“We need better positioning.” Someone on your team might insist, in the hopes that such an effort will be of benefit to one of your products. Fantastic. Are they right?
Here’s another question for you:
Burger King just revamped the Whopper and overtook Wendy’s in the burger wars, with a better bun, new mayonnaise, and a new box that helps the burgers stay fresher. Does this mean that Burger King “repositioned” the Whopper? We’ll come back to that in a bit.
We can’t find out if we need positioning until we know what positioning is. So today I want to share a simple way to think about positioning, so you can avoid investing in the wrong efforts at the wrong time.
If you use the definition espoused by the grandfathers of the discipline, Al Ries and Jack Trout1, positioning is about owning an association between a concept and your brand, in the minds of your buyers. That’s a pretty useful thing, no? Sure beats marketing to people who have the wrong idea in mind. “Volvo” and “safety” is one of the canonical examples.
So the goal of positioning is a worthy one.
The challenge arises when you consider how one might go about doing that. If you break down how most practitioners describe this work, they fall into one of two camps: downstream or upstream.
Here’s a quick breakdown:
When Reis and Trout were in their heyday (let’s call it the 80s/90s), positioning was downstream of product decisions. Just like advertising. Whoever was in charge of positioning was simply handed a product and told, “Hey, go figure out who to sell this to and how to sell it.” If you had a great product in an uncrowded category, or one with some real merits in terms of differentiation, then you had a reasonable chance of creating a “unique position” in the minds of your buyers. But if you were handed a commodity product, you had a much harder road in front of you. Hence the proliferation of the kind of slimy messaging that customers came to distrust. That being said, this approach is clean and tidy. It can usually be sandboxed and tackled within the confines of sales and marketing.
Another way you’ll hear positioning described is a priori of the product. Upstream. That is: you don’t yet know exactly how the product is going to take shape, or even who you might sell it to. Positioning is a way to home in on the answer to those questions, so you can develop a product that’s differentiated even before it’s built. Wouldn’t that be handy? This is a higher-minded version of positioning. It’s more based on first principles, and gives your product a better shot of avoiding commoditization. But if you need an improvement now, upstream positioning won’t help you much. And it’s harder, because by definition, it requires input from the likes of product, engineering, finance, and marketing and sales.
I hear a lot of people advocate for upstream positioning today, and for good reasons. It avoids the kind of contrived efforts I alluded to in downstream positioning; it prevents situations where marketing feels like they are just putting “lipstick on a pig.”
But there’s one problem with upstream positioning.
It isn’t positioning at all.
Upstream positioning is another name for strategy. Or product strategy, at least. As Roger L. Martin put it2, strategy is deciding “where to play, and how to win.” Upstream positioning does exactly that: it looks for opportunities in the market, and for products that can be developed to address that opportunity.
Burger King didn’t “resposition” the Whopper. They rethought their product strategy and made changes accordingly. Now, their marketing department must follow through with proper downstream positioning: by changing what the market believes about the Whopper (presumably, by trying to occupy a spot in their buyers’ minds as the “premium fast food” burger).
Positioning, like any effort, should ultimately result in a business outcome. So if someone on your team believes positioning can fix a product with weak revenue, here’s a simple way to think about it:
If you have a good, differentiated product that more people would buy if they simply understood what it was for and how it was different, then positioning can probably help.
If you have lots of ideas for product development, but aren’t sure which to invest your efforts in, then strategy can probably help. (This can be true for new and existing products, by the way).
In reality, there is never a clean handoff where product strategy ends, and positioning work begins. Products constantly evolve, as does competition and the needs of your buyers. Most businesses must treat product strategy, and the positioning work that helps it land in the market, as a constant evolution.3
John Rougeux is the founder of Flag & Frontier, a strategic narrative advisory practice for mid-market executive teams. He’s based in Colorado Springs, CO.
See Playing to Win.
Branding and strategic narrative run into a similar challenge, by the way. In some situations, they are best treated as upstream work (they inform the direction of the business). But in others, their role is to crystallize what’s already there.
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