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Brand Performance

Improve Your Brand Positioning Like Volkswagen

In this blog article, you’ll learn how Volkswagen was able to successfully improve its brand positioning while continuing to sell products. We will discuss a blueprint of using associations to both understand and then adjust your brand position through the right marketing content.

In this approximately 9-minute video, Michal Szaniecki from Volkswagen gives more details about how the brand positioning project developed from start to finish. So let’s start at the beginning.

Recently, Volkswagen partnered with us to do something very difficult, namely to improve brand positioning using Big Data, artificial intelligence, and our neuro-semantic analysis. Sounds like a big project, but it worked out really well.

The Volkswagen Challenge

The Volkswagen brand wanted to improve its brand position and brand image in the first place because of the whole Dieselgate scandal. It is out of question, that the scandal damaged its reputation. Therefore, improving its brand position was the main goal of the whole project. How? By re-establishing what they stand for and by revitalizing their brand values.

The brand values that the Volkswagen brand wanted to capture in their brand image were:

Innovative
Valuable
Responsible
Trustworthy
Equitable
Reliable

In order to reposition and improve its brand, Volkswagen needed to be strategic with its marketing content. In the past, their brand story was often connected to discipline, reliability, and trustworthiness.

But with Dieselgate, that had changed drastically. Thus, they wanted to construct a new story to improve their core values and re-establish a positive perception in the consumers’ eyes again.

The Solution: Using big data insights to improve Volkswagen’s brand positioning

Volkswagen was looking for a new method to approach the challenge mentioned above. Traditional methods, such as focus groups and online panels were considered too slow to quickly iterate ideas and implement a new strategy. Further, these methods were quite time-consuming and expensive. Thus, they began using our neuroflash AI.

By using our artificial intelligence software, four brand characters were identified as being fitting and most closely aligned with Volkswagen’s brand values. These characters, one of them a doctor, were ideally associated in the consumer’s mind to communicate the desired brand values of responsibility and trustworthiness.

The top characters were: teacher, doctor, robot, and dog.

Ultimately, we decided to focus on responsibility and trust as Volkswagen’s two main values. This lead to “doctor” and “teacher” as the fitting characters to be considered for future marketing content creation.

By combining “doctor” and “teacher“ in neuroflash’s virtual consumer brain, “pupil” and “first aid” emerged as fitting ideas. As you can see in the image below, the concept of “first aid” is very strongly associated with the desired brand values of Volkswagen.

The marketing campaign that ultimately came out was to teach first aid to young children and their families. Obviously, this campaign also fits nicely into Volkswagen’s corporate social responsibility (CSR).

In the image above, our software is used to assess how “first aid“ lines up with Volkswagen’s desired brand values. You can clearly see that it is perceived as the most positive dimension from the customers, whereas “pupil“ is barely associated with positivity. Also regarding the other desired brand values, such as “valuable“, “responsible“, or “innovative“, the dimension “first aid“ ranks the highest. Therefore, the decision to teach first aid to young children and their families is the marketing campaign that is predicted to be the most successful.

So a shortcut for getting ideas validated and for finding suitable content for your own brand positioning is using the neuroflash AI software. In fact, our expertise and data science advances we have gathered since 2016 is now available for you to use and create magic. Save valuable time and resources while creating content that aligns with your consumer’s expectations and desires.

You can try our AI software for free here to see it for yourself.

The Blueprint for Improving Your Brand Positioning

The Big Data analysis of associations has given us ingredients for achieving our goals (i.e the four brand characters Doctor, Teacher, Pupil, First Aid). But how can you do this yourself by using your own head? Let us show you below.

1. Brainstorm & Sort your Ideas

For your own brand, think of characters, situations, and things to do that may carry your brand values and represents them properly. Write them on post-it notes and put them on a big wall. Here, you can unfold your creativity to the fullest as there is no “right“ or “wrong“, or a limit at all.

Now, draw out your brand values as circles on a Venn diagram (as seen below). Then put your idea post-its in their appropriate position. The best ideas will have a strong overlap with many of your brand values! You can directly see it in the centre of the Venn diagram.

Now, brainstorm again with the post-its that are close to or in the middle of the diagram and are therefore well-positioned with many of your desired brand values.

Repeat this process over and over until you have a handful of very strong concepts, i.e. approximately 5 ideas that are able to communicate your brand values. These ideas are the centre from which everything radiates: be it your brand’s look (design), key message (voice), or relationship (customer service).

When choosing your brand values, make sure that you don’t choose standard values like “reliable“ or “trusted“ as they don’t make you stand out from the crowd. You should rather focus on your USP and communicate authentic brand values.

2. Get Creative & Execute

Take the ideas from step 1 and combine them together in meaningful ways. Ask yourself, how can I express the idea in a situation, what would the story be, what is the motivation of the characters? This step usually takes the longest time, so get creative and don’t throw away crazy ideas. You’d be surprised how often the crazy ideas end up working the best.

Forget about idealized perfections! Discovering the real and raw feelings that connect you (and your brand) to the world is what makes it successful.

With Volkswagen, the creative Agency (DDB Tribal) was of great value at this step. Together with the CMO and the Volkswagen team, they created pictures, wrote stories, and helped to put the overall inspiration into an execution that consumers can immediately understand and relate to.

You can do the same, probably a bit more cost-effective, by doing it yourself or using creative heads sourced from websites like fiverr.com, freelancer.com or upwork.com.

3. Test!

With a couple of solutions produced, it’s time to put them all to the test. This step is crucial to make sure that your message align with the expectations and associations of the customers. Throw the final executions on your landing page and conduct A/B tests, social media or conduct online research. The goal is to understand how consumers from your target audience are reacting to the execution. Here are some ideas for:

Business Impact

As a result of using neuroflash’s AI to inform the creation of Volkswagen’s campaigns, the following significant improvements were found:

Conclusion: Associations clearly improve brand positioning and results

From this case study, the following lessons have been learned for improving brand positioning:

This power is not exclusive for brands like Volkswagen. In fact, you may not have the 5-figure budget for hiring a brand consultant. But you can either use the blueprint method above, or you use our neuroflash AI software right now. Sign up here for your free trial.