Pillar 02 · Position
Positioning is not how the company sees itself. It is how the buyer chooses it.
Why does a buyer choose this company, and not an equally competent alternative? The answer is not invented in a room. It is found in the market, and it has to hold up in the moment the buyer places the options side by side.
Almost every company describes itself by what it does.
Few manage to truly translate their unique value proposition.
The result is a message that sounds like the competitors'. The same adjectives, the same promises of quality and experience, said by everyone at once. When everything sounds the same, the buyer decides on price, because it is the only variable they can compare.
And the position is usually built inward, not outward. It describes how the company sees itself, in the vocabulary it uses internally, and not the way the buyer thinks about the problem when looking to solve it.
A position the market does not recognize positions nothing.
What we do in Positioning.
The second pillar has three movements.
We study the market and the real alternatives.
Before stating what sets the company apart, we understand what it actually competes against. Not the list of obvious competitors, but the options the buyer considers when deciding, including doing nothing. It is against those alternatives that any differentiation has to defend itself.
We validate the market that can be served.
We size the TAM (Total Addressable Market) and, within it, the segment the company is in a position to win. A position is only useful if it points to a real market.
We define the positioning, in the buyer's language.
We isolate what the company does that is different and defensible, and translate it into the reason it gets chosen, said the way the buyer thinks about their problems. This is the base from which the message is built, coherent at every point of contact.
Market research.
The reading of competitive alternatives, of buying behavior and of the surfaces where the decision forms. It is what keeps the position from resting on assumptions about the market instead of the real market.
TAM and segmentation.
The total addressable market, and the segments we should prioritize. It serves to direct investment toward those to whom the difference matters, rather than diluting it across an audience that would never choose it.
Defensible differentiation.
What the company does that withstands comparison and that a competitor cannot claim with the same truth. Different from an alleged advantage, which anyone copies on the next page.
Message coherence.
The same position, said consistently from the site to the proposal to the sales pitch. A differentiation that gets lost between the first contact and the proposal never quite exists for the buyer.
A defensible position, in a market that looks for it.
A defensible position, a validated market where that position has demand, and the message base that makes it coherent everywhere. This is what the next phase, Demand, builds on: generating interest from a defined position costs less and converts better than amplifying a message that sounds like all the others.
Without a position, there is nothing to amplify. There is noise paid for dearly.