Positioning to win attracting consumers

Let’s get the politics out of the way first…

I’ve been observing with keen interest the general election build-up as each party unveils their manifesto plans for leading the UK forward. There was a wry smile on my face to read in this morning’s headline that the Conservatives are now ‘the party of the working people’ a claim long held by the Labour camp. The reality is when you unpick the ideological rhetoric, at a policy level the main parties have become more alike in their convergence towards the centre in recent years.

This loosely leads me onto the role of brand positioning…

Let’s face it, like politics there’s a lot of very similar brands out there trying to grab attention in what is already an over communicated world. From the moment we get up to whenever we slump back into bed we’re bombarded with over 3,500 marketing messages each and every single day. So how do brands cut through the clutter?

Many marketing text books say the easiest way to get into people’s minds is to be the first brand to enter a specific market. Which suggests the hard way is to be 2nd, 3rd…or last to enter a market. While there is some truth behind first-mover advantage, it’s over simplistic to suggest that brands which subsequently enter a market are already dead in the water.  Here’s a couple of early day Internet examples either side of the fence to illustrate:

1. First mover failure - Netscape, the first to market an Internet browser, enjoyed massive initial success before being supplanted by the rise of Microsoft’s Explorer browser.
2. Subsequent mover success – While Yahoo might not have been the very first search engine on the market it was massively popular by the time Google entered the market 2 years later. And we all know who won that battle, with the coining of the new verb ‘to Google it’.

First mover advantage is dependent upon many factors including the situation a company faces in the market place, as the table below courtesy of HBR shows:

The reality is subsequent movers into a market can learn from and capitalize on the mistakes of earlier entrants. But to do so, they can’t fight fire with fire. What I mean by this is whilst the end product may sometimes be similar (think Coke and Pepsi) developing an ownable and compelling brand positioning is necessary to succeed. So this rules out been seen as a ‘me-too’ brand relegated to an also-ran in the category. And it also rules out falling into the ‘everybody’ trap of trying to build a position that tries to be all things to all people.

Middle of the road is for road-kill…

If you have something that is a little better than the competition then that is a good start point. However to borrow from Seth Godin ‘it is more important to be different than to be better’. Which leads me back to politics. To gain attention, political parties like brands must stand for something that provides a compelling point of differentiation.

Or to look at it another way, as Jim Hightower, a colourful Texas populist, is bluntly fond of saying, "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."  

Something for Dave and Ed to think about.