Audit Your Message Strategy by Answering Three Questions

The goal of positioning is to help the target market associate a significant benefit with your product or company. Failure to differentiate creates market confusion, and this inevitably leads to longer sales cycles. Yet few companies successfully differentiate, generally because they either don't know how to evaluate and determine competitors' product positioning, or they simply don't think it's important.

Are You Making a Unique Claim?

It's pretty easy to learn how competitors are positioning themselves, because they do it in public. So start reading and analyzing your competitors' print advertisements, marketing collateral, and web sites, with an eye to deducing the positioning behind their messages. You'll probably find that a lot of the marketing communications put out by your competitors aren't backed by a real position. Often, these messages are just a “brain dump” (a lot of factual information) of product features. They lack the heart and soul of good positioning—a meaningful benefit statement, a reason the audience should care about their product.

A positioning statement frequently appears in the first or last paragraph (or both) of an advertisement, or in a prominent place on the home page of the web site. A good positioning statement should be a focused benefit idea or concept underpinning the executional theme of the advertisement, home page, brochure, etc. For each competitor, analyze as much of the marketing material as possible, including direct mail and e-mail marketing pieces, brochures, and press announcements.

Once you have determined the competitors' positioning, organize the ideas or themes in a table according to the conveyed benefit statement. Some competitors are likely to have similar or identical positioning statements. Other competitors may publish many claims, making it harder to determine how they are positioned, if at all. It is common—and a mistake—for companies to make two or more benefit claims of equal importance. Check those too. Figure 1 shows a real-world example of how the following mid-market enterprise accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software companies were positioned in late 2005.

Benefit	Lawson	MBS	Best	SAP	Oracle	SSA
Understands the needs of small and medium businesses.			X
Understands business fundamentals.				X
Is flexible and adaptable.		X	X	X
Is affordable.		X			X
Delivers value to the customer.	X				X
Supports rapid implementation and return on investment (ROI).						X

Figure 1. Positioning of mid-market enterprise accounting and ERP software companies in 2005.