Ce livre explique en détail comment faire du positionnement marketing
Résumé
Composantes du Positionnement marketing
We can break down positioning into five components (plus an optional bonus component) that come together to define what we do, why we are special, which customers we can best serve and the market we intend to win. These are the Five (Plus One) Components of Effective Positioning:
- Competitive alternatives. What customers would do if your solution didn’t exist.
- Unique attributes. The features and capabilities that you have and the alternatives lack.
- Value (and proof). The benefit that those features enable for customers.
- Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to really care a lot about the value you deliver.
- Market category. The market you describe yourself as being part of, to help customers understand your value.
- (Bonus) Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand and/or are interested in that can help make your product more relevant right now.
Obviously Awesome
Highlights
Positioning as Context
In the context of a concert hall, Bell is perceived as producing something that is very valuable. He’s dressed to perform. He’s surrounded by an orchestra on a beautiful stage. The program tells people what awards he has won. Whereas, when he’s playing outside a subway station, everything around him has changed. He’s dressed like a street performer and standing beside a garbage can, playing for tips. His product—the music—hasn’t changed, but in this context, few people recognize its value.
Positioning as Context
We rely on context to make sense of a world that is full of street performers and concert hall musicians, and full of millions of products of all shapes and sizes. Context allows us to make thousands of little decisions about what we should pay attention to and what we can simply ignore. Without context to guide us, we would be overwhelmed, maybe even paralyzed by choice. The situation is even worse when we consider innovative products that people have never encountered before. Think back to the last time you saw something novel—like an iPad or a hoverboard or a drone or a cake pop. How did you make sense of it? Understanding something new is challenging because we don’t yet have a frame of reference. When we lack context for a product, the easiest way to create one is by starting with something we already know. When you saw a hoverboard, you may have thought, “Hey, that kid is riding a thing that looks like a skateboard, but he’s not pushing with his foot.” Or you saw an iPad and thought, “That’s like a giant cell phone or a little monitor without a keyboard.” For people who build and sell things, the frame of reference that a potential customer chooses can make or break the business. Coke is much more than just fizzy water in the same way that a concert violinist is more than just a street performer with a fiddle.
Positioning as Context
“If you’re a baker, making bread, you’re a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you’re not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you’re an artist. So the context makes the difference.” MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ
The Five (plus One) Components of Effective Positioning
this is where I also first encountered the expression “malicious compliance,” meaning you have completed something that was requested of you, simply to illustrate the stupidity of the request.
The Five (plus One) Components of Effective Positioning
We can break down positioning into five components (plus an optional bonus component) that come together to define what we do, why we are special, which customers we can best serve and the market we intend to win. These are the Five (Plus One) Components of Effective Positioning: Competitive alternatives. What customers would do if your solution didn’t exist. Unique attributes. The features and capabilities that you have and the alternatives lack. Value (and proof). The benefit that those features enable for customers. Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to really care a lot about the value you deliver. Market category. The market you describe yourself as being part of, to help customers understand your value. (Bonus) Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand and/or are interested in that can help make your product more relevant right now.
Positioning as Context
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” DOLLY PARTON
Positioning as Context
Great positioning takes into account all of the following: The customer’s point of view on the problem you solve and the alternative ways of solving that problem. The ways you are uniquely different from those alternatives and why that’s meaningful for customers. The characteristics of a potential customer that really values what you can uniquely deliver. The best market context for your product that makes your unique value obvious to those customers who are best suited to your product.
Step 1. Understand the Customers Who Love Your Product
We discovered that our philosophies were strikingly similar—we spent all our time looking for things that work, and then deciphering why. What marketing campaigns brought in the most leads? Which pieces of content were consumed the most? What events had the most attendees? Asking these questions led us to the happiest customers. Once we narrowed in on the happiest customers, we went looking for the reasons they were so satisfied while others were not. What was it about our offering that made them so happy with it, and what was it about those customers that made them such a good fit for us? Answering these questions helped us figure out what our value was, who it was resonating for and why—in other words, it helped us get a start on understanding what our positioning should be.
Step 1. Understand the Customers Who Love Your Product
Think of your product as a fishing net. You have a theory that your net is good for catching grouper, but you haven’t fished with it yet so you aren’t certain what you might catch. At first, you’ll want to go where there are lots of different fish and see what you pull up. If you notice over time you’re pulling in a lot of tuna, not grouper, you can move to the tuna spot and do the same amount of work to get a lot more fish
Step 2. Form a Positioning Team
Assembling a team often exposes how different groups in your company hold certain assumptions about your attributes, value and target markets. In your first meeting, you need to expose all of those ideas and work through a positioning exercise that aligns the whole team with the desired results. Your goal is to effectively work toward developing a new position for your product that the entire company understands and agrees with.
Step 4. List Your True Competitive Alternatives
Don’t forget that you are an expert in solutions in this space and quite likely understand the real competitive landscape much better than customers do. If a competitor has a small number of customers, they are likely to have zero mindshare with prospects and should not be listed as a real competitive alternative. Would a customer really use them if you didn’t exist? Probably not, since few of them are doing so today. What would the majority of your best customers really do?
Step 5. Isolate Your Unique Attributes or Features
Your opinion of your own strengths is irrelevant without proof. Some groups at this stage will list features that are either difficult to prove or really more of a benefit than a feature. “We provide outstanding customer service” is probably the most common of these, followed by “very easy to use.” Focus on the characteristics of your product or company that drives a potential benefit—ideally those features are based on objective facts and are provable. For example, I have yet to meet a company that believes they provide terrible customer service. If you truly believe that your company is better at customer service, how would you go about proving that? Do you have more support people than your competitors and can you prove it? Do your support people have certifications that others don’t? Ease of use is another “feature” that I believe is really a value. What is it about your product that makes it easier to use and how do you prove it? Do your competitors’ products require training and your product doesn’t? Can you quantify how long it takes to become proficient with your product versus alternative products?
Step 5. Isolate Your Unique Attributes or Features
Third-party validation that your product’s feature is better than the alternative counts as proof. If an independent reviewer or analyst stated that your product is easier to use, that’s a fact. If a customer says in an approved quote that your customer service is much better than another company’s, that’s proof.
Step 5. Isolate Your Unique Attributes or Features
Be broad and creative with the attributes you list. They could be a proprietary process, expertise in a special area, distribution channels, partnerships or special skills.
Step 5. Isolate Your Unique Attributes or Features
Consideration attributes are things that customers care about when they are evaluating whether or not to make a purchase. Every product has features that you can connect directly to a goal the customer would like to accomplish right now
Step 6. Map the Attributes to Value “Themes”
If I tell someone I have a “patented fuzzy logic algorithm” for my product, I would expect their response to be, So what? I explained the feature without being explicit about why it matters. In this example, the benefit might be “faster response times.” Taking the question further, What does that mean for customers? What can they do with a faster response time that they couldn’t with a slower response? The answer might be that they can use the system to respond to their own customers while a customer is on the phone, rather than having to call them back, thereby decreasing support response times and increasing their customers’ satisfaction
Step 7. Determine Who Cares a Lot
An actionable segmentation captures a list of a person’s or company’s easily identifiable characteristics that make them really care about what you do. For consumers, a segmentation could include combinations of things such as other brands they own or like, stores they buy from, the job they hold or their music or entertainment preferences. For businesses, it could be the way they sell, other products they have invested in or the skills they have or don’t have inside their company.
Step 7. Determine Who Cares a Lot
Best-fit customers are easiest to sell to and retain. Focusing on a best-fit prospect segment doesn’t always make sense to people who don’t have a marketing background. If I wanted to increase my chances of landing a customer, wouldn’t I want to target as broad a market as possible? The reality is the exact opposite. The broader your focus, the more difficult it is to connect with prospects and convince them that your solution is the best one for them above all others.
Step 7. Determine Who Cares a Lot
Keep in mind that your product positioning will constantly be evolving. There is no need to make sure that your positioning will fit perfectly with where you or your product will be in ten years or five years or even two years from now. Similarly, your target customers will also evolve over time. Great positioning resonates with your best-fit customers right now, and will evolve with them over time
Step 7. Determine Who Cares a Lot
In general, the segment needs to meet at least two criteria to be worthy of focus: (1) it needs to be big enough that it’s possible to meet the goals of your business, and (2) it needs to have important, specific, unmet needs that are common to the segment. If you’re a tennis racquet maker and decide to market a racquet for seniors, you need to figure out first if there are enough tennis-playing seniors who might need a racquet, and second if you could fulfil an unmet need that seniors have in their racquets.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
You now have a good handle on your ideal prospects, your product’s unique attributes and the value those attributes can deliver. The next step is to pick a market frame of reference that makes your value obvious to the segments who care the most about that value.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
In the context of this exercise, a “market” needs to be something that already exists in the minds of customers (except in the very rare case where you make a conscious decision to create a new market
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
We position our offering in a market to trigger a set of assumptions—about competitors, features and pricing—that work to our advantage. By choosing to position within a specific market, you’re giving your prospects clues about what products they should compare you with, your key features, your price and your benefits. Those comparisons help customers quickly figure out what your product is all about and whether or not they should consider purchasing it.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
Positioning yourself in a growing market has obvious benefits: a rising tide of customer interest, media focus and buzz, and the appearance of being new and cool—who doesn’t want that? But be careful—simply wanting to belong in a market doesn’t make it the right one for you. Only choose a market if it makes your strengths obvious.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
Picking a market is like giving customers an answer to the question, What are you? Frequently, however, we need to think a little bit deeper about how we intend to win in the market we have chosen
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
If you are launching a new product, particularly if you are a small business just starting out, the Head to Head style is rarely a good choice. Trying to beat an established market leader at their own game is a bit like trying to out-cola Coke. It would be foolish for a small company to ever try.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
The advantage of positioning in an existing market category is that you don’t have to convince people the category needs to exist. You also benefit from the assumptions that the category brings to mind for prospects. The bonus is you get all of that without having to fight directly with an established leader. To use this style of positioning, first you have to determine whether or not the category has indeed been created in the minds of customers. You need data that tells you unequivocally that the market already exists in the minds of a critical mass of buyers or is emerging quickly enough for you to meet your business goals. For technology companies in particular, we often assume our knowledge of technology and trends isn’t that far ahead of average buyers, when it can be years ahead. That’s OK, as long as you’re comfortable knowing that enough buyers understand the market for you to sell to in order to hit your revenue targets. Second, take note of your competition. Sure, you’ve managed to pick a market that doesn’t already have a strong leader that you have to take on, but that doesn’t mean you are alone here. The fact that buyers understand what the market is all about means that there is market demand, and though the market feels uncrowded at the moment, it won’t stay that way for long. If you choose to enter this market, you will have to commit to moving quickly to establish yourself as the leader before someone else does. For technology companies, this often means committing to growing your customer base as quickly as you can, which can require outside funding (and the risks and potential headaches that come with that).
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
When the company was formed, we thought of our product as a database, so we positioned it as a database. The market category of database, however, was very well established with a clear market leader (Oracle) and a clear set of expected features and pricing. Unknowingly, by calling ourselves a “database” we were announcing to the world that we had the intention of beating Oracle in the overall database market. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that the first question we got from every prospect was, So how are you better than Oracle? The expectation was that we sold a database just like Oracle’s database, so if we were getting into this business we should have everything their database had, only better
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
Thinking about our ability to do analytics led us to reposition ourselves as a data warehouse—a completely different market from databases. The data warehousing market at the time was established and most larger companies understood what a warehouse was. Few of them bought warehouses, however; many companies were still developing them in-house because few commercial warehouses existed. For us, this was good news: the demand and market existed but a clear leader did not. This shift in positioning immediately got us away from trying to compete with Oracle, and it aligned with our strengths. It also had the side benefit of allowing us to raise our prices. Databases at the time were a commodity, but a data warehouse—with fewer options on the market—commanded premium pricing.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
Many startups compete in established market categories and do so successfully by first breaking up the market into smaller pieces and focusing on one piece they can win. In marketing, the process of splitting up an existing market is called subsegmenting. A market can be subsegmented by industry (manufacturing vs. retail), by geographic region (North America vs. South America), company size and a myriad of other criteria.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
You get the advantage of a well-defined category without the stiff competition. In Head to Head you are attempting to beat Coke in the cola market; in Big Fish, Small Pond, you’re selling Coke for dogs. While your product is a lot like Coke (brown and fizzy), it does something that Coke doesn’t do and that dogs really, really want (it tastes like bones).
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
Your focus is showing that there is a subsegment of the overall category with a specific set of needs that the current category leaders are not addressing. Those needs are very important—so important that buyers may want to relax a bit on the overall category criteria to make sure that their subsegment needs are met.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
List building is easier when you are targeting a subsegment, as is getting in front of groups of prospects. Your value proposition can be highly targeted to these prospects and you will generally have an easier time making your solution’s distinct advantages obvious to prospects. In my experience, one of the best advantages of this style is that once you begin to get traction with some customers, your advantage in the subsegment tends to accelerate quickly. For example, if you are targeting law offices or banks, success with even a single customer is directly applicable to the next customer and can help move the next deal along quickly
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
The subsegment needs to be easily identifiable—meaning if I had to create a list of prospective buyers, I could figure out a way to do that. For example, I can easily make a list of companies that have more than 1,000 employees by searching the internet for company size info, or a list of Pokémon fans by looking at active users on fan sites or email groups. I would have a much more difficult time creating a list of companies that value design or happy people.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
Last, it has to be possible to demonstrate that this subsegment has a very specific and important unmet need. For example, you might be appealing to companies with workers in very remote places who can’t use a solution that requires internet access, or banks in Europe that operate under a different regulatory environment and therefore have different privacy requirements than banks in the United States.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
The need of the subsegment must be clearly identifiable, but even when it is, your ability to meet it must be strong enough to convince buyers to go with you over the safer choice of the market leader
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
You need proof points that show there is a clear gap in value between the general-purpose solution offered by the market leader and your more-purpose-built solution
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
When to use the Create a New Game style Because this style of positioning is so difficult, it should only be used when you have evaluated every possible existing market category and concluded that you cannot position your offering there, because doing so would fail to put the focus on your true differentiators and value
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
If your solution requires both a new way of thinking about the boundaries of an existing category and a new way of thinking about purchase criteria, then it probably makes more sense to create an entirely new category
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
Creating a new category is the most difficult style of positioning, even when the pre-existing conditions are aligned to support it, mainly because it involves the greatest amount of “teaching” the customer. In the other positioning styles, you’re leveraging what folks already know about a category and building on that to create a position in the mind of customers. In this style, you are starting with a blank canvas.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
Wishful thinking won’t convince prospects that you don’t belong in any other existing category—this needs to be obviously true in the minds of customers. Also, be aware that the leaders of existing categories may claim that your new product is merely a feature or subset of their existing solutions.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
If the category doesn’t already exist, it means customers aren’t currently aware that they have a problem. They don’t understand the cost of not solving that problem, nor do they understand the potential value they can unlock by solving that problem. Customers need to be aware of those things before you can successfully convince them to purchase any solution (including yours).
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
This style is very, very difficult to execute, but if you manage to pull it off, the rewards are massive. Unlike the other positioning styles, Create a New Game allows you to create a market that is perfectly tailored to your strengths and weaknesses.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
This style is the most difficult because it involves dramatically shifting the way customers think, and shifting customer thinking takes a very strong, consistent, long-term effort. That means you need a certain amount of money and time to convince the market to make this shift. Because of the investment and time required, this style is generally best used by more established companies with massive resources to put toward educating the market and establishing a leadership position.
Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It
“The most successful efforts in category creation do not result from company executives creating an acronym at an offsite. Rather they are discovered from deeply understanding a narrow set of customers. These customers are often ‘freaks,’ extreme in their attitudes and behavior, forged by tectonic technological and societal shifts. The category then emerges when and if the freakish attitudes and behavior become mainstream. Category creation is hard, slow work, but if you are successful the rewards are huge.”
Step 9. Layer On a Trend (but Be Careful)
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” WAYNE DYER
Step 10. Capture Your Positioning so It Can Be Shared
Positioning canvas Product name and one-line description Market category (and subcategory) The macro market and submarket (if applicable) that you compete in Competitive alternatives What would customers use if your product did not exist? Unique attributes What features/capabilities does your product have that the alternatives do not? Value What value do those attributes enable for customers? Who cares a lot What are the characteristics of a customer that makes them care a lot about the value you deliver?
After Positioning: What Happens Next?
When selling to businesses, a sales story generally follows a common arc. It starts with a definition of the problem that your solution was designed to solve
After Positioning: What Happens Next?
The story then moves to describing how customers are attempting to solve the problem today and where the current solutions fall short.
After Positioning: What Happens Next?
The next stage of the story is what I call “the perfect world.” It’s where you describe what the features of a perfect solution would be, knowing what you know about the problem and the limitations of current solutions.
After Positioning: What Happens Next?
The sales story goes on to introduce the product or company and position it in the relevant market category
After Positioning: What Happens Next?
Next, the story naturally flows into talking about each of the value themes with a bit more detail into how the solution enables that value. A completed sales deck also adds some information, such as handling common objections, a case study or list of current customers. The story wraps up with a discussion of whatever you would like the prospect to do next.
Conclusion
Knowing how to do something is not the same as understanding how to teach someone else how to do it. As leaders, we often become very good at doing things that we have a very hard time explaining to the teams that work with us
Positioning as Context
lousy positioning makes your prospects work harder to figure out if you are worth paying attention to. Even if you do manage to capture their attention, ineffective positioning makes it hard for them to understand why they might want to buy what you’re selling