Don't Throw the Towel in...Reposition
Positioning is one of those things drilled into us in the marketing world - from school and beyond. We can all rattle off examples of brilliant positioning that skyrocketed a product into categorical leadership - from iPod to Nike's "Just Do it" - and terrible positioning that made a promising product crash and burn - from Google Glass to Segway - but the majority of people are terrible at really understanding what it is.
It's not enough to just write a bunch of fancy words on a page (as in the famous positioning exercise where you fill in what you offer, for who and why they'll love it), as April Dunford talks about in her brilliant book, Obviously Awesome, as well as on this week's episode of Anatomy of a Strategy. You need to do more than conjecture.
As she describes her eye-opening moment of realizing how terrible the positioning exercise is:
So, I'm looking at this positioning statement and I'm like, "Wait, what if I don't fill in the blanks right?"
And when April asks her professor, who gives a vague answer, April adds hilariously:
Apparently no one knows how to fill this in right except maybe Ries and Trout, but *they're* not telling.
So, she set out in her career to create a methodology that makes certain people fill in the blanks properly. Because:
What I love about the conversation we had with April was that, at the end of the day, there is a market out there for pretty much every product. Positioning is the exercise of making sure you understand who that market is, how your product can improve their lives and how to break through the rest of the clutter. It's not our particular methodology, but I think it works really well for companies who may have lost their way.
Listen to this week's episode here for more great truth bombs by the very smart and very funny April Dunford:
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