Is your product powerfully positioned?

Effective product positioning is the starting point for effective marketing. But regardless of the position you attempt to create for your product, only the position your product occupies in your target audience’s mind is the one that counts. Effective positioning must therefore be based on actual customer needs, known market facts, and the measurable capabilities of your product. Then it must be communicated precisely and powerfully to your target audience. Positioning is definitely not a blue sky marketing exercise – it’s based on reality and significantly affects business results.

But what is effective positioning and how do you create it?

This article breaks down the elements of positioning and explains some methods we’ve found to be helpful in generating a complete product positioning landscape for business-to-business technology products. We then take a brief look at positioning deliverables and deployment.

The foundation

Product launch strategies and tactical launch execution tasks dominate much of our thinking in our attempts to compete and gain a larger share of market and customer. Launching new products is exciting, challenging, and rewarding. But creating powerful positioning, a strategic analytical exercise that does not directly result in tangible marketing output or crowds of prospects at a show booth, is the hidden force behind every successful product launch. A product launch, a powerful brand, and carefully crafted marketing strategies, can only be as effective as the positioning on which they are based.

Product positioning engages marketers’ minds far more frequently than corporate positioning, although corporate positioning examples (for instance, Nike and Apple) are the ones we read about the most. Product positioning requires great skill, attention to detail, and a clear understanding of many factors – not the least of which is an intimate knowledge of target customers and the product or service to be positioned.

The product positioning landscape

“Positioning” or “position” is used freely to refer to a company’s or product’s perceived or desired status in a chosen market space, whether consciously chosen, crafted, and created, or not.

Here, we refer to “product positioning” as the process of creating a set of carefully crafted positioning statements, supporting statements, and substantiation statements that capture the key capabilities, benefits, and claims relative to your competitors’ products. These, together with any other related statements and information necessary for defining and communicating a complete product position within your organization, we call the positioning landscape.

External communications with your customers may never use the exact text you have created for your positioning landscape. However, all external communications, in any form, use the positioning landscape as the basis.

Because of the importance of creating a unique, differentiated position with respect to the competition, positioning is sometimes referred to as “relative positioning.”

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