Over the years I’ve helped a good deal of businesses discover their positioning strategy. This strategy works by making the brand the leader in something. Or maybe the magic ingredient – you know – in how their product is made. Sometimes it’s that they’re first in something or the latest in something. Developing their positioning takes hours and hours of discussions. The challenge often is to find that perfect button to push.
Another technique that works nicely is creating an anxiety in the customer’s mind, then providing the perfect solution to that anxiety. A great example from years gone by was Ban roll-on. Before Ban, humans simply washed their arm pits with soap and water and that seemed to work great. Ban planted the anxiety that unless you used their product somehow that initial solution was lacking and you would wander the world with under-arm door. OUCH! Planting the dreaded odor anxiety was all people had to hear. Nobody wants to smell bad.
Let’s say you manufacture windows. By educating your buyer as to what goes into a great window product, you instill the anxiety that only your window has these great and unique attributes and everybody else is lacking. It provides your customers with questions to ask the competition and if they don’t answer correctly, you get the job.
Every ones business or service can play in this strategy. Developing anxieties is a legitimate positioning solution. The one BIG rule is that the anxiety must be based on the truth as it could pose risks and the solution must be real. You can’t go around making medical claims you can’t defend. A brand has to be authentic and be otherwise can beat up your brand pretty good. It is also hard to recover from a brand anxiety deception.
Of course once you think you’ve hit on a pretty good anxiety/solution scenario, the next big step is to promote it. Maybe you should consider coming up with a catchy slogan that compliments your position. Together the positioning and slogan can be quite a compelling team. The positioning sells while the slogan inspires. Many times I’ll use the positioning as the slogan for the first few years so that the audience grows accustomed to what we’re promising. In the cases I’ve worked directly with developing positioning strategies, the positioning directs the entire brand them and direction. A lot of responsibility is resting on the shoulders of the positioning. But, it absolutely excites sales because the brand is leading instead of following. Sales feels that they have something to sell instead of more of the same.
The other advantage to all this is that it flies under your competitions radar. Most businesses from my perspective have never sold from this perspective. They rely on Logo, slogan and a hope and a prayer. This is a terrific opportunity to sell from a leadership position.
