A simple 3-step approach to your positioning statement
A lot has been written about positioning. An all time favorite on the subject must be “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Published first in 1981, and based on concepts developed since the 70’s, it is as relevant, straight-forward and fun to read today as ever. It covers all the basics with clarity and verve.
And when customers approach us with a positioning problem, we tend to start from the basics. The process of product positioning, at least the part of the process that informs early and strategic product and communications decisions need not be overly complicated, especially for small and medium companies with a small product/service portfolio.
The overarching principle is obvious, yet so often overlooked and overridden that it is never stressed enough:
Product Positioning is the process by which you create a position in the prospect’s mind. You do not position a product (or service), you simply aim to create a position for the product (or service) in your prospect mind.
This is a profound distinction. What matters is the perception in the prospect mind and not your own. The process of positioning is therefore the process of figuratively finding (or carving out) an unclaimed space, or hole, in the prospect mind. It is not the distillation of what marketing, engineers or even the CEO thinks the product stands for or worse, the company stands for. For example, while many Googlers may think of Google as a large internet media company that sells advertising products to marketeers and agencies on a massive scale, it is hard to argue that the position it occupies in most consumers’ minds is essentially “search engine”.
With this premise, positioning can be thought of as a process with key deliverables. Here are some of the key elements:
1. The target
A clearly-defined target is a foundation of positioning. If your product or service is already in the market, you can start by identifying the target as the group of users or buyers or prospects that are already potential or actual customers. Or you may want to strategically identify a target prospects in a market that is “adjacent” to the market you are already in. If you are not yet selling, than identifying the target is more of a speculative excercise. In any case, it is important to back your intuition with solid research and testing.
“Clearly defined” implies narrow focus. Consumers and customers are inundated with commercial communications, so by choosing to be very specific in selecting your target, you make it a lot easier to define a position that will be specifically relevant to the target and that will stick. One useful way to test your target definition’s focus is to state explicitly what are the segments that you are NOT going to serve. For example, if your target customer segment is “women, 15 to 34, who are single household and live in the top 10 US metropolitan areas”, does that mean that you’re product or service is not designeds for “women, 15 to 34, who are single household and live in rural areas”. Is that consistent with your product and business strategy?
Size of the target prospect population is also an important parameter. Can you really deploy sufficient resources (e.g. communications budget, product development investment, time, etc.) to position successfully a product in a segment the size you have defined? Can you successfully differentiate your product or service in the minds of a wide swath of potential prospects?
2. The problem
What is the target’s major problem that you are aiming to address or that competing products are addressing? This is where the focus expended in defining the target pays dividends. The more narrowly defined the target, the easier it is to identify needs and wants that that target has and that other targets DO NOT have.
The problem definition is never trivial, especially when the product or service satisfies needs that are not easily measurable. Think about entertainment products, such as games or sports. Or of products and services that satisfy needs customers did not know they had. It helps in this case to implicitly think of the problem as the opportunity, i.e. the unclaimed empty space available in the prospect mind.
3. The benefit
What are the ways in which your product or service is addressing the problem? More importantly in which ways it is addressing the problem in a more valuable way than the competition? Remember the benefit must be relevant to the identified target.
It also helps to think of competition in terms of economically substitutable goods or services. For example, for many consumers, online games are a substitutable good when compared with movies. Some consumers have implicitly allocated a certain amount of their time and attention to different forms of entertainment and if they play more, they watch less. From a business standpoint, games do not directly compete with movies but for some target customer they are definitely competing goods.
Putting it together
With a solid, wel-articulated definition of Target, Problem and Benefit, a positioning statement can be easily assembled:
Product XYZ helps [the target] address the issue of [the problem] by providing [the benefit].
There you go. From the positioning statement, you can then start developing Key Messages, Tag lines, Unique Value Propositions and the entire body of the branding and communications toolbox.
Photo credit: CC romainguy/Flickr
