter in them in the backyard and take photos. And then did a lot of sales and a lot of discounts, and that really affects your brand positioning. That really does dilute the market. All of a sudden, you have people who were associating this brand with oh, this is a little touch of luxury that my daughter gets to be so lit up by when she receives a package. It's in this beautiful unboxing experience. The the brand as a whole feels like this really elevated experience to corners being cut even with the packaging, with the way it showed up. The whole brand just felt very different. And over time, and I think it happened quite quickly, I would say over six months, the brand started to really dwindle. The sales weren't coming in as much because all of a sudden, that person who identified with the brand and who wanted to spend some good money on their child, because the parents really got a feeling out of it as well. They got something out of it for themselves too. It was, you know, witnessing your child in this happiness twirling in the skirt and just so excited to wear it. A lot of the pi my customers would buy this beautiful rack, especially for their princess wrap bag skirts, and they would collect them and they would display them in their child's room like it was decor. That's how special they were. So when you start diluting your positioning and all of a sudden the skirts are $50 because they're always on sale, and the photos aren't very I don't know, they're not they're not very photo shoot worthy. They were very much like, yep, proud mum taking a photo on the phone, and nothing wrong with that as a proud mother, but for the brand that I had created, it just didn't align. And yeah, unfortunately that business ended up just dissolving. I see this happen all the time. Now we can flip it around the other way and go, okay, maybe you don't want elevated brand positioning, maybe you do want to be more entry-level. I've done this as well. When I had a bridal clothing business, I knew that I wanted to be for the bride who couldn't afford couture, but they still deserved something that was custom fit, custom made, and they still deserve to feel beautiful. They also still deserve to have a beautiful unboxing experience. And I know that they could have gone to Alibaba and got dresses from them from China direct, but I saw a gap because I thought, okay, one, there's a real trust factor. A lot of people don't trust buying their dresses from China or Alibaba. They really feel like there's a communication issue and they're scared what will actually show up. And then number two, it arrives in a plastic bag, it arrives in plastic packaging, it doesn't feel very special. So I saw this gap for being the middleman where I could create this experience. I had a flat rate on the dresses of $550. I paid anywhere from $70 to $110 for the dress, and I was the middleman, so I had a process with my manufacturer. I'd built up great trust with the manufacturer. It took a bit of hit and miss, I'm not gonna lie, there were some dresses that came, and I had to say, no, this isn't this this one doesn't cut it. We need you need to redo this and we need to resend it to them. But then they got to know me, I got to know them. We had this really beautiful relationship, and all of the dresses were perfect from then on. It was very rare that there was something I had to fix. I was literally there with a needle and thread sometimes, sewing little Di Montes and motifs onto dresses myself. I remember going into the city so I could go to Gardens where they had beautiful lace um, I guess they're called motifs or lace trims. I was like, all right, I need to find something and fix this dress, and there's me, after my kids have gone to sleep, hand stitching this lace trim onto dresses to try and make it look more beautiful and cover up some of their mistakes, and then send it out, and it worked, they liked it. But obviously that wasn't ideal, so ended up getting it to a level where the dresses always came and they were great. I had specialty boxing and it had Bride's closet embossed in I don't know if it was silver or gold, I can't remember, but it was embossed onto the box. We had custom tissue paper. I made sure that it was scented so that when they opened the box, there was this scent, it didn't damage the dress though, and the dress wasn't in a plastic packet, it was wrapped in tissue paper, so they still had this experience, and then it had ribbon around it. That felt really special. It wasn't luxury or premium positioning, it was actually the opposite of that. It was entry level, it was budget, it was basically couture on a budget. Someone would order, I would send them measurement instructions, they would email them back to me, and then off we go. Their dress is being made, and three weeks later it's ready. And that worked because I was very clear about who I was for, I was very clear about the pricing. Some brands, it's not smart to share your pricing. For me, I literally said everywhere all dresses $550, custom made, custom made to suit you. And I had plenty of beautiful images there showing them the types of styles available on different body sizes, shapes, completely different styles, and then the website felt beautiful and premium, but again, it was very clear this is couture on a budget, and then the even the places I advertised, it was on bridal forums, like very cheap advertising that got me a lot of business. So your positioning doesn't always have to be premium positioning, but you have to decide who you're for and you have to stick to it. I wouldn't have stood a chance had I tried to go to beautiful bridal magazines, it wouldn't have been my audience, I would have missed the mark. But what I did do was I traveled to Sydney, I went to a lot of bridal shows. I can't even remember where they were. I'm not very familiar with Sydney. I think I did like Blacktown, I did um wool and gong, I did, I think I even did Hobart, I did bridal shows where I would go set up the dresses on mannequins again. Big signs, all gowns 550, custom made. Made an absolute killing. It was such a great business. Didn't have to spend much on advertising, didn't have to spend much on marketing or securing my positioning. It was all about being very clear who I was for and who I was not for and staying in my lane. Now, the last thing that I want to touch on today is when somebody says or they think to themselves, and this could be you if you're listening, you might think to yourself, I don't actually need a brand because I'm not selling a product. I just do a service, or I might be a coach, or I might be an educator, and you think I don't really need a brand. Actually, if you don't have a brand, you're relying on explanation to sell. Most people think that branding is for product businesses like skincare fashion, physical products. It's not. Brand is the reason people choose you before they fully understand what you do. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, it's why they choose you without actually needing details. I just launched, not quite 48 hours ago, my first in-person event, my first in-person business intensive. I've never done an in-person event before. It's a full-day business intensive, 15 founders, and I just launched it two days ago. Not very much seeding. I think I mentioned it for the first time a day before that. I was floating the idea on Instagram stories the day before. People were like, yes, sounds good. I announced it the next day. 11 places have sold. There's four left. And this is not a cheap day. It's high ticket at $797 for a ticket. I have the most incredible founders that have stepped up already that are coming into this room to come in and spend the day with me, learn from me, eat delicious food, of course, but really spend a day doing a brand intensive and strategy and mapping out their next moves and making sure that their brand reflects how they actually feel internally and that it's showing up with that level of authority. It's getting them the results they want. I'm so excited to run this event. But the reason that it sold so quickly, and I even had some people booking, I have I even had some people, I'll finish my thought first, I tend to jump. I even had some people booking who said I didn't actually even look at the details. I would say three or four people actually jumped into my DMs telling me that. I didn't even look at the details. What are we doing again? I just knew I had to be in the room. They booked, they paid very quickly. I also have about 50% of the women that are coming flying from interstate and they're coming and making a weekend of it. This is because of brand. Notice that it's not about what the actual event was, no one asked the questions. I didn't even get to create a sales page. I check I had a checkout link, it's got some. Details on it, but I don't even have a sales page for this event. I actually knew before I even launched it that I wouldn't have time to do a sales page. I don't have email sequences saying amazing, you're in, here are the details. I have none of that because I didn't even have time for that. This is brand. Your brand, it's a set of beliefs, it's standards, it's perspectives people associate with you. It's why they want to invest in you. It's what people feel certain about when they land on your page. It's not your logo or your cult, your colors, or your offer, or your product. Right now, most service-based businesses are explaining their offer, they're listing the features, they're educating constantly, trying to prove value. And truly, it feels like I have to convince people all the time. I always have to convince people. Yes, you do, because there's no identity that people are buying into. That's why. This is the gap. Now, if we use the skincare example, skincare brand isn't just selling products. What is it actually selling? It might be selling a slower lifestyle, it might be selling someone who doesn't overconsume. She carefully curates her skincare just like she carefully curates her wardrobe. She doesn't want everything, she doesn't want 10 10 steps in her in her skincare. She wants a set of three or four products that look beautiful on her shelf that she knows are high quality that are going to give her the results she wants. She chooses carefully. That's branding. That applies to whether you sell skincare or coaching or service. It's about what the person wants, what they identify with, how they want to feel. If you're a service provider, you are not just selling coaching or design or hair services or strategy or makeup artistry, fitness, none of that. That's not actually what you're selling. What you are selling and why people are investing in you is because of how you think, what you believe, what you stand for, how your clients operate differently after working with you. Maybe they like your vibe. It even comes down to that. Maybe they love your ethics, your morals, as something that they resonate with. That is your brand. Otherwise, why would they not just go choose the next fitness instructor? There's hundreds of thousands of them out there. But they choose you for a reason. That's brand. Without a brand, you will blend in, you will always be overexplaining, you're going to attract misaligned clients, and you will compete on price or effort. One of the two. With a brand, people already trust your thinking. They self-identify, they come in pre-sold. Who doesn't want that? Right? Is it making sense? Yes. This is why brand is so important. I put brand above anything else. It is the thing that has made my businesses the most successful when I focus on brand. So I'm gonna give you a quick shift. Instead of just explaining what you do, start expressing what you believe. Start expressing what you don't agree with in your industry, how your clients think differently. That's how your brand is going to start forming. Two people can sell the exact same service. I mean the exact same service. And the one with a clear brand is always going to win. I'm gonna leave you with that thought. And check the show notes below because I have a masterclass on this coming up next Wednesday, the 29th of April. So if you're listening to this episode before that, congratulations, you haven't missed it. Go and sign up below. Can't wait to see you in the room and talk about this further.