Monday, February 22, 2010

The Power of Positioning

One of my most favourite tools in counselling technology companies is Pragmatic Marketing’s positioning grid. I find it extremely helpful when working with my start up and mid-market clients in creating the basic building blocks for communication. From this simple exercise, comes forth your boiler plate for a press release, solution descriptions for your corporate one pager, your datasheets, web content and even tradeshow descriptors. This formula for positioning, which originated with the Chasm Group, also helps reinforce to young (and not so young) companies the importance of focusing on the user’s business problem. Too often, the tendency in technology companies is to lead with the product and its cool features, when really in the end, it’s not about you – it’s about establishing resonance with your target buyer.

Give this classic positioning formula a try and see how it works for you and your company. And remember when you go through this exercise leave the technical jargon and acronyms home!  

For: Who is the product for?

Internet savvy business professionals like Paul

Who: What is their driving problem?

Are having trouble keeping up with their email because of spam, overflowing folders, or size limitations

The: Product Name

Our product Gmail Service

Is a: What is our product?

Web-based email tool

That: What does it do to solve the problem?

Provides nearly unlimited storage, intelligent spam filtering, and tag-based email sorting

Unlike: What are competitive products and why do they not solve the problem adequately?

First generation webmail services, which have low attachment size limits, use clunky folders for organization, and allow an unacceptable amount of spam

It: How do we do it?

Uses community-based identification to improve spam detection and allows much more flexible organization by showing emails in a global view or sorted by tag.