Product Positioning: Sorry Marketers, You Got It Wrong

Beware: The product marketer's graveyard.

Positioning.... Oof.

It's the most important word in marketing. It's also the most misunderstood.

Yet every day, millions of marketers just like you, will sit down to write their product positioning statement. And in the marketing messaging that follows, many will fail to reach their buyers.

How does that happen?

You could say that marketing is competitive. Or markets are as crowded as they've ever been this millennium. Sure.

But what if it's simpler than that? Like, really simple. What if the majority were just... I don't know... doing it wrong?

After all, for every 10,000 startup products new to market, how many really succeed? How many go on to become market challengers rather than making fair-to-middling business?

When you think of the concept of "success" in general. For example, those rare artists, performers, and politicians who climb the highest mountain, it begs a similar question.

Forget about luck, chance, and happenstance. What if the majority is just doing it wrong?

The Godfathers of positioning predicted this.

Nearly forty-five years later, the bastards were right.

As I sat there at my copywriter's desk in Corporate America, scrutinizing my existence, it was coming to life just like they said it would.

"They," being none other than Jack Trout and Al Ries.

Two marketers, whom you may not know (or care), but who forever changed marketing from here to eternity.

Both Trout and Ries wrote the book on positioning in 1980. As a matter of marketing fact, they invented it. Or at least, as it exists today as a palpable concept.

There was one moment in their seminal positioning book that manifested itself into my marketing world. They warned readers to beware of a popular marketing tagline. To be on guard against what is a powerful positioning villain.

It happened on just another typical marketing day, in which my company asked me to write another typical marketing ad, a message speaking to the strength of our people, when this tagline, that Trout and Ries so decidingly despised, came crawling into my marketing life.

"The only thing stronger than our product? Our people."

If you felt a reflex in the back of your throat. That's a natural human response.

However for many brands, this Our-People-Are-The-Only-Thing-Better-Than-Our-Product positioning is very popular. It was in 1980. And it was when my employer insisted I write this tagline for their talent brand ad.

To be fair, their intentions were good. But in reality, it's impossible for this ad not to fail. Here's what Trout and Ries say in their book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.

"Are there no differences in quality between people in one company and those in another? Of course there are. But it's another matter to build a position on better people. Most people think that the bigger, more successful companies have the better people. And the smaller, less successful companies have the leftovers. So if you're not on top and you tell the prospect you have the better people... Well, that's one of those inconsistencies that doesn't usually get resolved in your favor."

When you consider these words from Trout and Ries, you can understand why owning such a position is impossible. Especially, with so many competing for it.

But this lends the big question: if even established brands are making this positioning mistake.

What gives?

The great positioning myth.

In the mad phantasmagorical mystery that's modern day marketing, the only place that doesn't lie is the prospect's mind.

There's a famous saying Trout and Ries borrow to help explain what marketers get wrong about positioning.

"You can't get there from here."

This analogy says that, like traveling, direct routes don't exist in marketing. The marketplace creates barriers that block the path.

Not mountains, seas, or impassable forests. But beliefs, attitudes, experiences, assumptions, biases, behaviors, and memories. Everything that shapes perception in the mind of the consumer.

Writing a product positioning starts not with what your company believes to be true about their product. But rather, what the consumer knows to be false.

'Nobody believes you have the best people. Because everybody says they have the best people.'

Examples like this which doomed my talent brand ad, make it all but necessary to create marketing messaging around these blockades in your buyer's mind.

A better way to have written the ad would've been focusing on my company's unique differentiator. One that couldn't be owned by anyone else. In this case, the brand, a fortune 100, had been just a startup a couple decades earlier.

While they grew into a giant. There was always this feeling by those who worked there, that it didn't lose its startup DNA. Knowing this is enough to build an attainable positioning in your prospect's mind.

You could combine the best of both worlds into one ad: the Fortune 100 and the startup vibes.

How about something that said, "Where startup spirit meets Fortune 1oo ambition?"

That just might work. In fact, it did work. Because I really did write this ad.

This approach can be described as working backwards from your marketing destination. Starting from a place in their mind where you can't succeed, then mapping out a detour to location where they're willing to let you in.

A believable, differentiated positioning that hasn't been beaten to death. That's the root of "good positioning."

On the other hand, you could say that "bad positioning" is rooted in marketer conditioning. “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them,” as Aldoux Huxley put it (Brave New World).

For many marketers, success in marketing has been framed as the ability to say something positively good about a product. Because as long as we say something positively good, nothing outside of that marketing message matters.

Sorry marketers, but they got it wrong.

Positioning has its own perception problem.

It one of my marketing roles, after brainstorming a new content strategy, I told my VP that I wanted to call out a competitor by name.

"Appalled," describes their response fittingly.

I wasn't surprised. But it's not like I was intending to publish a hit job. Or a public roast. I wanted to write a comparative marketing article about why, we, the small business, were a better alternative than our bigger corporate competitor.

I regret not writing the article. Even more, I regret not knowing how to help decision-makers overcome their perceptions of competitive positioning.

Classless. Tasteless. Negative. Cheap. Those are the things that come to mind for a non-marketer thinking about comparative marketing.

Meanwhile, ignoring competitors. Putting product before perceptions. Avoiding what already exists in a prospect's mind.

That's dangerous marketing. Yet, paradoxically, this insular, bubble boy approach makes brands feels safe.

One of my favorite marketing stories highlights this hypocrisy. It's a tale told by Australian advertising veteran, David Sampson.

"Possibly the worst campaign I ever made was for a bank. The line we used was 'We're with you.' And every time we ran that ad, it just generated such hate. That sort of gene that we all have: that bank bashing gene."

Why hate? Why would such a safe ad saying something positively good about the bank be met with such epic failure?

Easy.

Because Sampson and his banking clients cared more about what they thought of their product than the perceptions of their prospects.

Nobody thinks big banking corporations actually care about the little man.

Turning your weakness into a strength.

Trout and Ries loved to talk about this. Unfortunately, it's far more likely for a marketing team to hide a weakness rather than uncover its strengths.

Is it lack of education around this principle? Lack of awareness? I think so. But I think popular marketing culture deserves the blame.

Today's perception about how to win in marketing, or as a brand in general, seems to take the form of a school boy trying to prove himself on the playground to the older kids.

For many marketers, that means doing it better than the marketer next to you.

Just look at what I call The Follow-The-Leader Principle Principle. Where in every market, it's only a matter of time before new marketing fads are mimicked by competitors, as they move quickly to not fall behind.

This is great if you're the leader. You know you have a golden-goose of an idea if competitors are stealing from you.

But for those like the school boy, it'd be a much smarter strategy to let the older kids have their fads. And you start your own.

I remember this one year in high school when I hated everyone and everything and didn't fit in. I wore a Vanilla Ice tee shirt almost every day to school. And this mind you, was two decades after he'd been cool. I even cut my hair like him.

That school year, I was the world's most distinctive, differentiated tee shirt-wearer at a New York State public high school.

Well... maybe that's a little far. But the rest of it is true.

A more prudent example for your marketing purposes would be the story of 'The small staffing agency and the corporate giants.' A tale of none other than David versus Goliath.

One of my first jobs in marketing, was for a tiny nonprofit staffing firm in the heart of Washington DC.

Our marketing was failing because the positioning was failing. As a young upstart in the market, we were committing one of the cardinal sins.

We weren't positioning against the competition.

I like to call this The James Dean Principle. Our communications didn't zag from the status quo of the staffing industry. In fact, our marketing messaging sounded just like big Robert Half and Adecco.

That's trouble.

Luckily, the office was just a 7-minute walk away from the White House. Just in case I wanted to escape and pretend I was Jimmy Stewart in a scene from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

But the marketing was doing pretty terrible for a while. And at lunch, when I suspected that the shoe was going to drop. I'd head over to Loeb's Italian deli on 17th street so I could nuke my nerves with the marbled-fat from their beautiful Jewish pastrami.

Before my arteries were a goner, I got a phone call in the office one day.

A candidate for the staffing firm called asking about a coffee mug she forget at one of our career workshops. Our founder had been gifting these branded "I Love My Job" mugs with a distinctive orange heart to those who signed up.

She wondered if we could send it to her in the mail.

This event became more common. Even emails and social messages from candidates asking "Where can I get one of those mugs?"

You can think of this as accidental market research. But without having to pay people to sit in a small, uncomfortable room to answer your awkward questions.

We ended up repositioning. The entire brand became centered around that "I Love My Job" message with its distinctive orange heart.

After we figured the brand out. We doubled-down on the product marketing side, too.

We turned our perceived weakness into a strength.

For example, a smaller staffing agency didn't mean less capable. But 'more personalized,' said our messaging. 'Here, recruiters care enough to actually call you back. You're not just another number on the giant corporate staffing line.'

So it goes.

We became more focused. More all-in on only nonprofit staffing. Not a generalist, but a specialist. Even branding our staffing product with themes like "Mission-Alignment."

This was a positioning only we could own.

Beware! The product marketer graveyard.

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