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Positioning: Who are you?

14.09.2011 - Martin Smith

Many vendors make the same mistake over and over again.  When tackling the massive question of who you they and what they do – their positioning – they start at a place that seems perfectly sensible.  They start with their own product set and capabilities.

Unfortunately when it is done that way, the whole process can be very blinkered, meaning the perceptions of their prospects are undervalued and the strengths of their competitors are ignored.

Positioning starts, and always did start, in the minds of your prospects. If you’re looking elsewhere, you’re digging in the wrong place.

“Positioning” was introduced to the world by two gentlemen, Al Ries & Jack Trout in 1969.  They followed up their first paper with a three-part series of articles in Advertising Age, before publishing their seminal book “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” in 1981.  Since then, the word has firmly entered business life, even if many people are a little hazy about its meaning.

The premise was that in order to thrive in these over-communicated times, companies needed to carve out a unique position in their prospects’ minds to be remembered and understood.  Now, if that was the case as early as 1969, it is infinitely more true in today’s uber-communicated world.

Positioning is an exercise which requires structure, as well as a little creative, military thinking.  It is the art and science of becoming known and recognised for being something but not everything, rather the default position of being nothing in particular (while keeping your options open).

Here’s how to get started.

1. Mapping the terrain

Working out what battlefield you’re on is not as straightforward as it may seem.  You may like to think that your terrain is “intelligent broadband traffic management solutions”, but chances are, service providers will call it “policy” or “traffic management”.  Find out what the real pigeonholes or mental “buckets” are, and you have started the exercise.

Google search can provide good clues as can Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Insights, as well as the various LinkedIn Groups for service providers and the top telco and wireless media.

2. Assessing yours and your enemies’ strengths

What position do you currently hold in service providers’ minds?  And what about your competitors?

If you have the budget (and C-level sponsorship), then you can go ahead and commission a research project to determine and map the real associations that service providers have about you and your competitors.  But beware of framing the exercise in prescriptive marketing-speak.  For example, don’t waste your time measuring how “agile”, “cutting-edge” or “industry-leading” people think you are.  Real people don’t talk like that.  Find out what technologies they associate you with and what attributes and expertise they volunteer about you.

For those that don’t have the luxury of being able to commission a full research project, again, Google can take you a lot of the way there.  Google search results are about the closest thing we have to a map of the human collective consciousness.  Using the right search parameters you can see how much your company is mentioned alongside a particular technology or category, and compare that to your rivals.  When you lay yours and your competitors’ data side by side within a particular category, you have a strong proxy for how the market sees your place within that category.

As part of this section, if you have the tools, also map out the comparative size of your sales and marketing teams with those of your competitors. When the data is laid out in front of you, it is very clear where you fit in the food chain for a particular market.

3. Determining your best plan of attack

The best strategy for your company varies dramatically depending upon your position in the food chain.

Being the clear leader in a particular sector (and not just being “a leading company” like hundreds of boilerplates claim) brings massive benefits.  The leader position is safer and the revenues are stronger.  The optimal leader strategy is to fortify against competitors, use your scale to innovate and constantly improve on your own products, so you will be the only ones making your products obsolete.  Then keep spending more on marketing than anyone else.  For inspiration, look to Gillette which only ever compare its products to their own past products or Google, who do everything to build an unassailable moat around their advertising business.

But what if you’re number five or number six in an industry?  It is not always an option to do a Jack Welch and drop every sector where you are not number one or two.  If you’re genuinely number five or six in a category (and not actually part of a sub-category like emerging markets specialists), then you’re probably losing money and getting weaker all the time.  Go more niche.  Make something smaller.  Target a different geographic market.  Use a different distribution method.  Make it cheaper… or more premium.  If you’re going head-to-head with the 800-pound gorilla in your market on their own terms, you’re going to get squashed.

The good news is that by being different, the company becomes orders of magnitudes more memorable and your telecom PR and mobile PR efforts can suddenly break through with greater clarity.

Categories: Positioning, Telecom PR