The Power Of Positioning

Entire books have been written about this, including Ries & Trout's POSITIONING: THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND, which I suggest you read or re-read at least once a year.

My keys to Positioning are:

• Focus
• Congruency
• Consistence
• Advantage
• Fulfillment

By FOCUS, I mean that your position is clear and easily understandable. "Hertz is #1" is about as clear as you can get. And surveys of business travelers indicate everybody knows the deal; Hertz is usually more expensive than anybody else, but they out-service everybody else by an even bigger margin. (Although my experience in recent years says they're slipping.) In contrast, most people are not clear at all about their primary position; they are very unfocused about who and what they are and who their market is.

By CONGRUENCY, I mean that you establish positioning you can carry out through everything you do. If, for example, you wanted to put your rental car lots way off airport, to save fortunes on real estate, then you can't try on Hertz' positioning of maximum convenience and service. Here in town, we have a Cadillac dealer who drops people off at home or work while their cars are in for service, and that's good; it's in keeping with what you'd expect as a Cadillac owner; but they use Buicks to do the dropping off, and that's stupid because it's incongruent. This "little" incongruency undoubtedly costs them repeat sales and second car sales - I can envision somebody saying to himself: "If this Buick is good enough for this Cadillac dealer, it's certainly good enough for our second car, so I'll save $10,000.00 and get one."

Recently, a friend of mine stayed at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, was served morning coffee in a styrofoam cup instead of the glass cup he had always gotten on previous visits, and he has yet to get over it. I've heard him gripe to at least a dozen people about this. And he's booked into another hotel on his next visit. Not because he has a bias against styrofoam, but because, for Caesars; in his mind, the "cream" of Las Vegas; it was jarringly incongruent.

By CONSISTENCY, I mean that you are going to stick with your positioning for a long period of time, to build understanding than create confusion)....that you're prepared to hammer home this core message over and over and over and over again. If you look at the K-Mart vs. Wal-Mart war, one of the things you'll notice is that K-Mart has floundered around trying inconsistent strategies, like celebrity fashions, Martha Stewart housewares, vastly different ad campaigns, etc. while Wal-Mart has stayed its course over years; in fact it has one TV ad campaign with smile-faces "dropping prices" it keeps rotating year after year. And Wal-Mart is winning.

By ADVANTAGE, I mean that the positioning gives you some competitive or persuasive advantage with your target market.

If you cannot identify an advantage you have vs. competition and an advantage you provide to customers that they do not get from your competition, then I question the validity of your even being in business!

By FULFILLMENT, I mean that you can and will deliver on the promises stated and/or implicit in your positioning. Over-promising and under-delivering is a deadly combination. American Airlines or United dare not deliver a service level equal to Southwest's, but Southwest has the highest level of passenger satisfaction in the entire industry delivering its level of service; the consumer expectations differ because the positioning is different. Kelleher at

Southwest has brilliantly established positioning he can honor; expectations he can meet or exceed all the time. As I'm finishing this, I'm staying in a Ramada Inn in Cleveland, which I've settled for purely because of location/convenience, and it is terrible; room service comes without silverware or napkins, maid service is erratic, lamps are missing light bulbs, and so on. If this happened in a Hilton or Marriott, I'd be raising hell every two minutes. But this is a

Ramada and I expected exactly this kind of "low rent" experience.

So, there's the issue of expectations linked to fulfillment. The best policy, of course, is to establish the kind of promises and expectations that are very attractive to your prospects, then exceed them in fulfillment.