What Is Symbolic Positioning? How to Do It + Examples (2024)

How do you make decisions? Some people swear by extensive research and pros and cons lists. Others prefer to trust their gut. Both approaches are valid.

Data like reviews, technical product specifications, and prices can help logical decision-makers decide if a product is right for them, and brands can convey these facts and figures to appeal to logic-based shoppers. Appealing to intuitive and emotional decision makers, on the other hand, requires a thorough understanding of your target customers—and a solid symbolic positioning strategy.

Learn what symbolic positioning is and how you can use it to build a strong brand identity, connect with customers, and ultimately drive sales.

What is symbolic positioning?

Symbolic positioning is a brand positioning strategy designed to offer an emotional appeal to customers rather than just a practical value proposition. It involves identifying a target audience and crafting a brand image that builds an emotional connection with those customers. With symbolic positioning, marketing efforts focus on promoting intangible ideas such as company values and brand personality rather than hard facts about products.

Symbolic positioning is an element of a larger brand positioning marketing strategy, which businesses use to carve space for themselves in saturated markets. The ecommerce industry is crowded—shoppers often need to choose between similar items from several companies—but the right symbolic positioning strategy (and the right brand positioning strategy at large) can help you develop a loyal customer base of buyers that emotionally connect with your brand.

Symbolic positioning vs. functional brand positioning

Functional brand positioning focuses on a product’s practical, tangible benefits. Functional positioning highlights demonstrable facts such as product price, materials, and performance. These messages appeal to consumers making logic-based decisions. A waffle iron retailer, for example, could emphasize its product’s space-saving design, high-quality stainless steel coating, and patented even-heating technology.

Symbolic positioning, on the other hand, focuses on emotional appeal. Instead of product facts, symbolic positioning often focuses on cultural, social, and identity-driven signaling. This messaging helps brands connect with consumers on a personal level. To practice symbolic positioning, the same waffle retailer could choose to share images of happy families eating breakfast together alongside the tagline “Breakfast brings us together.” This message could forge an emotional connection with a target audience of families.

How to use symbolic positioning in your marketing

1. Segment your audience
2. Select your target audience
3. Research your target audience
4. Write a positioning statement
5. Develop your visual brand identity
6. Share your message

Symbolic positioning is often part of an STP (segmentation, targeting, and positioning) marketing strategy, which breaks down the process of developing a brand positioning strategy into a series of concrete steps. Here’s how to develop symbolic positioning:

1. Segment your audience

Audience segmentation is the practice of dividing your consumer base by traits that may affect their purchasing behavior. Businesses analyze customer data from sources like surveys, transaction history, and analytics tools to separate the vast pool of potential customers into groups. Popular segmentation strategies include grouping users by demographic, geographic, behavioral, and psychographic information.

Psychographic segmentation is of particular relevance for symbolic positioning because it groups customers based on their interests and motivations, which can reveal the emotional aspects behind customers’ decisions.

2. Select your target audience

Once you’ve segmented your audience, evaluate each group and determine which segment to target. Selecting a specific type of target customer will help your team develop focused, cohesive marketing messages. As you decide which group to prioritize, consider factors such as segment size, purchasing power, and product-market alignment. Make sure to pick a target audience that not only makes sense with your product but can help you achieve your business goals.

Let’s say, for example, you sell high-end hair care products and are aiming to increase your number of repeat purchases. Instead of targeting young women who purchase your products infrequently as luxury items and gifts, you might decide to target more mature women who have enough disposable income to use your products as part of their daily routines.

3. Research your target audience

Symbolic positioning aims to forge customer-brand alignment by establishing a set of shared values between a company and its potential customers. But first, conduct an audience analysis to understand what those values are and develop compelling marketing messaging. You can use surveys, focus groups, and web analytics to uncover this information about your target market.

4. Write a positioning statement

Now that you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to write a positioning statement. Positioning statements typically include a description of your brand’s core values, target audience, and unique value proposition. To develop your brand’s symbolic positioning, pay special attention to the brand values you want to communicate to your target customer.

Ask yourself:

• What impact should my business have on the world?
• What would I change about how other companies operate?
• Where do I regularly find inspiration?
• What would I like to inspire in others?
• What experiences have I had that inform my values?

Answering these questions will help you define the core purpose of your business and distill your messaging.

5. Develop your visual brand identity

Determine how you’ll visually represent your company in marketing and brand materials. Work with your business’s marketing team to identify the emotions you want consumers to associate with your brand, and develop a style guide to ensure branding consistency across channels. Consider providing guidelines related to copy tone, image style, and color palette. Even if these elements might feel small, they can help you communicate the personality of your company.

A children’s brand, for example, might use bright colors and hand-drawn fonts to communicate a sense of whimsy and play. A luxury clothing brand, on the other hand, may use dark, rich colors and sleek fonts to create a high-end brand image. You might also incorporate elements of experiential positioning, or communicating the experiences your brand will facilitate for customers (like living an expensive lifestyle in sleek clothes, for example).

6. Share your message

Every consumer touchpoint—from social posts to welcome texts to cart abandonment emails—is an opportunity to communicate with your customers, so make sure to share your symbolic positioning marketing materials throughout the customer journey. Referring back to your research, determine if your target audience spends most of their time consuming:

• Social media content
• Long-form articles
• Television
• YouTube videos
• Forum content (such as Reddit)
• Email newsletters

Use this information to meet them where they are at and tailor your content to speak to them in the way that is most appropriate for the platform. For example, if most of your strategy will focus on Instagram marketing, set yourself up for success with high-quality images, memorable branded hashtags, and opportunities for followers to contribute user-generated content (UGC)—all in ways that reflect your symbolic positioning.

An example of effective symbolic positioning

The headphone company Skullcandy used symbolic positioning to craft a bold, rebellious brand identity. Instead of focusing purely on technical audio specifications like frequency in its brand messaging (which would be an example of functional positioning), Skullcandy incorporates emotional branding and marketing materials that emphasize personality and lifestyle.

Skullcandy also uses copy and graphic design to express its brand identity on its website. The brand created a homepage with a dark theme, bright high-contrast photographs, and a street-art-inspired logo. It also uses product names such as “Crusher” and “Stomp” to evoke strength and defiance. All of these branding elements work together to portray Skullcandy as edgy and bold.