Hey, it's Al Bergeron, Chief Creative Officer of bergeroncreative.com, and this is The Brand Whisperer Briefing, where I provide practical brand strategies that will grow your corporate or personal brands. Giving you greater influence in today's technology driven society.As I've discussed there are three types of brand positioning you can hold in the mind of your target audience; Premier, Preemptive and Price. In last week's episode I explained Premier positioning, so this week's episode I'm going to focus Preemptive positioning.The majority of brands can benefit from preemptive positioning by offering unique, credible and relevant value to a specific target audience—known as differentiation or niche marketing. A common mistake is to adopt the offerings and messaging of the premier brand, known as the "me-too" position. Ultimately "me-too" brands are forced to compete based on price and convenience because they seemingly offer no unique value to the target audience. The key to a preemptive position is to target the largest possible audience who share a similar set of needs and values in which your brand is the only or best choice—thus preempting the competition. For example, in the car rental category, Avis decided to target business travelers with services like express check-out for those seasoned car rental customers, using the tagline, "We try harder." And who do they try harder than Hertz.So, your homework for this week is to answer these questions: What segment of my target audience can I bring most value to that is different from the competition? What need does my product or service fulfill that makes my brand the most valuable, the only, or best choice for the target audience when compared the competition?That's it for this week. Have a great week! On the next episode of The Brand Whisperer I will discuss Price brand positioning.