Position or be positioned

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What is positioning? Does it matter? Does everything need one? Is it just for products? Before you communicate anything, before you write messaging and a narrative, you need to start with positioning. Positioning is really owning that specific association in the mind of your audience, and it is a core part of any brand strategy.

Positioning needs to be:

Relevant
Differentiating
Sustainable

Five Cs to help you build a positioning:

Culture
Category
Customer
Competition
Company

Full Transcript:

Take for example, you wanted to buy a car and you just had a baby, and safety's important. What pops up into your head? Volvo. Immediately, Volvo is part of your consideration set. They've done a tremendous job positioning that brand in the safety realm. So whenever anyone thinks about safety and in automobiles or cars, Volvo comes up. Safety equals Volvo. And Volvo equals peace of mind, well-designed, solidly built. All this as part of the branding strategy and brand strategy, but it all starts with positioning.

Positioning as a concept has been made popular by Al Reis and Jack Trout back in the sixties. And at time it was very focused on product. But since then, it has really evolved over time. And when I look at positioning, it's an approach. It's a concept that obviously has been embedded and cemented in marketing and branding history, but I'm using it in a broader context. Brand is really not just about a product, brand can be a company, for example, Pfizer. Brand can be a product, for example, Dove. But brand can also be both product and company, for example, 23 and Me, Nike and so on.

Every brand needs a positioning.

How do you develop positioning? It is really a fit between the audience, what they need, what they care about, their goals, and what you can deliver. How can you uniquely give them the thing that no one else can, it's really an exercise in decision-making. I always say that strategy is about making decisions. If everybody has to do it, that's not strategy. You have to decide what's important enough. You have to decide what rises to the top. It has been always very tempting for any business to want to be known for everything, that's typically the mindset of most people. But if you want to be known for everything you in the end become known for nothing.

Ultimately positioning needs to fulfill three main criteria:

Relevant: It needs to be relevant to the audiences of the customers in which you hope to influence.
Differentiating: It needs to stand apart from the other competition from the other folks, that's trying to influence those same audiences.
Sustainable: It should be hard for other people to copy what you're doing. It serves as a moat to prevent other competition or new entries from immediately doing what you're doing.

How do you build positioning? Remember the Five Cs

1. Culture

Culture is really the context around the people that you're trying to influence. So if you were to start a company in healthcare, you need to understand that one of the trends is that people are viewing healthcare just like they view Uber or streaming Netflix. It needs to be on demand, on their time, wherever they are, whenever they want it. And so that is a key piece of context or culture, in the world of healthcare you need to take into consideration.

2. Category

Category is really important because it starts to set the frame of reference from which your brand will operate. It also gives you an understanding who the competition is. But when you think about the idea of solidifying a category, it's tempting to just look at one, you need to look at the tangential categories, other categories that might start to encroach on your category. But also when folks think about categories, it's also tempting to say hey, I want to create a totally new one. New category creation can be sexy, but it's also daunting. It's resource heavy. It is not simple. And the benefits of that typically does not come into other companies come into your category because when you think about new category creation, it's also probably educating your customers are or audiences about a problem they never thought they have. Think about the very successful brands–Facebook or Tesla, they did not create their categories. They simply made it better. They simply take their specific category and tweaked it. And so think very carefully about what category you're in. And if you're thinking about creating a new category, you damn well have the resources to back it up.

3. Customer

The customer for me is going to be broad. It might not just be the folks that buy your product or service. It’s also your audiences. It's all the people that you hope to influence and change along the way. So what's important about them? You need to understand what their goals are, what are they trying to do? What job are they really trying to accomplish? And what's in their way, what are the barriers. What's really getting them to be in a frenzy when they are not meeting the goals and the challenges that's ahead of them.

When you think about the category and the customer, and you put them together, you really start to understand the gap and tension faced by the people that you hope to influence day in and day out.

4. Competition

It is very important to understand your competition. As I said before, differentiation is so important. There are three different types of competitors that you need to look at: Direct competition, indirect competition, and alternative competition. I'll give you an example. So let's say you are offering a taxi service and more specifically, going from the airport to the hotel, a direct competitor might be other taxi services. They might even be Lyft or Uber. Indirect competition could be a rental car company, or it could be Zipcar. An alternative competition could be the hotel transport service. It came from a totally different industry. It's the hospitality industry rather than transport. So you see, when you start to consider the different sets and types of competition, then you have a good understanding of actually what is the white space and what you can own.

5. Company

Companies in this sense, it's really your brand. It could be a product, service, solution or portfolio of products. What's important here is to look at the unique value that your brand provides. What is the thing that your customers or the audiences would come to you for? What could be your secret sauce?

Once you start to understand that and the competition, you can create something that's differentiating, something that's unique to talk about and be part of your positioning.

When you understand your five Cs, it is time to put all the components together to write your positioning. It's really deciding upon what is that most important thing that's going to help your audiences do what they need to do for positioning. I don't really care about what a specific template is going to be, but it should accomplish three different things.

The first one, it needs to talk about your audiences or customers for products. It might be very specific. It might be a very specific target segment for company. It might be more white. You're talking to investors, you're talking to media, you're talking to, uh, your employees, but what is that red thread?

The second piece is the differentiation and the value. What value are you providing that is unique that is going to solve their problem? That's going to help release that tension?
And number three, if there's a core piece of information, in terms of a proof point or a claim, it should be in the positioning.

So next time before you write any type of messaging or communicate a narrative, or if someone asks you to refresh a website, you need to ask this one question: What is the positioning? Start with that.

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Company as brand, Product as brandhowie chanDecember 21, 2021