Brand Positioning In The Flexible Office Market

 It sometimes feels like brands rule the world. They engage with us everywhere, from the high street to the internet, with pervasive cross-channel advertising. And it’s no accident that they crop up wherever we look – brands spend over $500 billion on advertising each year.

In this regard, flexible workspace operators are no different to any other business – they market themselves just like any other brand. And just like the rest of the companies vying for our attention with ads, they need two things before they achieve marketing success: an understanding of who they’re targeting and an idea of how their brand is positioned.

We’re here to give you a crash course on the importance of brand positioning in the flexspace and coworking market, as well as an overview of some of the most notable brands operating right now and how they’ve nailed their positioning.

What is brand positioning?

Brand positioning can essentially be defined as the unique way in which you aim to stand out in the market. It’s how you get seen in a crowd of competitors as a company that offers something bigger, better, or more relevant than the rest.

Philip Kotler, regarded by some as the ‘father of modern marketing’, echoed this thought in his definition, saying brand positioning is ‘the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target marketing’

With as vague a definition as that, it’s no surprise that brand positioning strategies need to cover a lot of ground. The process of implementing one usually involves a range of activities, including:

• Determining how your brand is currently positioned and how successful that approach is
• Researching competitors to identify their brand positioning strategies and find gaps in the market
• Introspectively identifying what makes your brand unique (or what could make your brand unique in the market)
• Creating a brand positioning document or statement to sum up your approach
• Investigate whether your new brand positioning strategy works through further market research
• Roll your brand positioning strategy out across all channels – addressing everything from operations to marketing

Examples of flexible office and coworking brands’ positioning

With a basic understanding of what brand positioning is and what kind of activities the process involves, the next step is to see it in action. The Spaces to Places positioning model was created to outline how existing flexible office operators have positioned themselves in the market, and provides a rough overview of what options are available to new entrants.