The Blog

A Guide for CPG Food, Beverage & Wellness Brands

Retail brands have never had a shortage of things to react to.

Consumer priorities change. New competitors appear. Trends move from niche to everywhere seemingly overnight. AI gives your team a firehose of ideas before the first cup of coffee.

In uncertain times, there can be a temptation to either react to everything or retreat and wait for things to settle down. Neither is much of a strategy.

You can’t control the economy, what your competitors do or what becomes the next cultural obsession. But you can be clear about what your brand stands for, who it serves and where you want it to go.

That’s what brand positioning gives you.

A strong brand positioning strategy creates a long-term destination for your brand. It helps your team recognize the opportunities that can move you closer to that destination and, just as importantly, the distractions that can pull you away from it.

What is Brand Positioning?

At its simplest, brand positioning defines the place you want your brand to occupy in people’s minds and what you want them to associate with it. It’s what you want to be known for.

The strongest brand positioning is the intersection of three things:

1. Brand Offering: What can we authentically and uniquely offer?

This starts internally. What is your vision for the brand? What do you value? What is your purpose and culture? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What makes your product or offering new, different or better?

These internal elements help establish what the brand can credibly stand for rather than simply choosing a position that sounds appealing.

2. Competitor Differentiation: Where can we meaningfully stand apart?

Understanding competitor positioning, strengths and weaknesses helps reveal where a category is crowded and where there may be meaningful white space. For CPG brands, this also means studying the physical and digital retail environments and considering what your product brings to the retailer, not just the consumer.

The goal isn’t simply to look different. It’s to find a difference that matters to your consumer.

3. Customer Benefit: What does our consumer actually need, want or value?

Strong positioning is built around real people and lifestyles, not just a demographic bullet point buried in a strategy deck.

What do they believe? What are their habits? What are they trying to accomplish, and where are the points of friction in their buying journey? And most importantly, how can your brand help them reach their goals or bring a little more delight to their lives?

Where brand offering, competitor differentiation and customer benefit intersect, you begin to uncover a position that is authentic to the brand, relevant to consumers and differentiated within the market. That’s where the brand becomes memorable and equity begins to build.

And all of it exists within context.

Consumers and brands don’t exist in a bubble.

Economic forces, culture, social shifts, retail environments and category trends all influence what people value and how they perceive your brand. That’s why our positioning framework surrounds those three core elements with context, looking at both macro trends in society and culture and micro trends within a specific industry and category.

The result isn’t simply a tagline or a marketing message. Brand positioning defines the associations you want people to have with your brand and provides a strategic foundation for building them.

Why Brand Positioning Is Especially Important for Retail CPG Brands to Nail

All brands benefit from clear positioning. But retail brands face a particular challenge.

They aren’t chosen in ideal conditions. They’re chosen in real life: midnight grocery runs, Saturday rushes, squirming toddlers, tired eyes, price comparisons, and quick impulse decisions. Often in a matter of just seconds between first glance and first reach.

When a shopper walks down an aisle filled with competing products or scrolls through a page of tiny package images online, they aren’t going to read your brand strategy. They may not see your advertising first. They probably aren’t going to research your mission before deciding which salsa, sparkling water or supplement to put in their cart.

They see the package and, in those few seconds, they need to understand what the product is, why it’s relevant to them and why they should choose it instead of everything surrounding it.

That’s why brand positioning and package design are so closely connected for CPG food, beverage and wellness brands. The package is a CPG brand’s most important marketing moment, and the positioning needs to be optimized for it. It has to be powerful enough to become something consumers can quickly see, understand and feel.

Positioning Gives Package Design Something Meaningful to Communicate

Without a clear positioning strategy, the package design conversation can easily become: What looks cool? What’s trending? What will stand out? Those aren’t necessarily bad questions. They’re just not enough.

A better place to start is: What should this brand stand for, and how can design make people feel it? Once that is clear, design has a strategic job to do.

Color, typography, imagery, messaging, hierarchy, voice, structure and appetite appeal aren’t simply decoration applied after the strategy is finished. Together, they create a visual language that can make the positioning tangible.

This is why we believe visual thinking should be part of the positioning process early, particularly for CPG brands.

If the positioning is built entirely in words and only later handed to designers to “make it visual,” you can discover too late that the strategic territory doesn’t translate into a distinctive or compelling presence on shelf.

Exploring visual territories earlier helps us ask an important question while the strategy is still taking shape:

Can consumers actually see and feel this position?

When the answer is yes, food and beverage package design becomes much more than a way to get noticed. It becomes one of the brand’s most powerful tools for building the associations you want to own.

Positioning Helps You Know Which Trends to Follow, and Which to Ignore

Trends are particularly tempting in CPG.

Suddenly everyone wants more protein. Or less sugar. Or functional ingredients. Or nostalgic flavors. Or maximalist packaging. Or minimalist packaging. Or whatever happens to be having its moment.

Some of those trends may represent significant opportunities for your brand. Others may have nothing to do with you. Positioning gives you a filter.

Instead of asking: Is everyone doing this? You can ask: Does this strengthen the position we want to own?

If the answer is yes, the trend may be worth embracing. If the answer is no, you can let someone else chase it.

That’s the difference between responding to culture and being driven by it.

Brand Positioning Guides More Than Marketing

Brand positioning may have “brand” in the name, but it shouldn’t live solely within the marketing department.

A strong positioning strategy can become a filter for decisions across the business, helping everyone evaluate opportunities against the same long-term goal.

For a CPG brand, positioning can help guide questions like:

• Product innovation: Which products or formats strengthen our position?
• Portfolio strategy: Where can the brand grow without losing focus?
• Retail and distribution: Where does our brand belong?
• Pricing: Does our price reinforce our position?
• Hiring and culture: Does our organization reflect what the brand stands for?
• Sponsorships and partnerships: Which associations strengthen our brand?

A sponsorship with impressive reach isn’t necessarily a good sponsorship for your brand. A product opportunity with strong sales projections isn’t automatically the right extension. A retailer interested in carrying your product may not always reinforce the perception you’re trying to build.

Positioning gives you a way to look beyond the immediate opportunity and consider what each decision is teaching people about your brand.

A good positioning strategy doesn’t just give you something different to say. It gives every decision a strategic why.

Positioning Gets Your Team Rowing in the Same Direction

One of the most overlooked benefits of brand positioning happens inside the organization.

Leadership, marketing, sales, product innovation and design naturally approach the brand from different perspectives. Each team can be making perfectly reasonable decisions and still collectively pull the brand in different directions.

Positioning creates an agreed-upon destination.

That’s why we put a lot of emphasis on aligning stakeholders early in the brand positioning process, before creative development begins.

Getting the right people involved early gives the team an opportunity to agree on fundamental questions: What are we trying to build? Who are we building it for? What do we want to be known for? Where is our opportunity to differentiate?

That shared strategic foundation changes the creative conversation later, especially when evaluating designs.

Instead of: I like this one better.

It becomes: Which direction best supports the position we’ve agreed we want to own?

That’s a much more productive question. It can also prevent expensive disagreements later in the process, when changes can mean reworking a brand identity, redesigning an entire packaging system or revisiting decisions across dozens of SKUs.

Alignment doesn’t mean everyone has the same opinion about everything. It means everyone is evaluating opportunities and decisions against the same goal.

And that shared direction extends well beyond the branding process. When positioning is clear, product innovation, packaging, sales, marketing, partnerships and internal teams can all build toward the same destination.

Clear positioning doesn’t eliminate uncertainty, and it shouldn’t prevent a brand from evolving. It gives everyone a common direction so the brand can evolve with purpose.

The strongest brands aren’t necessarily the ones doing the most. They’re the ones that know where they’re going and have everyone’s efforts moving in the same direction.

Positioning Helps Build a Brand That Can Grow

For CPG brands, a positioning strategy shouldn’t only solve the problem sitting in front of you today.

Today’s hero product may become tomorrow’s product family. Your positioning needs enough focus to make the brand distinctive, but enough room to accommodate growth.

It should be able to stretch across new flavors, SKUs, formats, line extensions, retail environments and future innovation without losing the central idea that holds the brand together.

This makes scalability an important test of any CPG brand positioning strategy.

Ask: Can we own it? Can consumers understand it? Can we build on it?

If a positioning idea works beautifully for one product but falls apart as soon as the portfolio expands, it may be a campaign idea rather than a durable brand position.

And there’s another advantage to getting that position established early: brand equity can travel with you. Once consumers have learned to associate your brand with certain qualities in one category, those positive associations can carry over to new products and categories.

A new launch doesn’t necessarily have to build its reputation from scratch. It can borrow from the meaning and trust the brand has already earned.

AI Makes Strong Positioning Even More Essential

Ask an AI tool for product ideas, social content, campaign concepts, partnerships, messaging or visual directions and it can give you dozens of perfectly plausible answers.

Without a strategy, though, more output can simply mean more directions to go in.

One team member might use AI to develop messaging around performance. Another generates ideas around indulgence. Someone else explores sustainability. Meanwhile, the social team discovers that irreverent humor is performing well and starts moving the voice in another direction entirely.

Each idea might be good on its own, but together, they may not be building anything.

Positioning provides the constraints that make AI more useful. Ideas can be evaluated against the same consumer, competitive opportunity, brand values, personality and long-term ambition.

The same applies when using AI to generate creative briefs or explore package design concepts. The quality of the output depends heavily on the clarity of the strategic input.

AI can help you move faster. Positioning helps make sure you’re moving in the right direction.

Positioning Turns Complexity Into Opportunity

You can’t control consumer confidence, what your competitors launch, what retailers prioritize, how culture shifts or what becomes the next TikTok obsession.

But you can control how clearly you understand who you’re for, what you offer, why you’re different and what you want to become known for.

That’s the value of positioning, especially when the environment around your brand feels anything but predictable.

It doesn’t tell you to ignore change. It gives you a foundation for responding to change thoughtfully.

Instead of reacting to every new opportunity, you can recognize which ones move the brand forward.

Instead of spreading resources across disconnected initiatives, you can focus them around a common objective.

Instead of letting FOMU (Fear of Messing Up) drive decisions, you can move forward with greater confidence, guided by a strategy your team has already aligned around.

And when product innovation, package design, sales, marketing, partnerships, sponsorships, AI and your internal culture are all reinforcing the same idea, the impact of each effort becomes greater.

Brand positioning doesn’t make a volatile market predictable. It gives you the clarity to navigate it.

Get the positioning right, and it becomes much more than a paragraph in a strategy deck. It becomes a tool your organization can use to decide what to make, where to go, what to say, how to show up and what to say no to.

Ready to get clear on what your brand should stand for? Let’s talk.