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POSITION
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1986-12-13
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9KB
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221 lines
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POSITION MISSIONARY
By Michael Finley
How recently have you handled a job
application, and when you asked the
earnest applicant what he could do, he
said, anything? And right then and there
you knew the poor guy wouldn't get the
job.
It's the same with small business.
Nowadays it isn't enough to have one's
calendar full to bursting with jobs, or
one's business account full of cash. In
addition you have to be something. You
have to be positioned.
The phrase existed in advertising and
marketing well before Al Ries and Jack
Trout (of New York's Trout & Ries
Advertising) published Positioning
(Warner Brothers paperback, $3.75). But
Ries & Trout were no slouches at the
game. With their book they accomplished
two major coups. They positioned
themselves as the grandfathers of
positioning, and they positioned general
readers (the book is subtitled "The
Battle for Your Mind") as the natural
audience for a book of interest mainly to
ad types -- selling hundreds of thousands
of copies instead of mere thousands. So
you know from the onset these guys have
dangerous thoughts.
Positioning, they wrote, is what you do
when you stop thinking of your goal as
selling widgets or haircuts, but rather
as occupying the niche of premier high-
quality, high-service widgets or hair
stylists in the marketplace.
Positioning begins with a product, a
service, a company, or yourself. But it
happens in your potential customer's
brain. It is the suggestion you plant
that a customer must be a feeb to ignore
you. Because you're Avis, number two.
Honeywell, the other computer company.
Seven Up, the uncola. Widgets R Us.
Hair We Are.
Presumably, once you're seen in such a
position, and the whole world sees you
that way, too, you'll sell more widgets
than you dreamed possible. But that is
strictly an afterthought. With
positioning, you've strayed from the
simple path of boasting about the
benefits to the buyer of your products.
Instead you're hoping to take up
permanent residence in that customer's
prefrontal lobes. The discount broker
who cares. The garage where tires wish
they were fixed. We don't sell
asynchronous communications throughput
cables and accessories -- we sell
dreams.*
Most advertising today is position
oriented. Twin City Federal is the
friendly small town savings and loan with
the big city professionalism of a bank.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press & Dispatch is
the hot Twin Cities paper with the star
writers that still costs only 25 cents.
The Minnesota Twins are the only regional
baseball team that features major
league talent, if only in the visiting
dugout.
Soon, the theory goes, customers forget
about their IRAs, morning headlines,
seats in the stands -- their
hypothalamuses are too busy flashing
corporate messages to worry about their
petty personal needs.
The question for emerging businesses is,
is positioning such a hot idea for you?
Your niche is somewhere between the
penthouse and the lobby. But you are
past the days when word-of-mouth and a
black book of cronies accounted for 80% of
sales. Worst of all, there are people
out there who dare to compete with you --
you, who really need that money. Maybe
there's something to this positioning
business.
Obviously, companies with cashflow
problems, or with nonproducing employees,
or with Captain Ahab in the executive
suite, have more pressing matters to
consider than perception in the
marketplace. At the same time,
successful businesses don't hover forever
at the breakeven point, or in crisis
mode. Once you see daylight, what then?
I spoke this week to two acquaintances,
both pretty much small-time operators,
both in the graphic design business, to
ask about positioning.
"We're definite believers in
positioning," said Bill, head of a
downtown Minneapolis shop. "Not because
the textbooks say so, but because the
Twin Cities is a boom area for design,
and we can't afford to get lost in the
crowd."
So what exactly is his position in the
crowd? "Well, uh, just at the moment,
we're struggling to stay afloat. We've
been dabbling in advertising and some
audio-visual work. Last week I took
pictures for the first time since
college."
I got the feeling that Bill, who for all
the right reasons preferred not to have
his firm named, would have taken in
laundry to keep his dream alive.
His last words: "When we get our position
figured out, you'll be the first to
know."
By contrast, consider the case of Mark
Leblanc. For several years Mark, like
Bill, plugged away as just another
generic one- to three-person design shop
in the Cities. Always making a profit,
but never breaking from the pack. Today
he's collapsing his design firm, however,
and reconstituting as a specialty
printer (Copy-Rite's the name), using
bit-mapped desktop publishing to satisfy
a clientele exclusively interested in
newsletters, brochures.
"The Macintosh computer gives us laser
typesetting at a fraction the cost of
phototypesetting. Finally we're being
seen as the Twin Cities' emerging
economical desktop publisher. We can
stop being all things to all people and
be this one thing excellently."
Leblanc's service company is in effect
announcing it isn't taking in any more
laundry. But positioning isn't just for
service companies, either --
manufacturers and fabricators need to
portray themselves as more than metal-
benders or glue-merchants to find
themselves and their "true" identity in
the marketplace.
Positioning means more than shortening
resumes, Yellow Pages ads, and "see-
other-side" business cards.
Unfortunately, it means something
perilously close to planning, and
conceptualizing who you are and what your
business is about. If you have a market
plan, you have identified who can sell to
and how your products meet their needs.
Positioning asks you to take the next
giddy step. Not toward mind control --
but toward providing an easy identifying
tag for the world to know you by.
We don't kill bugs, we kill worries. The
good hands people. Coke is -- it.
Positioning is about streamlining your
business, and discussion of it
invariably trespasses on the turf of
specialization, targeting, and just
generally not being all things to all
people.
It's a good idea, and one you should try
putting into practice. As soon as the
spin cycle ends.
# # #
* Incidentally, there is also such a
thing as anti-positioning. I
recall from my days at Murphy Hall
at the University of Minnesota
journalism school a bumper sticker
on a basement door. "JUST WHAT THE
WORLD NEEDS," it trumpeted,
"ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHER." I don't
know about the rest of you, but I
would have gladly hired a
photographer with that kind of
depth of field. Out of pity,
perhaps, but hired him nonetheless.
For he had positioned himself as
the Maytag Repairman of
Audiovisuals.