Difficult positions

I want to drill into positioning since good positioning is difficult to achieve. Why? A great once president said when he learned his speech was schedule to be only 10 minutes as opposed to an hour, “That will take a lot more time to prepare for.” Successful company positioning statements capture the following three concepts in as few words as possible:

Describes what a company does
Outlines the value proposition of the company
Provides some differentiation in the market against competitive and complementary offerings

Capturing these three concepts is a minimal number of words is hard. When done well the result is succinct and instinctively people “get it”. This is one reason people outside marketing always wonder why it took to long to get the result.

Next I will look at examples of good/bad positioning and discuss the process of developing positioning.