There are three elements of the brand positioning that fit within this first part of the model:

• Category Definition
• Target Audience(s)
• Target Audience Insights

Category Definition Being clear about your category definition helps define what your conversation, or story, is about. It defines the context of the conversation you hope to have.

Think of it as answering the question, ‘What business are you in?’

Target Audience The importance of getting clear on your target audience at the beginning of the process of writing your brand strategy is that it’s really hard to have a conversation if you don’t know who you’re talking to.

Target Audience Insights Target audience insights explore how people think, feel and behave around your category, brand and product. This helps guide the content of the conversation you want to have with them.

The model is depicted as a triangle balancing on the bottom point to imply that the whole thing falls over if you don’t get this first part right.

Like the first part of the model, there are three elements of a brand positioning that make up this part:

• Attributes
• Functional Benefits
• Emotional End Benefits

Attributes Attributes are the physical, tangible, observable building blocks of the product or service that the brand represents.

Functional Benefits If the attributes of a brand are the building blocks of the product or service, the functional benefit is the practical job that the brand does.

Emotional End Benefit This is the ‘so what’ factor. It captures how the brand makes the user feel or what need it fills for them.

Group 3 only contains two elements:

• Brand Personality
• Brand Values/Drivers

In this part of the model, the goal is to capture what makes your brand tick and help your target audience get to know your brand on a more human level.

Brand Personality This is the ‘how’ factor. It explores how the brand behaves on a human level. If the brand were a person, what are the personality traits that it would have.

Brand Values and Drivers This is the ‘Why’ factor. Why does the brand do what it does? What are the principles and philosophies that underpin the brand? What is its purpose? What are its core beliefs?

This section only has a single element in it, but it’s arguably the most important element of all. The core promise brings the whole story to a focus.

When the core promise is well written, it is a concise statement summarising the story you want to tell about your brand, captured in a sentence. It sits in the middle of the model to visually communicate that it is the heart of the story.