Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg: Steps to Creating a Compelling Position

Here are the steps that Clancy and Krieg recommend following in developing a positioning for your brand.They begin with the assumption that you have clearly identified your target customers and that you have conducted research to determine your target customer’s desires and problems and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
Step #1: Make a list of at least 200 tangible and intangible attributes and benefits that might motivate your target customers and thereby serve as the basis for a powerful positioning.
Step #2: Prioritize the list and combine redundant items to get the list down to between 50 and 100 items.
Step #3: Survey at least 200 and preferably 500 or more target customers on these 50 to 100 items on three dimensions: (1) how desirable each item is to them (dream detection),
(2) the extent to which the product/service they are currently using contains that attribute or benefit (problem detection), and (3) the likelihood they would buy a product or service that had that attribute or benefit (brand preference detection).
Step #4: Average each respondent’s scores for each item across the three dimensions to get the motivating power of each attribute or benefit. (Note: Clancy and Krieg say you may want to give more weight to the first dimension if the product is new and more weight to the second dimension if the product/service is an established one.)
Step #5: Examine the results of step four to identify highly motivating attributes and benefits that your brand enjoys relative to competing brands.
Step #6: Write three to seven different positioning statements and test them with 150 or more target customers to determine which is most powerful in terms of purchase interest, uniqueness, and product/brand superiority. Pick the winning positioning strategy.
Source:Adapted from Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Krieg, Counterintuitive marketing:Achieve Great Results Using Uncommon Sense (New York: Free Press, 2000), pp. 121–129.