Positioning is one of those marketing words everyone uses and surprisingly few people can define… drives me nuts!
It gets attached to messaging workshops, brand refreshes, campaign plans and sales decks. Sometimes it means the words on the website. Sometimes it means the strapline. Sometimes it appears to mean ‘how we would like people to describe us’.
Most of the time, what people are actually talking about is promotion. And promotion is not positioning.
Promotion is how you communicate. Positioning is the strategic choice that determines what you communicate in the first place.
You can promote weak positioning more loudly. It will still be a weak position.
Positioning happens before the campaign
This is where businesses regularly get the order wrong.
They want the campaign before the decision. The website before the segmentation. The messages before the proposition. The content plan before anyone has agreed what the business should actually be known for.
Positioning isn’t quick. To do it properly you need to start with your customer and make real choices.
Which market are we competing in?
Which audience matters most?
What need are we best placed to meet?
What can we credibly own?
What are we willing not to be?
That last question is usually where the trouble starts. Businesses like the idea of positioning until it requires them to exclude something.
They want to be specialist and broad. Premium and accessible. Innovative and reassuring. Designed for everyone, but deeply relevant to each individual.
Positioning requires sacrifice
Good positioning isn’t an exercise in finding enough appealing words to keep everyone happy. It’s a decision about where you’ll compete and how you intend to win… which inevitably means giving some things up.
Marketer to marketer… I feel you… you have a strong and informed position, and whilst constructive challenge leads to a better result… you end up in this doom loop…
Someone will ask whether a message is broad enough. Someone will want to squeeze an extra service into the homepage because ‘we do that too’. Someone else doesn’t like that one word and needs to replace it with 17.
And your tight, killer positioning becomes three paragraphs of word soup.
Your audience decides where you are positioned
Your positioning doesn’t live in your brand deck. It lives in your customer’s mind. And when you think positioning, that’s the question to answer – what do you want your customers to think of you?
That’s why positioning begins with your customers… researching and segmenting them. Not a room full of people deciding what sounds good.
Without customers positioning is an inside-out exercise. But to be effective it needs to be outside-in.
Promotion can’t rescue a muddled position
When the underlying position is unclear, it’s hard to hit sales targets, so guess what… businesses respond by increasing promotional activity!
Promotion amplifies what’s already there. If the position is sharp, promotion helps more people understand and remember it. If the position is vague, promotion simply spreads the vagueness further.
That’s why a business can be highly visible and still difficult to describe.
Take Cinch… they seemed to sponsor almost everything with a pulse: football, cricket, rugby, tennis, darts, the NFL, radio and five major music festivals… It certainly bought visibility. But visibility isn’t positioning. A big enough budget can make a name familiar. On its own, it can’t give people a distinctive reason to choose it. Awareness without preference is an expensive place to stop!
Get the order right
Promotion matters. Of course it does. A killer position achieves very little if nobody ever hears about it. But promotion comes second.
First decide where you want to compete, who matters most and what you can credibly stand for. Then build the proposition, messages, brand and campaign around that choice.
Otherwise, you’re just ticking an activity box… AI can do that for you!
What do we want to be chosen for?
You can write the most elegant positioning ever committed to PowerPoint. It doesn’t matter if the market thinks of you differently… or worse, doesn’t think of you at all.
Once that positioning is clear, promotion has a job to do. Until then, it’s mostly noise.
Karen Quinn, Co-founder, Untamed Consulting
