Combat strategy: beating weak positioning for good

The antonym for good positioning is not bad positioning but weak.

Weak positioning is just a confused tangle of half-baked ideas: you haven’t trimmed the bloat yet. In our earlier post, we showed you the template positioning expert April Dunford recommends for testing your strategy’s strength.

Most of the symptoms pointed out in the template stem broadly from the following two scenarios:

1) Not speaking your customer’s language

When you’re first developing a product or designing a service, you tend to focus more on overcoming hurdles within the process. For example, a little UX feature that might delight the customer or a hardware enhancement that boosts your speed.

But this isn’t positioning.

Positioning is translating these technical features into benefits that the customers just can’t afford to ignore! These benefits will automatically set you apart from the herd and give your customer the USP they need to anchor their focus on.

Here’s a book you could read that puts positioning in perspective, especially when it comes to creating whole new markets for your product to lead in.

Not being transparent enough

As a marketer, you are always caught in the dilemma between drafting customer-oriented messaging and brand-related messaging. But it’s important to remember that the customer always wins.

Positioning serves as a framework for your messaging. Identify the immediate value your product gives to your customers and centre your messaging around that. Don’t make lofty promises which your product can’t deliver.

Be deliberate. Be informed. We think we know our products. We think the value they bring is immediately apparent. We assume our audiences and go on to bombard them with marketing messaging that doesn’t speak to them.

Focus on customer-centric positioning. To make things easier, here’s a detailed walkthrough of April Dunford’s celebrated 5-step approach to positioning.

In conclusion

Customer-centric positioning helps translate your product’s features into actual realisable benefits to your prospects. It also acts as the guiding framework to base your entire campaign strategy on. After all, with proper positioning in place, you would have a clear-cut idea of your audiences and their interests as well as the messaging that would most appeal to them.

Positioning must be relooked at every 6 months to 1 year. The market doesn’t stay put for too long and neither do your prospects. Repositioning to keep up with the times will make your product feel relevant, fresh, and customer-oriented. In the long run, this will ensure your marketing will always complement your product and will help reduce your prospect’s decision fatigue. Every product is Obviously Awesome. You just have to trim the excess away and let it shine through.

Breathing fresh life into products and reinventing their positioning is our bread and butter. If you want to run something by us, reachus@deepredink.com.