Send to Kindle

Much of your strategy will remain under the covers and hidden from your customers. The only people really interested in your thought process will be companies that want a strategic partnership with you, the venture capitalists, the media, and business school professors who are writing case studies.

Your products, solutions, and services are what your customer will see, feel, touch, and buy. When he or she has a pain point, they will go shopping in the mall or browse the web. In reading about your product description, if the customer can connect the dots to their pain points, they will open their wallets.

Note that customers will look at the total cost of ownership of your products, solutions, and services, and not just solving the immediate pain point. They will look at terms, ease of installation, maintenance, after sales service, residue value, break-fix process, scalability, and a number of emotional factors such as the opinion of their peer group. Non-functional attributes, like color, play a role.

It is a deeply creative endeavor to design products that are a joy to purchase and use, and thus, a joy to make and sell.

Send to Kindle

Imagine you are looking for a city or country on a map. You are looking for the city or country’s position, meaning, you want to know where it is located, and its position relative to other cities and countries.

A company positioning statement is similar, with one crucial difference. The “map” is not standard and you can choose to make it up. Before you do that, check if any industry standards exist. Analyst companies such as Gartner and Forrestor make up “maps” to describe the players in an industry, but you are free to create your own map if you have the marketing muscle to communicate it to and convince all those who need to hear it.

Your company’s positioning statement answers the question, “Why should I work with you and not your competitor?” Obviously, talk is cheap, so you need to back up your positioning statement with proof such as patents, control of scarce resources, top notch talent, intellectual property, installed base, your track record or whatever.

The point of positioning is not to sound good (yes, that’s important), but to be compelling to your customers. You have to be different and better.