Positioning in Four Simple Steps

September 21, 2022
Posted by: Don Wieshlow
Categories: Growth, Marketing Strategy, News, Positioning

How to Position your Product, Service or Business

So, you’re launching a product, service or business; or trying to re-invigorate an existing one. Congratulations!

But beware the pain of burning resources in building and marketing the wrong solution or chasing after an uninterested audience! Proper positioning is the foundation for marketing and sales success.

Below are four simple positioning steps to reduce confusion and save time and money.

These consolidated steps are derived from product and service launch experiments at the companies and clients I’ve worked with, plus the wisdom of the topic experts listed at the end of this article.

1) Who’s it for?

What are your buyers’ alternatives?
- Competitors; or common user workarounds?
Who cares the most about your solution?
- Talk to target users and know them well.
- Define detailed personas for your key users.
Target the smallest viable market that you can win.
- Your solution must be remarkable to a specific segment of users who really care.
  - An “all things for all people” strategy never works.
- You need this core user base to evangelize and influence others. From here, you can grow your next logical market.

2) What’s it for?

What critical problem do you solve for the target user?
- What job do people hire your solution to do?
Where’s the white space?
- What user needs are not being met by existing alternatives?
- To help identify your competitive white space – plot your product, and the competition against two critical user needs on a four-quadrant grid using a range from least to most (i.e., affordability and ease of use). Do you best solve that need? If not, try again by applying a different user need element. Some common positioning strategies include:
  - Price: Position your product as the most affordable option in the market.
  - Quality/Luxury: Position your product as the highest quality option in the market.
  - Feature: Position your product as the only one in the market with a critical feature(s).
  - User Benefit: Position your product as the option that provides the best benefit(s) to your customers.
  - Use/application: Position as the best tool for a particular job.
  - Product Class: Positioning to take a market leadership position.
  - Competitive positioning: Position to compare directly against a specific competitor.

3) What are the Benefits for the user?

How are the users changed as a result?
- Ideally, quantify this (i.e., save $X annually)
Why should customers buy from you instead of the competitors?
- What’s different and better about your product?

“If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales. If we fail at marketing and sales, the entire business fails.”
April Dunford – Obviously Awesome

4) Craft your Positioning – sample template:

My product/service ____ solves the problem a)____ for b)____ by doing c)____, which is different and better than our primary competitor(s) d)____, resulting in user benefit e)____.

Positioning can be a confusing topic. And you must work hard to understand the users and competitors to answer the above questions. However, keeping this simple framework in mind allows you to get to effective positioning without wasting time.

Tips

Involve key stakeholders in this work: CEO, Marketing, Sales/Service, Product, Creative, etc.
For customer understanding, I like to combine existing data and user feedback with targeted surveys and 1-on-1 interviews.
Test and refine your positioning hypothesis as needed.
Use quality, professional copywriting and design to strengthen your position. Make it easy to understand and communicate within your company and externally to your target buyers and across all platforms.
Invest the required time, repetition, and frequency to solidify your message with your target audience.