Your brand is defined by the perception of your company and its products in the minds of your current and prospective customers. You shape their perceptions by what you say and (more importantly) by what you do. People form mental models of industries by rank ordering the industry players around different competitive attributes. Treacy and Wiersema argue in The Discipline of Market Leaders that strong brands are built around leadership positions for the “best” products, prices, and personal relationships (niche focus) explicitly by focusing on one and only one attribute.  In The Myth of Excellence , Crawford and Mathews extend this hypothesis by further distinguishing each category:

• Product leadership can focus on quality or quantity (i.e. depth or breadth) of your range of goods and services.
• Price leadership can be paid for in money or time (convenience).
• Personal Relationships can emphasize the service aspect of the offering (e.g. offering to customize/personalize the product, thereby minimizing customer impact) or alternatively create aspirational/experiential images of their products and the people who use them so that customers feel better about themselves because of the relationship.

Crawford and Mathews similarly argue that disciplined focus on a single attribute, coupled with a strong supporting secondary variable is the consistent business strategy of top market share winners. Example strategies of familiar brands are listed below:

Some brand leadership combinations are more believable by prospects than other combinations. For example, product quality leadership tends to be linked with expected outstanding personal service in the minds of most people. In contrast, price and quality are typically viewed as counteracting variables – the lowest price for the highest quality products is not a credible proposition. The claim that a product saves you time AND saves you money usually (though not always) elicits a skeptical response. An analysis of brand positioning credibility is shown below as a function of the cross correlation of primary versus secondary attributes:

A recommended method for arming your sales team with focused sales literature is assessing competitive positioning of key players in your industry relative to your differentiation.