According to Collins Dictionary, the definition of positioning is:
The position held by a brand in the opinion of consumers, in comparison with its competitors’ brands.
Blair Enns recently made the point that positioning is not strategy, though we often confuse the two.
Strategy, as defined by Roger L. Martin, is a set of choices that enable you to invest in a given place to win.
Positioning as an activity, in my view, is downstream of strategy. It’s the decision on how you’ll frame your solution relative to the job it performs and the alternatives it competes with, as experienced by the customer set you serve. Think of it as choosing which aisle and shelf to place your product on (metaphorically or literally).
Avis, Listerine, and Lucozade famously changed little about their struggling products. When they repositioned, they transformed results.
That choice does two things:
- It determines the set of competitors you’re judged against
- It inherits the context of the environment in which it sits, which implies the job that it’s deemed to perform
Every firm has a position in the customer’s mind, but I don’t believe positioning is a relevant activity for every firm. In fact, I’d go further: positioning is a redundant activity for any firm seeking to sell its expertise from a position of authority.
And by position of authority, I mean that a meaningful collection of people in a market recognises your voice as THE voice on the topic in question.
But we do have an absolute requirement for strategy.
For an authority-driven firm, these are the strategic choices I think about:
- Who are the people you’ll serve?
- How many clients do you want to serve?
- What one frustration or task will you obsess over that these people truly care about?
- What practice will develop unique insights related to that frustration or task?
- Where will you publish your insights, and in what form?
- How will the right people discover your insights?
- What do you need in place to realistically and successfully execute this?
- What will you sell and how will you deliver it?
You do not need to decide in which aisle and shelf your product is located relative to competitors.
Austin Kleon, in Show Your Work!, quotes David Foster Wallace, who said that good nonfiction is the chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”
I think that authority is similar.
When you pay far closer attention, at far more length than anyone else, to a frustration or task a group of people truly care about, you develop interesting opinions and perspectives. Those perspectives contrast with existing ideas and differentiate you from other sellers in the market.
Positioning is the byproduct, not the activity.