DEFINING YOUR POSITIONING - From a Great Product to a Great Brand pt.2
What’s the one thing you want to be next to in your target customer’s brain?
We were invited by SETsquared, the world’s No1 University Business Incubator, to run a workshop for 15 startups on the principles underpinning the creation of a brand.
This post is a summary of the second half of that workshop - determining your positioning. You can read about the first half here.
It’s about them, not you.
In the previous post, Ian covered critical parts of developing your brand from the inside out. Why you exist. Who you are. What your plan is.
All incredibly important parts of defining your brand. But, all about you.
To create a truly compelling brand, the type needed to scale beyond early adopters, you need to think more about the mind of your target customers. Everything you’ve decided so far will help them evaluate you once they’ve thought about you. But positioning your brand against some of their problems will help you get thought about in the first place.
‘Attitudes are about evaluating the brand, whereas salience is largely about having a chance of being thought of.’ Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science
Think about it this way. What do you think of when you think of the brand Apple? Innovation. Steve Jobs. Nice laptops. Great design. California. Etc. etc. These are all important elements of the brand that Apple spend a lot of money to put in your head. But now turn it on its head. What scenarios could you be in for which the solution is Apple, not the question? When I want to treat myself to some technology. When I need a new phone. When I want the best user experience. These are the positions that Apple owns in our heads.
What is the one thing you want to be next to in your target’s brain?
Assuming you don’t have the budgets of Apple, or really of a fully established business, you are going to have to pick your positioning carefully. Big brands can afford to hold multiple positions - but it’s very likely you need to pick one and go for it.
Getting the structure of a positioning statement is quite easy. But writing a good one is hard and is based on doing your groundwork properly. In order to do so, you’ll need to:
Define the essence of your brand (which Ian covered in the last post)
Select and understand your audience
Recognise and appraise the competition
Look realistically at your own product
Selecting and understanding your audience
First up then, your audience. Now I’m guessing you already know a fair amount about them, but in our experience founders tend to confuse the future market opportunity with the immediate, select too big a target market and therefore fail to uncover some truly interesting insights about them to leverage in their positioning.
‘Winning at marketing more often than not means being the biggest fish in the pond. If we are very small, then we must search out a very small pond.’ Geoffrey A. Moore, author of ‘Crossing the Chasm’
Most startups think ‘Who could use my product?’ and start talking to all of them. But for positioning work, you must first step back and say ‘who is out there in my category?’ At this point it’s not a strategy, it’s data-gathering, in theory, your competitors should have the same map of the market as you. Work out who the big groups of potential customers are and describe them as much as possible by their behaviour as well as what you think is going on in their heads.
Now, pick one group to target. Only one. In the future, you can go for a wider audience. But for now, focusing is your friend. It allows you to keep your limited budget to make an impact on this audience, rather than spreading yourself too thin.
Now you have selected that audience, spend as much time with them as possible to understand their problems and goals that are associated with your product. Once you’ve found their explicit goals (“I need an accounting software”), keep digging to find their implicit goals (“I want to spend my time winning new business not doing the books”). Just keep asking “Why?” until you get a great understanding of how they think and feel, not just what they do. And when you discover these thoughts and feelings, try and identify one that your product and brand can respond to.
Recognising and appraising the competition.
No matter how innovative your product is, you are very VERY likely to have competitors. Yes, you too.
Right, now we’ve got that sorted. We need to go a little deeper. Your true competitor set are not always those with a similar product to you, but those who solve the same problem as you. People shop the problem, not the product. Who else solves the problem you are solving? Put yourself in your customers’ shoes - if you were trying to solve this problem how would you go about it? And are there any higher-level problems that make this problem irrelevant? These are your true competitors.
Spend some time working it through, and once you have found them, get to know them as well as possible. What is their positioning? How do they maintain it? Can we beat them? Don’t fall prey to the myth of the lazy incumbent being beaten by the agile startup - incumbency effects are a huge factor in business performance. Put simply bigger brands have got a huge advantage over smaller ones. Or even more simply put:
‘Goliath kills david, f##ks off and eats a pizza.’ Mark Ritson, Professor of Marketing
Don’t underestimate your competition. Identify the brands you need to beat and identify the brands you need to avoid. Your positioning is an opportunity to take control of your competitor set in your audience’s mind so understand who and how you will compare yourself against.
Looking realistically at your own product
Now, you know your product better than anyone else in the world. How could it be any other way?
But, what you see is not what your audience sees. It’s hard to get an objective view of your product yourself.
‘It’s hard to see the label when you’re inside the jar.’ David C. Baker, positioning expert.
So try and get an outside perspective to give you the lowdown on what stands out for your product. Preferably people like your target customers, but it’s worth stating that talking through your product with any reasonably intelligent human being beats relying entirely on the perspective of you and your colleagues.
Whilst you’re doing this, it’s worth thinking about the difference between what differentiates you, and what makes you distinct. It’s quite likely that you do have something that differentiates you, but for many, it’s quite a small detail and therefore not recognised by a potential customer in the first pass (it will become more important once they’ve bothered to notice you). Now think about what makes you distinct. It might be totally meaningless - a particular shaped product, a certain philosophy, a charismatic founder. But if it is there, it’s a hook for your brand, something to make you stand out from your competition, and can be very helpful in your positioning if you can’t find a big enough differentiating point.
Writing a positioning statement
Now you’re armed with insight into your brand, product, audience and competitors, you need to pull it all together into a statement. This end result is that this statement becomes the North Star for every communication your brand has. It serves as a sense-check every time your brand opens its mouth - ‘is this communication reinforcing my positioning in the mind of my potential customers?’
There are many, many templates for writing a positioning statement. They’re all pretty similar, so whichever you use is relatively insignificant, but the critical things are that it is based on insight (see everything above), is specific enough so that it excludes as much as it includes, and it can ONLY apply to you.
‘The essence of strategy is sacrifice.’ David Ogilvy, Founder of Ogilvy & Mather, ‘The Father of Advertising’
At Firehaus we’ve tried to pare it down to the simplest we think it can be whilst still being useful:
BRAND is for AUDIENCE who want to ACHIEVE THIS GOAL. Unlike ALTERNATIVES we are the only solution that POINT OF DIFFERENTIATION/DISTINCTION.
It’s pretty self-explanatory, and you should be able to see the links with the insight areas above. Work through your customer targeting, your definition of your competitors and your distinctive or differentiating assets and see what you can come up with. Then go away for 10 minutes and write it again, but better. Rinse and repeat. Get outside input if you can.
It’s not complicated, it’s just hard. Good luck.
If you’ve had a go at writing your proposition, feel free to email it to me for a quick blast of feedback.