What is Positioning and Why You Need It (Part 1)
Positioning is one of the most foundational, misunderstood, and under-utilized parts of a company’s core business strategy.
Poor positioning leads to higher marketing costs, lower margins, and slower growth—yet many companies invest more time in tactical marketing decisions than in getting their positioning right.
This article is the first in a three-part series on positioning. Here’s what we’ll cover over the next three issues:
Part 1: What is Positioning and Why You Need It
Part 2: How to Create Strong Positioning
Part 3: How to Incorporate Sustainability into Positioning
What is Positioning?
Positioning can be tricky to explain, so let me illustrate with an example:
My daughter recently got her ears pierced. The piercer told us to clean her ears daily with saline. So I trotted over to Walgreens in search of saline.
My first stop was the contact aisle. I found a saline solution for contacts, but suspected other active ingredients might be in it, which Google quickly confirmed.
Then I headed over to wound care. There were a few brands with a special spray nozzle, which I didn’t need, and the prices seemed crazy expensive for what is basically salt water.
I racked my brain, wondering what other category might sell a cheaper saline. Baby care! I remembered that Boogie sells saline nasal spray.
In this example, saline is the solution—the basic product, service, or technology. It has many benefits, serves multiple uses, and creates value for multiple customer groups. These products represent three different positioning strategies.
A positioning strategy clarifies your choices about who you serve, what category you play in, and why you are a superior choice.
Positioning informs almost everything about your marketing strategy and impacts decisions such as:
Who is your customer?
How, when, and why do they use the product?
Who are the competitors or alternatives?
What is the packaging? (This can be physical packaging or how services are “bundled” to create a service product.)
How is the product/service sold, distributed or accessed?
What are the benefits, results, or claims?
What is the price?
Your choices influence positioning. But ultimately, positioning happens in your customer’s brain. Customers evaluate your solution in the context of alternatives. You can make strategic decisions to influence how your brand or product is perceived, but you don’t control it.
A positioning strategy isn’t obvious. Rather, it is the intentional and often challenging process of narrowing to a more granular usage and context for how your solution shows up in the market. Just as with the saline example, a business must make choices to intentionally focus on a specific market, purpose, or usage context, so the customer knows the product is for them.
Consider the following:
Gum that cleans your teeth: Is it gum or toothpaste?
A sparkling fruit juice: Is it soda, a mocktail, or a prebiotic?
A digital transformation firm: Is it management consulting, IT services, or software development?
There are two primary types of positioning: product positioning and brand positioning. For the purposes of this article, I won’t delineate between the two as these principles generally apply to both types of positioning, but if you have questions about how your product/service positioning connects to brand positioning, reach out as I’d be happy to explain.
Customers Make Associations Based on Positioning
When we give our customers a specific category context, they make associations. These associations are neither inherently positive nor negative but must be considered to inform your positioning strategy.
When customers compare your product to alternatives, they will have specific expectations about:
Price
Benefits and functionality
Quality of service
Areas where you may underperform
For example, if you position a product as an eco-friendly cleaner, people may expect:
There are no chemicals in it (so they will have higher standards when reading the ingredient list)
The product may not clean as well
It comes in recyclable packaging
It will cost more than traditional cleaners
Evaluating how your solution performs against these expectations helps you frame your product to appeal to the right audience.
Common Positioning Pitfalls
Poor positioning creates internal and external confusion. Without a clear strategy, you risk appealing to no one and create ambiguity about the top priorities for your innovation, sales, and marketing efforts.
Here are three common positioning pitfalls for purpose-driven brands.
Pitfall No. 1: Positioning is too Broad
If you try to appeal to all your potential customers, you lose the ability to specialize for any one group. You will water down your benefits and your solution won’t resonate because you have failed to design and communicate for specific buyer needs.
Take our saline example. If you went to market with a generic saline solution, here’s what could happen (terrible design intended😊):
The retailer won’t know what aisle to put your product in.
The consumer won’t know if your product works for their situation.
Your messaging will become overwhelming and confusing as you highlight different types of uses and benefits.
Your product formulation and packaging will be sub-optimized for the specific use cases (e.g. wound care spray vs. contact solution).
Notice how even the claims are confusing. “Gentle on eyes and noses” may be technically accurate, but it’s difficult for a customer to envision how a single solution can do both functions well.
Pitfall No. 2: Creating a New Category
I commonly see companies who think they are creating a new category, believing “no one else is doing this.” As a result, they explain their offer in a vacuum, as though there are no other alternatives, and assuming the value is obvious.
This is a mistake.
First, if you don’t attach yourself to an existing category, your buyer will do it for you.
Second, true category creation is extremely rare and, even when it does happen, you still need to associate yourself with an existing category to help customers understand what you are and how they would use you.
Most products and services fit within an existing category. Understanding your competitive advantages and disadvantages compared to alternatives will set you up for a stronger strategy.
Consider Uber at launch. Rather than comparing itself to a taxi or introducing “ride-sharing services,” a category that meant nothing at the time, Uber called itself, “Everyone’s private driver.” This concept leveraged customers’ understanding of a premium car service while elevating brand perception, enabling them to charge more.
Pitfall No. 3: Positioning Isn’t Your Purpose
Many purpose-driven brands lead with mission or purpose as their messaging strategy, thinking it creates a distinct market positioning. But if purpose or impact doesn’t influence a buyer’s decision, it’s not a core factor in positioning. Positioning is about understanding the landscape of options and how you fit into those options in your buyer’s mind. Sustainability or purpose is often a peripheral factor in a buyer’s decision.
Additionally, values and purpose may actually be undifferentiated in categories where most players have similar purposes and similar environmental benefits. It’s important to communicate purpose to align with customer values and create relevance, but sometimes these efforts are table stakes vs. differentiators.
Tesla’s roadster is positioned as a premium sports car, even though Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. You don’t need a purpose-driven positioning for your business to have an impact.
Back to my saline story. I bought the Boogie saline spray, not because it optimally delivered my specific need but because it was the lowest cost per ounce of saline. (Side note, this is an amazing nasal saline spray, if that’s what you need!)
Had there been a product specifically designed for piercings – an easy-to-use wipe form that eliminated the need for gauze and claimed to prevent piercing infections – I would have chosen it (and paid more). Perhaps, this market is too small, at least for distribution at Walgreens. Still, the power of positioning is often also the power of pricing.
Do you have a clear positioning strategy?
In the next article, we’ll cover how to create one. Stay tuned!
If you need help crafting a strong positioning strategy, schedule a free 30-minute consultation here:
