# The Positioning Manual - *** ## title: The Positioning Manual - The Positioning Manual - Created: May 09, 2017 1:09 AM - Tags: book-summary - Updated: May 09, 2017 7:20 AM - Why position? Better clients, higher fees - Problems of being a generalist - 1. Don’t have power in negotiations and rates - 1. Business growth plateaued and growth is limited to 10% or 20%, COLA is met with grumbling acquiescence from client. - 1. You don’t spend much time focussing on creating value for clients - 1. You almost never say no to work - Focus is just as important to a professional services firm as it is to a product business - No unfair advantage over a large competition - By creating a narrow positioning, you can create a list of prospective clients. - By billing higher rates, you get enormous time to run your business - You can say no to stupid client, and save emotional stress - _What is Positioning?_\* - Owning a word in mind. - safe car - Volvo. - Leadership position in a category. - Positioning will lower costs, increase selectivity and increase profit. - Increases business value of services delivered to your client and meaningfully differentiates you from alternatives - Rule of Thumb - When you find the point on the specificity value curve that maximizes businessvalue for _your particular clients_, you will have positioned your business properly: - You can become specific in terms of the audience , market vertical or market segment you focus on or the services you offer to that market - 3 positioning strategies are - 1. Narrow Focus - 1. Category Leadership - 1. Category Pioneer - 1. Or a combination of two/three - It takes generally 3 to 12 months, you will iterate to get there , and **revisit your positioning every 18 months for you to grow.** - _Narrow Focus Strategy_\* - Go to Firm for whatever it is you do for that audience - So ifyou build websites, you want to become known as the go-towebsite builder **for a specific audience or market segment.** -  - _Narrowing your audience, gives word of mouth_\* - If don’t focus on a market, you are a sales driven company and not a market driven company. for word of mouth to develop in anyparticular marketplace, there must be a critical mass ofinformed individuals who meet from time to time and, in ex-changing views, reinforce the product’s or the company’s - positioning. That’s how word of mouth spreads - _Insider Status_\* - If you and all of your marketing assets arespeaking the language of cosmetic dentists, using terminologyspecific to their business, showing case studies or portfolioitems only from other cosmetic dentists, and describing howyou solve problems specific to the cosmetic dentistry busi-ness, then you have done a _lot_ to increase your prospects’ trustin you by making yourself “one of them”. - _Marketing and Trust Advantage_\* - Gives more focus and makes it easier to appeal to clients. - Case studies and reference accounts become more effective - _Leadership Advantage_\* - 1. Conservative Buyers , want a sure things or a known thing . No one gets fired for hiring IBM - 1. Market Leaders get free publicity - Markets self-segment in ways that make sense to the partic-ipants in the market. An **audience** is a group of people or businesses that arebrought together by a shared situation, concern, problem,need, or interest. - So when trying to sell your services to clients based on their au-dience affiliation, you need to focus on an audience affiliationthat they feel very strongly. companiesare usually only a member of one market segment, but they areusually members of multiple audiences. - [ ] Make a list of conferences, events, and professionalassociations for the market(s) you are considering fo-cusing on. You’ll be looking at websites for these events.Remember that a crappy conference website doesn’talways mean the underlying market segment is a badone to focus on. - ›   []Sortyourlistbyhowspecific/narrowtheeventis,withleast specific ones at the top and most specific ones atthe bottom. - ›    Take a break, then read down your list from top tobottom. Flag the level of specificity where you start toget uncomfortable and say to yourself “hmmm... I’m notsure there’s enough of _those kind of clients_ to support mybusiness.” For now, **go with the segment that seems _just_too small to be viable**. The one that makes you a littlebit uncomfortable. You will validate that segment andback off to a more broad position only if you find that ittruly is too specific or too small. - Formulateaworkingpositioningstatementbasedonthis formula: [Type of service(s)] for [target market seg-ment/audience]. For example, it might be something like “**Rails apps** for **funded startups in the JiT supplychain space**” or “**iOS apps** for **funded startups in the on-demand services space**”. - Check the list and case study from the book in page number 90\~ - _Categories_\* - Categories are used to organize markets, problem domains,business needs, job functions, and just about anything else. you may decide to use apositioning strategy that requires you to re-define an existingcategory or create an entirely new one. - You can also have multi dimensional categories While a strategy canvas is a wonderfully nuanced way of defin-ing a category, it doesn’t travel well without a simple verbal“handle” attached to it. So instead of “lower priced, fasterdelivery, low touch-low customization, lower risk website re-design service”, Kurt uses the verbal handle “Website Rescue” to describe his service instead. - _The Category Leadership Strategy_\* - The Category Leadership strategy is quite simple. It involvescapturing enough of the available market share that you be-come the undisputed leader in that market segment or to thataudience - You’re going to want to have already validated that your audi-ence or market focus is viable. Trying to get from “I wonder if afocus on this market segment will work” to “I want to dominatethis market segment” in one move is not advisable. It’s toorisky and complex to pull off both validating an unknown au-dience/market focus and gaining a leadership position in thataudience/market all in one go. - However, if your business is already doing well in a viable andproven market position and you want to increase profitability orincrease the value of your business in preparation for selling ita few years from now, then Category Leadership is the strategyfor you. - If you work with between 30 and 40% of the active clients inyour market segment, you have a leadership position, at leastin terms of market share. - ›   Some form of **teaching-related activities**, like leadingpaid workshops, classes, or the like. - ›   Some form of **original research**, like studies, collectingdata and analyzing it, or so-called thought leadershipcontent. - ›   Some form of **proprietary intellectual property**, like pro-prietary methodologies, systems, or ways of creatingcertain outcomes. - This may feel premature, but again I’d like to emphasize that acertain amount of “acting the part” of a leader is a very effectiveway to shorten the distance between where you are now and agenuine leadership position. - - _Category Pioneer_\* - If you want to build a successful brand, you have to un-derstand divergence. You have to look for opportunitiesto create new categories by divergency of existing cate-gories. And then you have to become the first brand inthis emerging new category. - Like all the other positioning strategies, this one works byincreasing specificity in order to deliver more value. In _BlueOcean Strategy_ terms, this strategy works by defining a dis-tinctly different value canvas–one that eliminates attributesyour clients don’t _really_ value and adds new attributes thatprovide increased value not offered by your competition. Onceyou’ve created a distinctly different strategy canvas, you mayhave to create or discover a new category name to serve as aconvenient verbal “handle” for your services. - When applied to professional services, the Category Pioneerstrategy plays out in one of a few ways. Here are the mostcommon patterns by which you can create new forms of value: - ;Creating a new delivery approach - Makinguseofnewtechnology - Pioneeringanewpricesegment - › Using adifferentmechanismormethodologyforobtain-ing results - › ;Predicting a new demand in the market for somethingthat doesn’t exist yet