A primer on positioning, and how to transcend your competitors
Isn't it strange how brands become verbs? More interesting than proper nouns are the commodities that become regular nouns. You're not searching the internet, you're "Googling," and it's not a bandage, it's a "Band-Aid." You get it, I won't belabor the point.
This is the dream of every founder, that their product or service goes on to become the Platonic ideal for their vertical. Many assume this to be a pipe dream, something only possible for brands that came to market 100 years ago. This is simply not the case. There is actually a large body of marketing literature outlining how to become top of mind for your customers when they think of a product category.
This is positioning in marketing, and mastering it gives one the most sober view possible of where their brand sits amongst competitors, while also revealing the clearest path toward carving out a little space, exclusive to you, in the minds of your customers.
I've read said body of literature, so today I'd like to give you a primer on positioning as it is typically defined, and how I use it in my work with CaJu's clients.
In a nutshell, if your customers are weighing you against your competitors at all, your positioning is wrong.
Rethinking the meanings, identities, and "permission slips for certain kinds of behaviors" that come along with your brand's offers will make you the Coca-Cola of whatever industry you're in, even if you're currently the RC Cola.
What most businesses get wrong about positioning
The first thing to understand is that most businesses don't bother learning the concept, so by reading this, you've already got a head start.
The second most important thing to understand, and something I harp on constantly in these articles, is that customers don't evaluate every product or service from scratch. They look for cues to estimate value because value is largely a social phenomenon. People rely on mental anchor products to define entire categories.
When you think of a camera, the definitional image that comes into your mind is likely a very specific model of Canon or Sony. The same goes for every commodity, from cars to cola. Your customers are only remembering a few of these products per category, and in an era of mass overcommunication, simply being one of many is not enough to guarantee your place in one of these limited definitional spots.
Your goal needs to be mental legibility.
The more you stick out from the crowd, the easier you will be to remember. This is more than being gimmicky for the sake of shock. For instance, I still remember the "Puppy Monkey Baby" Super Bowl commercial from roughly a decade ago. I even vaguely recall that it was a Mountain Dew commercial. That said, when I think of soft drinks, Mountain Dew doesn't even enter the top 20.
I'd make the case that good brand positioning has two factors: the first is uniqueness of offer, and the second is clarity of message. You need to explain why you don't really have competitors, and you need to explain it in a way that is clear enough to be easily remembered.
That, to me, is the heart of brand positioning. Not noise. Not spectacle. Not one clever campaign. A durable explanation for why your business occupies a different kind of mental slot.
Positioning improvement starts with targeting
Positioning is actually the last step in what's called the STP process, segmentation, targeting, and positioning. If we're talking about how to make your brand offer clear and memorable, this is the method to take.
First you identify groups of people that are meaningful to you. Then you choose the group that you can serve best. Then you design a message that speaks directly to that group in the way they speak to themselves.
That is the foundational way to think about your positioning.
It's not changing your logo, or the style of your website, or even claiming your product or service is higher quality than everyone else's. Good brand design is important, but if you're having to rethink design or language choices all the time, then you probably haven't thought enough about who you're talking to and how they talk amongst themselves.
Ask yourself: who are we? Who is my product or service for? Then, critically, ask yourself not only why just anybody would choose you over your competitors, but why this specific group of people would choose you over your competitors.
It could very well be that you can take a photo of your product or service that is so good you become the Coca-Cola of your vertical overnight. But the more reliable path is to do a little mental work first about who you're talking to before you try any big rebranding projects.
A lot of founders want to begin with aesthetics because aesthetics are tangible. They feel productive. But a brand positioning strategy starts upstream of design. Before you touch the visuals, you need to know whose inner monologue you are entering.
The classic positioning improvement route
Let's kick it old school for a bit.
Brands have been leapfrogging each other for as long as there have been brands. Naturally, then, there is a standard canon of advice when it comes to improving your positioning and becoming top of mind for your customers.
The first route is obvious. You can be first to market.
Easier said than done, but obviously the best way to come across as being wholly unique is to be wholly unique. If you are the first to come up with an entirely new kind of thing, you become the de facto ideal for that category, and your positioning is infinitely easier because of it. You're "the original" forever.
That said, true innovation is exceedingly rare. Being the first to market for a new class of products is a privilege held by very few in history. If that is you, then you're probably not reading this because you have yachts and hostile takeovers to tend to.
What's more common is being an improver within a market, someone who takes an existing product or service and makes a change to it that makes it a better experience for the customer. That will be 99% of products and services on the market.
For those people, my people, if you cannot be truly first in your market, then you need to make a new market.
Markets are often fractal, remember that. The more you zoom in, the more markets appear.
If you can't be first, then you need to carve out an entirely new class of people for which your product can be an entirely new class. Your size, your price, your worldview, the moment when your product is used, the specifics don't matter too much. What matters is framing yourself as a new kind of thing.
This is the first and best option for improving your positioning.
If you're unable to frame yourself as being in a class of your own, the second of the usual approaches is to frame yourself as the alternative to the first choice. Pepsi, goes without saying. If you can't be the leader, then you can be the leader of the rebellion. You can be the underdog, or the everyman's choice, or you can be the exact opposite, the luxury option, or the choice for people who care about quality.
The important part is that you have to position yourself against somebody else. Your framing revolves around the structural weaknesses of that competitor.
The reason this is only the second-best option is because you become, essentially, a parasite, like the remora attaching itself to a shark and eating its scraps. If the shark dies, so do you. In a world where Coca-Cola is no longer a household name, you can be damned sure that nobody is drinking Pepsi either.
The best brand positioning strategy, then, as I'm fond of saying, is a mixture of the two approaches. You probably can't be first, so you create a new class of product and place yourself squarely in it. That new class of product should frame itself as the alternative to the original and market toward a fresh niche of people who are a subsection of the original product for whom the new product meets a deeper need.
You are not just against the leader of your market. You should represent an entirely new market whose very existence is a repudiation of the original market.
Not just "down with the king." It's "down with the whole system, man."
How exactly to do that
I hate that most blogs and books on this topic stop there. They give you a map of the route, show you all the mountains and rivers in your path, but give you no tips for how to navigate either.
Brother, I'm about to give you an oar and a carabiner.
Brand positioning, at its most basic, is a study of how you compare to your competitors. Start there. You need to build a full and honest account of your competitors, who exactly they are appealing to, what they do well to meet the needs of that group, and how they fail that group.
The single best place for this is their public reviews.
Not just the 1-star ratings, but the 3-star and 5-star ratings as well. Understand that far more people leave a review to complain than leave one to compliment, so take the existence of 5-star ratings more seriously.
What are the frequent compliments your competitors receive? What are the frequent complaints? When they respond to reviewers, what word choices do they use? Do they speak like the customers themselves? Have they launched any new products lately? Have any of those new products succeeded or failed? Why?
Map out your vertical.
Then do the same kind of sober analysis for yourself.
It's shocking to me how many people in my generation simply ignore sources of information when they could potentially contain bad news. Bite the bullet. Take a look at your own reviews. Pay particular attention to the bad ones. For you, those are the most important.
If possible, try to survey your customers. Sweeten the deal with some kind of perk in exchange for their time. Ask them why they chose you and what aspects of your product they like most, the obvious stuff, but also include some more freeform questions like:
- How would you describe yourself?
- What is your perfect first date?
Those kinds of questions tell you about the customers themselves, their priorities, and the language they use to describe themselves.
What you're trying to discover is the deeper, potentially hidden priorities of the demographic that makes up your customer base. If you can discover some need or priority that isn't being fully catered to, or at least not clearly being spoken about, then you've found your new market to be first in.
This is where positioning stops being abstract and becomes practical. Most businesses don't need more adjectives. They need more evidence. They need a cleaner understanding of who the category leader is really serving, where that service breaks down, and which subgroup of people is still standing there with an unmet need.
The law of sacrifice
Most of my job is telling business owners who their customers are, in as exact terms as possible.
Everyone thinks their baby is beautiful. Everyone wants to believe that their product or service appeals to everyone. That just simply, factually, categorically, cannot be true.
The act of defining a group of people, by the very nature of language, is also the act of defining a group of outsiders. A set of all sets is not really a set. Here again Hegel rears his head in these articles, but the negative aspects, what a thing is not, can often tell us the most about what a thing is.
One of the fundamental principles of mathematics is proof by negation. What this means is that it is possible, and often more insightful, to think about who your customers aren't rather than who they are. Paradoxically, that will tell you the most about your customers.
Say you put out a podcast. You want to believe that everybody can listen to and enjoy it, but that cannot possibly be the case. Would the most senior resident of the local retirement community enjoy your podcast? Would an eight-year-old? Would a yacht-owner? Would a person without a house?
Start at the extremes if you must, but ask yourself these kinds of questions until you've created an anti-persona. Everything your anti-persona is, your target persona is not.
When you try to appeal to everybody, you end up appealing to nobody.
In order to maximize the number of people you appeal to, you have to minimize the number of people you're talking to. This is the paradoxical law of sacrifice. To gain the world, you must first give up the world.
Good positioning typically comes at a cost, whether material or psychic. Once you give up the fantasy that your offer appeals to everyone, then you can start to grow.
Identify the smallest viable audience for your product, the narrowest unmet needs, and you will start to see that you don't really have competitors per se. The ones you considered competitors actually sell something far different than you, and they sell it to different people.
Live and let live.
Commit fully to the smaller group of people, learn the way they talk to themselves, and only then craft your branding and marketing materials to speak to them and their deeper, more unique needs.
The CaJu difference
This isn't product placement. My own brand is just the one I know best.
Rather than give some abstract examples to close the article out, I'll give you the most tangible one closest to me.
When we started CaJu, we knew very little about the marketing industry, so the first thing we did was write down all the things that marketing agencies do and then offer to do those things for people. As we did this, we realized how crowded the space is and how similar most agencies' offers are.
Because of that, most of what constitutes choosing a marketing agency comes down to price, not value.
So we surveyed the landscape and took stock of the needs of the people we were talking to. We realized that there was a whole sub-category of people who either try a marketing agency once and give up because they don't see results, or never try in the first place because they don't see the value.
To us, that screamed accountability, along with a whole myriad of needs that were going completely unaddressed for the leads we spoke to.
At this point, we've evolved our offers and services to the point where I'm almost uncomfortable calling ourselves a marketing agency because we appeal to an entirely different set of people through an entirely different set of unique selling points.
When I was younger, I used to have a side gig designing newspaper ads for a pecan tree nursery in my hometown. The owners of that business had absolutely no idea who they were talking to or what channel was working, so they would try new ad approaches every single month, always across the same half-dozen trade magazines.
I think about that nursery a lot.
Those are the people I want to talk to.
They'd never hire a marketing agency because from their perspective it would be an unnecessary waste of resources toward something they were already managing to do themselves. What they needed was someone to explain to them, in the same manner that farmers speak in, sans the fancy language, that investing a little money now in some ad channel testing would mean less work and more payoff later. Like a seed you go through the effort to plant now to harvest later.
That is CaJu's persona.
What we do is a mix of marketing, production, analysis, yada yada (go read our services tab). It's so unique that if I get on a call with someone, I know with near certainty that they will work with us because the needs we fill go far deeper than just editing videos for social media or helping you run ads on Facebook.
The hard part of positioning is almost never the uniqueness part. It's the clarity part. The knowing who you're talking to and how to talk to them.
The classical advice for improving positioning is good and classic for a reason. But an improved approach to improving your positioning, and becoming top of mind for your customers, also involves aligning with who customers believe they are and who they want to become just as much as it involves escaping comparison against competitors.
That, in my view, is how you become a category of one.
Positioning homework
Answer the following questions and you'll be well on your way:
- What positioning do we currently have with our customers, whether we like it or not?
- What category are we in, from the customer's point of view?
- Who exactly is our product or service for?
- What sub-groups of customers and needs can we sacrifice in order to focus on deeper, narrower, more unaddressed sub-groups and needs?
- Who is your anti-persona?
- What are you refusing to be?
- What desire, fear, or identity does your customer base have that your competitors aren't addressing?
- What aspects of your business and story are wholly unique?
- Are those aspects enough to redefine a whole new category?
- What about your product or service do people remember long after they've engaged with your business?
If you do not take a conscious approach to carving out your position within your market, then the market will decide your position for you, and you will likely be seen as interchangeable or forgettable.
Don't waste your time trying to beat your competitors at their own game. Make a new game that only you know the rules to.
Before you touch your website or your logo, ask yourself: what exact place are we trying to earn in our customer's mind, and why exactly would they let us stay there?
Until next time, stay fresh.
- Casey