To Create A Positioning Strategy For Your Knowledge Commerce Business, See How To Occupy The Minds Of Your Audiences, And Dislodge Competitors.
Knowledge Commerce is a booming new line of ecommerce. You first discover, and then “productize” your own unique knowledge, talent, skills or passions – into ebooks, courses, memberships, webinars, virtual summits, consulting packages, and a host of other formats.
It’s an ideal business for solopreneurs. If you want to grow yourself into an exclusive and premium brand, and command market-dominating prices, this is your perfect opportunity. So get in early.
There are two concepts that are closely interlinked in marketing. At Solohacks Academy, we think both are critically important to plan carefully when you start out in a Knowledge Commerce business – or indeed any business.
One concept is that of “positioning”. Positioning is about how you state your difference from your competitors. What do you offer that they don’t? What is that differential that will always separate you from other marketers because it is your rare uniqueness?
The second concept is that of your “value-proposition”. To get your value-proposition, you have to first gauge what your potential customer’s biggest pain-point is. Then you have to see how you can solve this big pain best because of your uniqueness i.e. your positioning. You have to let the customer know that your uniqueness is what can solve his pain point the best – and why.
This is how the positioning you state as your difference in the market becomes relevant to the consumer as an answer to his pain point. Positioning and value-propositions cannot exist meaningfully without each other.
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1. How To Create Your Market-Beating Positioning Strategy
Experts say that a “positioning statement” for your business is about explaining to the target audiences how you stand out from the rest of the competitors – and why they should, therefore, remember you as the “first among equals”. Why is a positioning statement so important in marketing? It’s because it succinctly shows your potential customer the place you occupy in the market. It also tells them how to position you in their minds.
Here are a few important things to know about deriving your positioning statement …
a. Discover First What Your Target Audience Sees As It’s Most Important Values
Ask yourself in an unscientific way what your difference from competition is. You’d have many ideas to list. But the important point here is this. It’s not what you see as your difference that matters. It’s what your target audience sees as your difference, that will make you cut the grade. Now, how do you find out how your target market may see your difference?
Your first step: survey your target audience before you survey your competitors. Discover the top two criteria they hold above all others in selecting a teaching expert on a topic. Let’s take an example. Let’s say you are a knowledge expert in “Content Marketing & Blogging”. Don’t rush to check out other marketers also teaching Internet marketing. Survey your potential target audiences.
Let’s say, you cater to people who have already tried out Content Marketing, but been unsuccessful. In your audience survey, you may discover the two biggest challenges:
- They are not getting enough ideas for content marketing and writing blog posts.
- Their content marketing is not attracting enough traffic to their websites.
Your audiences are likely to judge you against the competition on these two criteria. They have said they hold these two criteria and the most important ones.
Armed with his knowledge let’s go the next step …
b. Plot Your Competitors On A Classic 2 X 2 Map
The diagram below is a classic 2 x 2 Map. Use it to plot your competitors’ market positioning against your audiences’ top criteria. So let’s proceed with the sketching of our 2 x 2 map …
On one vertical axis, draw a line. The top end of the line represents “gives the least ideas for blog posts”. The lowest end of the line represents “gives the most ideas for blog posts”. Draw another horizontal line across the vertical one. Name one end as “gives most traffic-generating content marketing ideas”. name the other end as “gives least traffic-generating content marketing ideas”.
Now you have four quadrants as follows:
- Quadrant A is for competitors who give least ideas for blog posts, and least ideas for traffic-generation content marketing.
- Quadrant B is for competitors who give least ideas for blog posts, and most ideas for traffic-generation content marketing.
- Quadrant C is for competitors who give most ideas for blog posts, and most ideas for traffic-generation content marketing.
- Quadrant D is for competitors who give most ideas for blog posts, and least ideas for traffic-generation content marketing.
Now, take your top four or five competitors and plot where they may exist on the map. Take into consideration what they offer on the two important criteria for customers.
c. Look For Market Gaps You Can Fill With Your Differentiated Positioning
After you’ve plotted competitors on the map, see if there’s a concentration of them in any quadrant. Is still room for you there? Or, can you fit into one of the quadrants with the least competition?
In this example, let’s say you want to steer clear of the competition. So you want to be in Quadrant B. That means your raw positioning should be this. “I offer more traffic generating ideas but less blog post ideas.”
Offering more ideas for traffic-generating content is a clear plus-point. But offering fewer ideas for blog posts seems like a disadvantage. But you can smartly spin this as an advantage by saying:
“Get more traffic out of fewer blog posts. I’ll show you how.”
That’s the savvy you need to make any positioning sound like a plus point. Turn the negatives also into positives.
2. How You Should Use Your Positioning Statement To Make The Greatest Impact
After you arrive at a possible positioning, it’s important to see where you may have the opportunity to use it. It must impact everyone who comes into contact with you. This includes your customers and all other stakeholders.
The positioning statement is a simple answer to the question: “What does your business do?” You can simply answer that question as: “I am into teaching Content Marketing.” But that statement may not do yourself much good. Instead, see how it feels to say this. “I teach Content Marketing that gets more traffic to websites”. You would have stated your difference – your positioning. Consider what an impact that would make. You’d have separated yourself from other teachers of Content Marketing.
That’s the power of positioning. In the listener’s mind, you have created a corner apart from the rest of the ordinary crowd. Stating your positioning statement with clarity will add a lot of impact. Here are some places to achieve that impact.
a. You Can Use Your Positioning Statement As Your Brand Tagline
Marketers often use their positioning is in their brand tagline. (A long time ago, when I first joined advertising, they called these “slogans”.)
A tagline is a “catchy quip” version of your positioning statement. By nature, positioning statements are blah sounding, because they are matter of fact. To convert a positioning statement into a memorable tagline, give it a bit of verbal sorcery. The most memorable taglines are all evolutions of positioning statements.
Here are some six taglines I am sure you must have heard before. This time as you read them, see how we’ve decoded the underlying differentiated positioning.
- Dollar Shave Club: “Shave Time. Shave Money.”
Differentiated positioning: Enables easier, quicker shaving than competition. - MasterCard: “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.”
Differentiated positioning: Usable in more places than any other credit card. - M&M: “Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands”
Differentiated positioning: Un-messy compared to other chocolates. - Meow Mix: “Tastes So Good, Cats Ask for It By Name”
Differentiated positioning: Cat food that’s recognizable by its very name. - Verizon: “Can You Hear Me Now? Good.”
Differentiated positioning: No call dropouts or static noises like other mobile services.
Why do you need to give taglines a creative twist? The idea is to make them funny, or sarcastic, or in some way inject some emotion into them to make them memorable. When you kindle emotions, the taglines remains in memory. People chuckle over them. If any of these brands above used their raw positioning statements, what would happen? People would brush them off as verbose and mundane.
b. You Can Use Your Positioning Statement As An Elevator-Pitch
Imagine bumping into a friend or a potential customer, when he is in a hurry. He makes casual conversation saying: ” What are you doing these days?” He’s given you this one big chance to get his attention – and hopefully, also his business. Have you got an answer ready-prepared for a moment like this? You need to say in one short sentence not only what you do for business, but how differently you do it. You won’t ever get the answer right if you leave it to chance.
That’s why most marketers keep a line ready for their “elevator pitch”. They use it to pitch at people who are important but give them only a minute of their precious time. Your elevator pitch cannot be as saucy as your tagline. After all, you have to be taken seriously, right? So it’s got to be a casual but serious version of your positioning statement.
A good elevator pitch would be this. “I’m running courses online in content marketing – how to get more traffic to websites.” Notice that it gives a tad more detail than the positioning statement. You add something extra for context – that you run online courses. You would leave him floundering without that extra bit as a context.
c. You Can Use Your Positioning Statement To Underscore Your Value-Proposition
There’s one more place where your positioning statement becomes very important. That is when you frame your value-proposition for potential customers. The value-proposition is an extra bit added to your positioning statement. It answers the customer’s question: “So you’re into content marketing for more traffic? What’s in it for me?”
The “What’s in it for me?” is the benefit that the customer is expecting to hear as an extra to your positioning statement. It’s the part that relevances your positioning to the customer. It’s the part that makes “value-sense” to him. It makes it sound like you’re the perfect answer to his main problem in life.
Let’s take the same examples of positioning statements as before. Let’s see the implicit value-proposition of each one.
- Dollar Shave Club: “Shave Time. Shave Money.”
Differentiated positioning: Enables easier, quicker shaving than competition.
Value-proposition: Saves you precious minutes in the morning rush to work. - MasterCard: “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.”
Differentiated positioning: Usable in more places than any other credit card.
Value-proposition: No need to carry fat wallets with wads of currency everywhere. - M&M: “Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands”
Differentiated positioning: Un-messy compared to other chocolates.
Value-proposition: Eat when you feel like. No tissue needed. - Meow Mix: “Tastes So Good, Cats Ask for It By Name”
Differentiated positioning: Cat food that’s recognizable by its very name.
Value-proposition: Easy to remember the name when dashing in and out of the store. - Verizon: “Can You Hear Me Now? Good.”
Differentiated positioning: No call dropouts or static noises like other mobile services.
Value-proposition: No need to rush to the window or outdoors to take a call.
Did you notice why a value-proposition is different from the raw positioning statement? It’s because the value-propositions tells the customer about his benefit, from your difference. It adds to your positioning, by conveying the resultant customer benefit.
3. What To Be Extra Careful About When Crafting Your Positioning
There are a few things you have to be careful about when you pick or craft your positioning. Your value-proposition may change with the changing trends and tastes of consumers. But your positioning has to endure over time. How many positioning statements of great brands have you seen changing every day? In fact, it is by the very consistency of positioning that your brand imprints itself on the minds of people.
Evolutions of trends and technology may challenge your original positioning. But you have to craft a positioning that can weather all this. You may need to re-state its core idea, to stay relevant to the market? Read on.
a. Pick A Positioning That Can Scale Time And Grow With The Changing World
When you do the 2 x 2 positioning map and find a slot to fill in the market and your customers’ minds, don’t be in a hurry. Think hard about whether your positioning will be meaningful even after several years. The genesis of your positioning may be competitive. But the statement derived thus must be capable of staying valuable for a very long time.
Let me give you an example of a positioning that grew out of competitive difference. It also endured over time. And then, it even evolved itself towards the future very innovatively.
You may have heard of DeBeers (the world’s foremost diamonds company). DeBeers found itself in a strange position after the Great Depression of the 1930s. It was a diamond mining company that also sold diamonds. But when it scanned the landscape, there were no other branded diamonds on the market. DeBeers was, in fact, fighting a faceless competitor. Further, the economy was so bad that the demand for diamonds saw a huge drop. The economy itself became the competitor.
DeBeers looked for a positioning that would make the brand distinct. It wanted people to value “branded diamonds”, even in a depressed economy. The company hit upon the positioning that “Diamonds Are Forever”. It was a clever way to say the emotion of “love” is eternal – and diamonds are an expression of that love. Depressed economies can’t affect human love.
Now here’s where the story gets even better. With global warming, our Planet Earth needs a champion. It needs someone to foster the cause that it should “live on forever”, right? That how DeBeers has now started relevancing itself to all things of eternal value to humans.
See how the original positioning served a competitive challenge from a negative environment. But, now the positioning has evolved to cover everything that is in the “forever” sphere of life.
b. Pick A Positioning That Will Not Quake If A Competitor Positioning Changes
Sometimes your position vis-à-vis your competitor changes. What will you do if that happens to you? Your positioning has to be quake-proof even in a changing competitive landscape.
The Avis Rent-A -Car tagline did roaringly well for years. Hertz was the market leader and Avis decided to make a virtue of its second position with a tagline that said: “We’re No2. That’s Why We Work Harder.” This positioning was hard to beat for decades, until Avis grew so much that it became No. 1. Now, Hertz began to ask Avis if they were still working harder, or not? Suddenly the tagline became meaningless.
Avis was forced to slash it down to a whimper: “We Try Harder”. But it didn’t resonate with people. Even that positioning was eventually shunted. A third competitor, Enterprise, stole the market. Both Avis and Hertz were left wondering what “working harder” would now mean.
The moral of the story? Don’t get directly competitive to such a degree. Don’t let your positioning depend on a competitor staying where he is. Even though Avis became No. 1, they couldn’t celebrate. They had lost that edge that had made them so coveted when they were No. 2.
c. Instead Of Picking Your Positioning Why Not Reposition A Competitor?
Occasionally, there is brand that plays a reverse tactic Instead of positioning itself, it cleverly repositions its main competitor and grabs his market. One of the hallowed examples from advertising history where the market-leading, unbeatably-ahead, doctor-endorsed mouthwash brand Listerine was made to look extremely small and unfavorable by an upstart brand called Scope.
Scope simply asked consumers if they wanted to continue having “medicine breath”! Listerine was repositioned in consumer minds as the “medicine smelling mouthwash”, while Scope, by its very gentle green color, gave off cues of minty-fresh lovely-smelling breath!
Thereafter we all know what happened. Listerine called its old mouthwash its “original” variant and tried other variants of blue and green color to look more “pleasant”, but I guess the Scope hammer had hit the Listerine nail on its head and caused a rash of reactive U-turns from the great unassailable Listerine.
The game here is this. You subtly position yourself not by your own merits alone, but by repositioning the competitor’s merits as far less favorable. You make the competition sound like “old hat that consumers need no longer suffer.”
You thus don’t have to say much for yourself (and so you can spend less marketing dollars too) if you can smartly lower the competitor by several rungs on the consumer perception scale.
I am sure there must have been many consultants who warned Scope not to downplay their own medicinal value since a mouthwash has to “fight oral bacteria”. But I am sure again, that Scope’s brilliant marketing team must have sized up the odds and decided that people know that any mouthwash will help kill germs so it’s not necessary to state the obvious.
So they decided they could instead play up the taste and flavor and freshness of breath (all of which matter more to people who are social animals and therefore place great value of personal aesthetics!)
When you play this game, though, you have to kill competition totally, and not do half a job. You also have to ensure that the gains you get on your own positioning are durable – and not just a short-term stunt. Unfortunately, Scope eventually failed on this.
In Summary …
- There are two concepts that are closely interlinked in marketing. They are “competitive positioning” and “value-proposition”.
- “Competitive positioning” states how you are different from competition. What’s your edge over the rest of the market?
- “Value-Proposition” states how your customer will benefit from your difference – your competitive positioning.
- The first thing to learn is how to develop your market-beating positioning strategy.
- The second thing to learn is how to use your positioning statement to make the greatest impact.
- The third thing to learn is what to be extra careful about when crafting your positioning.
Hear These Experts On This Topic …
Cult Branding in the article “How to Create Strong Brand Positioning in Your Market”:
Popularized in Al Ries and Jack Trout’s bestselling Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, the idea is to identify and attempt to “own” a marketing niche for a brand, product, or service using various strategies including pricing, promotions, distribution, packaging, and competition. The goal is to create a unique impression in the customer’s mind so that the customer associates something specific and desirable with your brand that is distinct from rest of the marketplace.
Brand positioning occurs whether or not a company is proactive in developing a position, however, if management takes an intelligent, forward-looking approach, it can positively influence its brand positioning in the eyes of its target customers.”
Aashish Pahwa in the article “Brand Positioning: Characteristics, Types, Examples & Ideas”:
Positioning is the unique space a brand occupies in the brains of the customers. It makes customers view a specific brand in a unique way by associating emotions, traits, feelings, and sentiments with it. These associations make it stand out from the competition.
Positioning is usually the reason why customers buy a specific brand whose product doesn’t necessarily differ from the competitors. Positioning creates a bond between the customer and the business. It’s that friend of the customer who’ll always stay in their subconscious mind and will make them recall the company whenever they hear about any of its products or a particular feature which makes it stand out.”
Jim Wilkinson in the article “Market Positioning”:
What is market position? In marketing and business strategy, market position refers to the consumer’s perception of a brand or product in relation to competing brands or products. Market positioning refers to the process of establishing the image or identity of a brand or product so that consumers perceive it in a certain way.
For example, a car maker may position itself as a luxury status symbol. Whereas a battery maker may position its batteries as the most reliable and long-lasting. And a fast-food restaurant chain may position itself as a provider of cheap and quick standardized meals. A coffee company may position itself as a source of premium upscale coffee beverages. Then a retailer might position itself as a place to buy household necessities at low prices. And a computer company may position itself as offering hip, innovative, and user-friendly technology products.”
So What Are Your Thoughts? Do Share!
This post is incomplete without your input. The community of Knowledge Commerce solopreneurs would feel galvanized to hear from you … so do share your thoughts on this topic with us, in the comments field below this post.
Related Reading
This post is part of a series that elaborates on “Marketing Strategy Plan For Jumpstarting Knowledge Commerce“.
Other related posts you may like to read are these:
- How To Find Your Niche Of Expertise For Knowledge Commerce
- How To Write Your Mission Statement For Knowledge Commerce
- How To Find Your Target Audience For Knowledge Commerce
- How To Conduct Competitive Analysis For Knowledge Commerce
- How To Develop A Business Model For Knowledge Commerce
- How To Create A Sales Funnel For Knowledge Commerce
- How To Do Content Marketing For Knowledge Commerce
- How To Measure Performance Of A Website In Knowledge Commerce
- How To Exploit Cutting Edge Technology In Knowledge Commerce
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