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More About The Importance
of Positioning
by Nan Andrews Amish
Our previous article entitled Positioning
is Everything discussed the importance of positioning
for strategic marketing and integration. This new article provides
more insight into the importance of positioning for communicating
to your target audience.
Positioning is about communicating your unique selling advantage
or proposition to your target audience in everything you do.
Marketing, sales, customer service. The consistency helps your
customer remember. Can't articulate your unique selling proposition
in less than 10 words? Maybe you lack clarity about positioning.
Our marketplaces have lots of choices. Too many, perhaps, for
the average consumer to evaluate logically. With hundreds of
choices in any given locale, many people simply look for a referral
to a product or with professional services: a company that their
friends trust. Those who shop around, consider two or three
options and take the best of the three.
With hundreds of choices, and with products and services that
most consumers find hard to differentiate, how do you set yourself,
apart from the crowd?
Positioning allows a marketer to think about why a customer
would want to do business with them. What do you offer that
the other producers don't? What does a potential client get
by doing business with you, that will serve their needs well?
Positioning has three components:
-
What are your strengths? Your distinctive
competencies? What about your offerings provide value to
your customers?
-
Who is your target customer? What about
them, makes them an ideal fit for the value you offer?
-
How are you different from your competitors
in ways that your customers and potential customers will
value? In other words, what is your unique selling proposition?
Your competitive advantage?
When all three are put together, you have a positioning
statement. Positioning statements are the basis for all marketing
messaging, sales scripts, and at a corporate level: branding.
So here are the things you need to know to be able to develop
your own market positioning:
-
Who are you? As a company? As a sales rep?
-
What is your firm or known for? (Ask people
what they think. It may not be what your internal talk says
it is. Is it prompt claims? Or telling it like it is? Or
it might just be everyone knows you.)
-
What do your customers appreciate about
your products or services? (Ask your colleagues and your
customers. Again, it might not be what you think. Maybe
you are known for high quality. Or perhaps for returning
calls promptly or your problem solving ability. Maybe it
is just that you are convenient. )
-
What are you particularly strong at? (These
are your core competencies.)
-
What are you better at, than anyone else
in your business? As a company? As a professional? As a
sales rep? (Quality? Innovation? Cost effective choices?)
-
Who are your most satisfied customers?
(This is a key one. It will help you get at you at your
best, where your value stands out.) What is it that they
value most about what you have to offer?
-
Based upon your sales goals and annual
plan, who is your target market? The key here is the fit
between what you do well and who or what type of business
needs what you are good at.
-
What value can you bring your customers
that they will value the most, based upon your unique strengths?
-
At a company level, can you articulate
this competitive value for your target, best customers?
Does your branding reflect this? Do your communications
use this messaging as its foundation?
-
Are your web, collateral, and sales
force attuned to this value?
-
Do your services focus on this value?
-
Does your customer service reflect this
value?
-
What about your other practices?
-
Does your IT infrastructure support
the value proposition? (Or does it simply focus on state
of the art practices?)
-
Do your hiring, compensation and promotion
policies seek out and reward behaviors that can enhance
the positioning and delivery of this competitive value?
-
Does your customer service reflect the
promise of the brand? Or are customers continually shocked
that the customer service is not like the brand image
at all?
Your customers are bombarded with hundreds - perhaps thousands
- of commercial messages each day. Believe it or not buying
your product or service is probably not their most important
priority. So, in the end, it comes down to relationships.
Does your vendor understand your needs?
Thus, positioning is EVERYTHING, because, positioning IS that
unique value you offer, to that target market you seek, in
ways that are better, more effective, more amazingly meeting
your needs than any of your competitors. And, the customer
service, and employee relationships need to MATCH or be INTEGRATED
with the market positioning.
Many companies today do not have big picture thinking about
marketing and positioning. Their practices are out of synch
with their brand images, and their customers are uneasy about
this. When customers are uneasy or confused, they become transactional
customers. Even for the best companies, they can lead in their
specific area, for what, a month? Then competitors match the
buying premise.
What we want is relationship customers. No one survives in
business with out a strong reputation and referral customers.
Customers who trust us to serve their needs. Who defend us,
in light of new product offerings, and service innovations.
For them to do that, they need to know what we stand for.
They had a good experience with us, but time passes. They
forget. But if they see our messages, our positioning, then
they remember and are pleased to do business with us, again.
When you consider the big picture, positioning is everything.
It drives marketing plans, web sites, recruiting and sales
scripts. It is the basis of every conversation, every sales
call, every customer service interaction.
What is your position?
(949 words) Copyright © 2006-2007 Nan Andrews Amish. All rights
reserved.
Nan Andrews Amish and Big Picture Perspective
offer facilitation, member surveys, management assessments,
tools, workshops and keynote addresses to help associations,
leaders and teams increase their effectiveness by seeing the
big picture perspective. Nan knows associations. She is past
president of a 1000 member New England regional marketing association
and current board member and 2002 Member of the Year of the
National Speakers Association/Northern California.
Permission to reprint this article is granted,
provided original author is given credit, and a link to www.BigPicturePerspective.com
is included.
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