Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

One of my favorites rants has to do with high-tech marketing being an oxymoron due to the lame definitions many techies slap onto "marketing". But even asute marketers can get fuzzy about their definitions. It's a semantics problem most of the time, but you've got to beware of the consequences and precise about your terms. Example: "Product positioning". When we give presentations and pitches in-house, to internal friends and family, we tend to be less discriminate (I get accused of being anal on this subject) about our definitions and the language we couch them in. The term "product positioning" get used -- and abused -- frequently and it leads to confusion among team members, management, your agencies, and ultimately your customers/consumers.

 

Why is precise product-positioning language so important?  Because every business-development, marketing and selling initiative you're ever going to attempt will emanate from it. This is not a trivial, effort. It is KEY. Your product positioning statement determines where your product will "live" in the mind of the people we want to reach and persuade. It must be clear and immediate about how you  want people to always think about your offering. Especially the people inside your company - sales, engineering, everybody. It must clearly identify the most valuable benefit the market can get from YOU -- and nowhere else: the reason why anyone should want to do business with you. Product positioning statements that are product-centric are useless. If they don't reflect the user's perspective they are worse than useless, they will mislead your team and everything will shake out of alignment after you've gone to market. The positioning statement needs to communicate the product, the benefit, who benefits, why it's so important, and from whom it is exclusively available (namely, YOU). All from an outsider's point of view. More on this crucial topic in posts to come!