Posts Tagged ‘positioning’

Good brands last by evolving with the times. That means a good brand strategy doesn’t just position a brand at a moment in time, but establishes a direction for the brand to evolve and innovate as new competitors emerge and categories evolve. Your brand direction should be aspirational and extensible. It is not a thing to be achieved, but a direction in which to strive.

Brands that are defined by a position rather than a direction eventually become irrelevant. Take FedEx, the first overnight delivery company. Its position was clear: “When you absolutely positively have to get there overnight.” Then competitors moved in. And the category became too small. With no clear brand direction pointing where to go, FedEx now struggles to say what it stands for.

There are five potential directions from which you should choose the best single direction for your company:

1. Category: it’s about perpetual product leadership
2. Core technology: it’s about forever leveraging the essence that powers what you deliver into more products and services
3. Market: it’s about fulfilling more of the unmet needs of a particular market segment
4. Core belief: it’s about a principal that drives everything the company does
5. Vision: it’s about how your company is helping make the world a better place

Start by defining each direction, like we’ve done for Dangerous Kitchen below. When you’re done, each direction will feel like a piece of a harmonious whole, and you won’t want to choose. But you must. For example, we’ve chosen to continually push the limits of our category.

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Realize that over time, the pieces will drift apart. Knowing your direction now will let you know what to let go of and what to drive toward as your world changes.

Positioning your product or service is probably a waste of time.

First of all, it’s hard. Saying specifically and succinctly what you are means saying very generally what you are not —  a difficult thing for those who talk to shareholders. That’s why taglines like The ultimate driving machine are so rare, while taglines like Quality in everything we do are so commonplace. (Yes, that’s a real tagline).

The solution: don’t even try. Instead, recognize that people don’t care what you say about your products. They care what your products say about them.

The ultimate driving machine says, “Hello, I’m the ultimate driver.” By contrast, Quality in everything we do says, “Hello, I’m satisfied by good-enough.” Amping up the enthusiasm doesn’t help:  The relentless pursuit of perfection simply says, “Hello, I’m an uptight, overly controlling, type A who is constantly disappointed by those around me.” (This is not how I want to be introduced at a party.)

So break out the “Hello, I’m _______” stickers and pass them around. When your team comes up with a statement your customers would be proud to wear, you may have something worth building a brand on.

I was having a heated discussion (and a few margaritas) with dear friend about the merits and perils of entering a category after it has fully formed. On one side, you have the opportunity to be a fast-follower. On the other, you can just as easily become a failed-follower. In the end, I believe there is nothing inherently good or bad about being a late entry, provided you position yourself according to your timing.

Almost every product or service exists in a category along side similar products or services.  Just as products have a life-cycle from introduction to discontinuation, so do categories. The goal of positioning should always be a move toward category dominance (Technically, that’s when your product has twice the market share of any competitor).  Your positioning strategy should be guided by the timing of your entry into the category.

The following illustration shows the relationship between positioning strategy and timing. I’ve borrowed the adoption life-cycle curve from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. It describes the number of new buyers entering the market for products in a category — not the lifespan of the category. (A category can go on for decades even if no new buyers are entering the category.)

On top of Moore’s lifecycle curve, I’ve overlayed four different positioning strategies — each coinciding with a specific point in the category’s maturation.

A new product can be launched (or repositioned) in a category at any point in the lifecycle.  How you position the product should be based on when it’s launched.

Market-forming strategy:  A useful definition of a market is “a group of people with a common problem who reference each other.” A market forming strategy identifies groups of people who don’t yet realize they have a problem and may or may not yet reference each other, but they have the potential to come together around an innovative idea and form a market — e.g, FedEx or Starbucks.

Category-creating strategy:  Most new products are clumsy, incomplete, flawed in ways that contribute to their getting stuck in what Moore called the Chasm.  If the shortcomings are real, a second-mover might exploit them and turn a quirky technology with limited appeal into a significant new product category.  I can think of no better example than the iPod. It isn’t just an mp3 player: along with iTunes and the iTunes Store, it’s an entire personal music system, the like of which never before existed.

Benefit-surfacing strategy:  Once the category has caught fire, you can’t expect to get in front of it without offering a fundamentally different reason to buy.  Amateur golf was enjoying a surge in popularity about the same time Callaway introduced the Big Bertha.  While other clubs touted distance and control, Big Bertha offered forgiveness — exactly what the amateurs needed, even if they previously didn’t realize it.

Delivery-differentiation strategy:  New products can be launched even when the category is fully matured and the number of new buyers is waning.  But the focus needs to shift from the product to the way it’s delivered. Laggard buyers often lag because the product benefit doesn’t outweigh the hassle of getting and using it. This is not the time for a faster, better, cheaper product; but faster, better, cheaper system for acquiring and using it.  In other words, Amazon.

Late in the lifecycle, new benefits and even better delivery systems tend to take a back seat to price.  The goal should be to so significantly change the user experience that it’s no longer comparable to its original category.  For example, Miller Lite is not a beer; it’s a light beer.