Words: Adam Ketterer – Founder
Category(s): Branding, Positioning
Date: 31st October 2025
1: Brand strategy
Usually defined on an annual basis in order to help a company meet its broader corporate goals (which almost always involve growth). Developing an effective brand strategy involves answering three key questions: Which buyers or partners are we targeting? What do we want to stand for in their eyes? (positioning). How do we make this happen? (objectives).
2: Positioning
Positioning is all about influencing how you’re perceived by buyers so that you can own a position in their minds. Basically your entire GTM factors into this, but it all starts behind the scenes when you define how your company or product provides the best solution for a specific problem or opportunity faced by your target audience. Without appropriate positioning of a brand or product, it’s hard to come up with ideas and stories that connect with your target audience, and persuade them to buy from you.
3: Positioning statement
Not the same as a tagline. Rather an internally facing document that helps your team understand your brand’s intended position in the market, so every visual and verbal asset that goes out the door is aligned. A good positioning statement should be concise, readable and memorable so it’s easy for team members to act on. For more, read our blogpost: Define your B2B brand positioning in six questions.
4: Targeting
The process of prioritising the different groups of customers a brand wants to sell to.
5: Segmentation
A precursor to targeting. It’s the point at which a brand breaks the market down into distinct groups of buyers that share characteristics or traits.
6: Brand narrative
A common misunderstanding of a brand narrative is assuming it’s the story of a company. You know the kind: “from scrappy startup to industry leader…”. Actually, a brand narrative should be the story of why your company exists; the value it brings to your audience of buyers or partners. The different components of your brand narrative are usually defined during the positioning phase.
7: Strategic narrative
A term (often used by Silicon Valley positioning expert Andy Raskin) to describe a high-level company story that powers commercial success. Can be used interchangeably with ‘brand narrative’ but serves to underline the truth that all brand narratives should be strategic.
8: Verbal identity
Every word a brand utters – from the H1 on a home page and the script of a CEO’s keynote, to Ts&Cs and the onboarding messages sent to new employees – contributes to a verbal identity. It’s what you say and how you say it. And it needs to be defined, differentiated and documented with great care if you want to build and maintain an effective brand as you grow.
9: Visual identity
The yang to verbal identity’s yin, a visual identity is made up of every visual brand expression. It’s far more than a logo, brand colours and typography. It’s an identity that captures the essence of a positioning and helps put it to work across all channels, campaigns and content.
10: Vision
The ultimate destination a brand is headed towards. A vision can be framed as an end goal for a company: To be the “biggest and best ABC” or to create “A world in which XYZ”.
11: Mission
Mission statements are similar to vision statements, but are more about how a company delivers in pursuit of the long-term vision. A key point: if your brand doesn’t have a mission, don’t dream up an inauthentic one. A genuine mission is a nice-to-have, not a necessity.
12: Purpose
The supposed reason a brand exists. Purpose can be useful from a marketing perspective if it emerges from strategic thinking and is relevant and authentic. But not when it’s shoehorned into a brand strategy. The takeaway: communicating a purpose is optional, and most of the time turns out to be an unhelpful distraction for B2B brands.
13: Brand values
(Not to be confused with brand value.) A set of core beliefs or principles that help guide how a brand behaves. Useful for building cultures and helping everyone in the company make consistent decisions. But if brand values don’t emerge from rigorous strategic thinking, be careful about allowing them to influence your branding and marketing work.
14: Value proposition
A value proposition is a statement that communicates the specific value a brand or product delivers to its target audience.
15: Differentiated value
The singular, meaningful benefit that a brand or product delivers to a target audience, which makes it more suitable for that audience (and preferable to alternatives). This is more important than it might sound: it’s the foundation of positioning strategy. An articulation of why a customer should pick you.
16: Discovery
At the very beginning of any brand or marketing initiative, there’s the discovery. This is the exciting, information-gathering stage where marketers get their mitts on all the information they can – not just about the market and the audience, but about the business itself, and the state of the current brand (if there is one).
17: Diagnosis
If discovery is the data-gathering stage, then diagnosis is the interpretation of that information. It’s a crucial analytical step that helps establish a brand’s current equity and positioning, from the perspective of the target market.
18: Distinctiveness
All about making a brand easily recognisable through consistent use of brand assets. A distinctive brand has more chance of being noticed and remembered.
19: Differentiation
The practice of creating meaningful differences in how your target market perceives your brand or offer. The goal is to be perceived as better or more relevant.
20: Salience
Salience is simply how top of mind a brand or product is for a prospect when they’re actively in the market for a relevant product or service.
21: Brand equity
The commercial power a brand has to influence a purchasing decision. In other words, it’s a positive perception that keeps buyers loyal to a brand, even over cheaper alternatives.
22: Brand awareness
This term is often used interchangeably with salience, but they’re not quite the same thing. Brand awareness is an audience’s ability to recognise or recall a brand. Salience is about coming to mind in a buying situation — being top of mind when it matters most.
23: Brand guidelines
Brand book. Brand bible. Style guide. Take your pick. Brand guidelines are the documented verbal and visual rules and standards pertaining to a brand, and how it should be expressed or represented across different touchpoints.
24: Messaging
A collection of all the chunks of copy created to strategically communicate with different audiences, with different points of focus. From lengthy, complex messaging frameworks that target certain personas, to snappy value propositions that summarise a brand’s key benefits. All that is messaging. A tagline? That’s messaging too. So’s a brand narrative.
25: Messaging pillars
These are the foundations of a verbal identity – the core themes that support wider messaging. Some brands stretch to five or more pillars, others keep it minimal with three or four.
26: Messaging matrix
First, scroll up to read our definition of messaging. Done? Well, in line with that… a messaging matrix is a reference tool that helps to align the different key messages for a brand, according to the channel that message is written for, and the audience it’s targeting. It usually looks like a table with audience segments listed down one side, and channels along the other.
27: Brand tagline
Mailchimp started out with “Send better email”. Slack became known as a place “Where work happens”. A tagline is often an encapsulation of a positioning – or the headline of a brand narrative. Usually they’re only a few words long, and often accompany a brand name out in the world to encapsulate a core idea. A rock solid tagline can endure for many years, but can often change to reflect brand repositionings.
28: Competitive alternatives
If your brand or product didn’t exist, what would your customers use instead? Competitive alternatives aren’t just your direct competitors (companies selling similar products and services), but anything your customers might do to solve the same problem…this could be using a manual process or even choosing not to do anything to solve the problem.
29: Market category
A market category is a clearly defined space in the market: a classification of products or services which serve the same (or similar) functions and audiences.
30: Category creation
A category creation play is the attempt to define and spread the word about a new market category. In other words, it’s an attempt to frame a product in a new way (often so customers see it as innovative and game-changing). For example, Salesforce pioneered Cloud CRM and HubSpot successfully pushed Inbound Marketing. Marketo, however, reframed and expanded what Marketing Automation meant. This might be described as category reframing as much as category creation. Educating a market can be ruinously expensive, so a more realistic goal might be to differentiate within an existing category that is already familiar to your target audience.
31: USP
The jury may be out on whether this stands for “unique selling point” or “unique selling proposition” – but the sentiment is the same. Your USP is your expression of your differentiated value. In other words, it highlights what’s different and valuable about your offer – ideally, something your competitors can’t claim.
32: Manifesto
A manifesto is a useful way for a B2B brand to express its beliefs and values in a bold and engaging way. It’s both a promise to customers and a statement of intent that communicates who and what the brand stands for, and why it exists. Whether two sentences long or 20, a manifesto often sits comfortably on the About page of a B2B company website, communicating value to the customer in a way that has a chance of emotionally connecting.
33: GTM (Go-to-market)
A strategic and operational plan for introducing and selling a product or service to its target market and, more generally, helping it succeed commercially. A GTM plan should include strategic activities like targeting and positioning, and tactical plays like selecting promotional channels and creating campaigns and content.
34: Brand tracking
The measurement of a brand’s health (and success of your brand positioning) via a recurring a quantitative survey. Usually carried out on an annual basis by brands (though the very biggest may measure quarterly or even monthly). Its purpose is to guide brand strategy and tactics for the year ahead. The main thing to track is awareness of your brand among your target market. If they are aware of you, find out the extent to which that target market associates your brand with the things you want them to associate with it (e.g. reliability, innovation, a certain feature etc), as well as the things that you don’t.
35: Brand value
There are two ways to define brand value. 1) The perceived worth of a brand in the minds of customers and other stakeholders like partners or employees. 2) The monetary worth of a brand as an intangible asset.
36: Brand plan
A brand plan is effectively a marketing plan, typically carried out on an annual basis. If you subscribe to the views of marketing professor Mark Ritson (and why wouldn’t you) this plan should be completed before the financial year begins in order to show the finance department where you plan to spend budget, and how much budget they should give you. A plan should diagnose the situation using data, describe a strategy, then detail the tactics to deliver that strategy.
37: Benefits vs. features
April Dunford, in her positioning book Obviously Awesome, describes the difference succinctly. Features are the specific attributes or functionalities of a product (e.g a 15-megapixel camera), benefits represent the value or positive outcomes those features deliver to customers (sharp pictures). You’ll often hear the received marketing wisdom to always sell benefits rather than features. Beware of this catch-all advice, especially if you sell a complex product. A good positioning process will establish how best to present and sell your product to your target audience.
38: Brand assets
Elements of a brand that contribute to brand equity. These include brand codes (logo, brand colours, tagline, a jingle etc) but also include assets such as reputation, customer relationships, positioning statements, product quality, IP etc.
39: Brand DNA
The encapsulation of a brand’s essence, usually expressed in a few words. But beware, the concept is more applicable to brands with a long and recognised heritage. Typically, B2B companies (especially those in tech) need to be nimble and flexible, so paying too much attention to the concept of brand DNA could hold businesses back.
40: Storytelling
Any company that aspires to become a successful brand has a story in it. There’s a reason it exists. There’s a distinct value it brings to the world. Specifically, to a certain kind of customer with a certain need. And this value is best explained through story. B2B companies need compelling, coherent, convincing stories that set a course for growth, stand up to buyer scrutiny and bring everyone along with you. Read our guide for B2B marketers: Storyful brands and how to build them.
41: Elevator pitch
Imagine you’ve got eight floors to introduce a total stranger to your business, and convince them to buy your product or service. Your elevator pitch should be a short, persuasive description of your brand and the value it delivers to your target audience. It’s a key expression of your positioning.
42: Founder story
Typically tales involving resilience, determination and long nights programming in a bedroom or making stuff in garages. If you’re a founder with a compelling story, feel free to shout it from the rooftops. If you aren’t, don’t sweat it. Take solace in the fact B2B customers only really care about the value they can extract from a product.
43: Brand objectives
Clear, measurable goals that define what a brand needs to achieve to strengthen its position in the market. For example, an objective might be to grow brand preference among a target group from 33% to 40% within 12 months.
44: Brand codes
The distinctive, recognisable and ownable elements or codes that make a brand identifiable in the market – a logo, brand colours, tagline, a jingle or even a mascot.
45: Brand tactics
If your brand strategy is a plan for growth, then brand tactics are the practical steps to make that strategy come to life – like creating content and rolling out campaigns or promotional plays.
46: Long and short of it
Marketing effectiveness gurus Les Binet and Peter Field have provided compelling evidence that investing in long-term brand building is necessary to ensure short-term sales activation efforts remain continuously effective. In other words, without brand equity to leverage, your lead-generation efforts will eventually slow.
47: Product category
A product category defines what type of thing your product is, from the customer’s point of view. In the B2B industry particularly, it’s hard to define how you’re different until you’ve defined what you are (the category you’re in).
48: Brand architecture
The structured way a company organises and presents each brand in a portfolio. Usually that means starting with a master brand, and working out how your sub-brands, products and services sit underneath that umbrella.
49: Product architecture
The way a company defines how products fit together within a portfolio and how they collectively deliver value to customers.
50: Brand archetype
A much abused model that is supposed to define and represent a brand’s personality, values, and emotional identity. Totally unnecessary in B2B. If a branding agency brings up archetypes, it’s a good indicator you need to go elsewhere for help.