How to get your positioning right

Positioning is a critical, yet often neglected, component of marketing, and it has a particularly significant effect on your copywriting.

Not long ago, I finished reading a great book on this topic:- Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It. This book, by positioning expert April Dunford, explains why positioning is important and gives you a step-by-step framework for creating your own winning positioning.

Dunford defines positioning as "deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about." The key word there is so important that she said it twice - define. By positioning your product as a specific solution for a specific problem, shared by a specific group of people, you can make it much easier to get those people to buy what you're selling.

This is not easy to immediately wrap your head around, so here’s a couple of examples:

Garden tools at Mitre 10

The first example is these garden tools by the front door at Mitre 10. They're not positioned as garden tools, but rather as"grab and go tools." Take a look:

Fundamentally, these shovels and rakes don't look any different from the zillion other shovels and rakes you'd find inside the Mitre 10. But they've identified a specific target market: people who need a tool right now.

Maybe someone was working on a retaining wall, and their shovel broke in half (I’ve had this happen - it was irritating). Maybe they went to rake the garden to make their place look presentable for some guests, and realised their rake got lost last time they moved house.

The point is, if you're one of those people, you're not going to be that concerned with finding the perfect tool at the perfect price point. Rather, you just need a tool, right now. The day is getting on and you've got stuff to do.

By positioning these tools the way they have, this tool company has made it clear that they are the solution to that problem. If you have different shovel needs, you are very price sensitive, or you have a looser timeline, then by all means, step inside and peruse all the other options. But if all you care about is getting your job done today, then the grab'n'go tools are just what you need. You grab your shovel or rake, take four or five steps over to the checkout counter, and you’re back in your car in less than three minutes.

Nappy pail at the Baby Factory

Here's another one. This is a nappy pail I saw at The Baby Factory:

As you can see, it is fundamentally no different than a pail with a lid you can buy at The Warehouse or a hardware store. It’s just a bucket.

But by positioning this bucket as a special nappy bucket, they are solving a specific problem (somewhere to store dirty nappies) for a specific set of people (parents who need somewhere to store their dirty nappies).

This positioning narrows their audience. It is no longer the very broad, and presumably price sensitive, "people who want buckets."

Someone who needs a bucket to mix some paint is not going to pop in to Baby Factory to get it. So now they have completely removed themselves from the race to the bottom on price, without having to make any fundamental change to what they sell.

And they're reaping the rewards from that approach too! This bucket is $40 - a similar bucket with a lid would be $8 from The Warehouse. But it's the only bucket here, and if someone is buying a bunch of things to prepare for their baby's imminent arrival, they may be willing to just grab it in order to save themselves a trip to another store. And if not, who cares? A $40 bucket is bringing in such a giant margin that selling one a week more than pays for the shelf space it’s taking up.

This specific positioning has also given the bucket company the ability to tailor their copy to specific benefits for their audience. Take a look:

I’ll run through these real quick, in case your image didn’t load:

Extra Large 18.2 litre (4 gallon) capacity
Holds a whole day’s nappies
Special close-fit sealing lid
Helps keep in odours. Stops accidental spills.
Takes boiling water
Will not distort when full
Strong easy-grip-handle and wide stable base
Stain resistant and colourfast

As you can see, these benefits are highly specific to people who want to use their bucket to store dirty nappies. They’re also not that specific to this bucket, really. These are actually features of any bucket you could buy. But by focussing on one target audience, with one specific problem, the people behind this bucket are able to tailor their benefits to that audience’s specific problems.

A more generic bucket from somewhere like The Warehouse can’t do this. Someone who is mixing paint doesn’t care if their bucket takes boiling water. Neither does someone who is filling their bucket with chicken feed. And so on, and so forth.

It makes everything easier

One of the main takeaways from Dunford's book is that getting your positioning right makes all of your other marketing activity easier.

The best copywriter in the world couldn't do much to sell a generic shovel or bucket. What are the benefits of those products? "Moves dirt" and "stores liquid." Not that compelling.

And that's just one component of your marketing activity. How do you generate leads for buckets and shovels? People use those tools for all kinds of things, so your potential customers are spread all over the place. Good luck finding them. You end up sticking your product in a store like The Warehouse or a hardware store, and competing on price alone. Hardly ideal.

But if you nail your positioning, selling becomes a lot easier, because now you have a whole heap of specific benefits you can connect to your product. You can turn your generic benefits into specific benefits for your specific audience.

That's how "stores liquid" turns into "takes boiling water," and "18.2 litre" turns into "holds a whole day's nappies." And the people behind the nappy bucket didn't have to go far and wide to find people who need buckets; they just need to sell that nappy bucket in a place where they know new parents are going to be spending money - The Baby Factory.

But you have to get in early

Here’s a graph you should print out and put next to your desk:

Your positioning is very much on the left-hand side of that graph because of the way it touches everything you do. If the bucket company from above had printed off a bunch of marketing material and gotten their buckets on shelves in hardware stores, it would be extremely expensive to re-do all that marketing material and get their buckets onto shelves in The Baby Factory. Not impossible, but certainly not cheap.

But if you haven’t had a single bucket come off the assembly line yet, it’s a lot more affordable to figure out where you’re going to sell those buckets, who you’re going to sell them to, and how you’re going to describe them.

The same applies to smaller-scale projects, like a one-off campaign or even a blogpost. Have a quick brainstorm about your positioning - who are you talking to, and what are you offering them? Can you tweak your positioning early on to make your material more effective? This process helps to set a course for your copywriting - it gives you an idea of which benefits to push,and which benefits to ignore. What’s more, it also gives you an idea of what kind of language to use, and what channels to communicate in.

How do we get there from here?

Talk to people! Start with your best customers. Find out why they really use your product. What do they love about it? What do they hate about it? What do they have in common? What would they do if your product disappeared - would they use a competitor, or would they just use a spreadsheet or hire an intern?

Then, talk to your sales team. Find out what the best salespeople find themselves saying on calls, time and time again, to close deals.

From here, you can create some basic material as a starting point. One great way to do this is to write a 500-ish word “story” about who you are, what you do, and what value you offer. Then share that story around. Get people to respond to it, seek feedback, and refine it. Eventually, that story becomes a base that you can work from for all your marketing material.

But that’s just a couple-paragraph summary. If you want to take this seriously (and you should), just buy the book. It’s not just an ode to positioning, but rather a series of practical steps you can take to sort out your own positioning. It's $8 on Amazon at the moment - money well spent if you ask me.