Positioning. Customer driven marketing

What a 20 year old book can teach us about marketing.

Over the last number of years, the idea of customer driven development has gone from strength to strength. Driven by classic material such as Steve Blank’s “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”, and championed by people such as Eric Ries and his Lean Startup Movement, the customer first business model has gained significant traction, especially in technology startup circles.

As it turns out, people have proposed customer centric theories in the past. “Positioning: The Battle for your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout outlays an idea for brand positioning which parallels the consumer development cycle we have today extremely closely.

Positioning was revolutionary when it was first published. Today, even though it is now over 20 years old, positioning is still highly relevant and helpful for anyone in startup land.

What’s it all about?

The core philosophy of positioning, is that when trying to decide on branding values, the first, most important and sometimes only place we need look is in the minds of our prospective customers. Positioning teaches customer based brand development from cover to cover. Sounds familiar right?

The other core concept that Positioning shares with the startup movement is that you should focus on finding a problem before you set about trying to fix something. Just like startup philosophy teaches us that we should first find a customer who has a problem, Positioning teaches us that in order for our brand to have a deep and lasting effect on a person, we should first find a hole in that person’s mind, then set about filling it.

What can we learn from it?

The book covers many important topics, one of which is how to tackle the task of positioning a brand in a market dominated by an established leader. Many startups today are attempting to disrupt sectors with large and established players and face this problem at one point or another.

The book describes the tactic of positioning yourself _against_ the competition in an interesting and detailed manner, providing the example of Tylenol (among many others) which managed to carve out a significant wedge from the aspirin market by repositioning aspirin as a substance which “can irritate the stomach lining”.

Many startups today could gain by repositioning the competition in a similar fashion.

Using a springboard

Another topic covered is how we can use an anchor point as the basis for our product’s branding position. As a complete unknown in a new market, it can often be hard to get a foothold in the consumers mind because they cannot grasp where your product can fit into their lives. It is difficult to relate to a completely new product idea.

By leaning on already established market leader for some grounding, we can easier place our product in the mind of the public. We need look no further than the latest batch of Y Combinator graduates for examples of this tactic. Parse, for example, is “A Heroku For Mobile Apps, Vidyard is “A YouTube for Business”.

Last Word

I’m really only scratching the surface of what this book contains. Other topics covered include the traps to avoid when choosing your business name and the perils of line extensions. It really is well worth the read and a book I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in the startup ecosystem.