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The most vital thing you may do for your startup is to focus on brand positioning. Often, nonetheless, startups don’t treat this with the same attention they provide to general marketing, go-to-market, and product development. A well-defined brand positioning statement will provide you with clarity and can act as a compass for all elements of your online business. When making strategic decisions about introducing a latest product or service, you wish to make sure it aligns with your brand positioning.
If you are in the technique of creating sales and marketing materials, they ought to be guided by your positioning statement. Often, startup founders and leaders use their judgment and intuition when making such decisions, when in fact these decisions should result from a clearly defined brand positioning. Given the crucial role it might play, in this article we are going to focus on a positioning framework you may apply for your startup today.
3C
In marketing we regularly hear about the so-called 5 Cs (company, customer, competitor, co-workers and climate), but if you are short on time, three of those letters are solid enough to allow you to position yourself attractively for your organization. These critical C’s are your customers, competitors and the company. While this exercise will still require resources and time, it should be one of the most vital belongings you will do for your startup.
It’s a very effective framework. You should make a comprehensive list of all the features of your products and brand. The next step ought to be to discover your competitors’ strengths and what they provide; When taking this step, remember to conduct a comprehensive competition evaluation. You should then use this research to focus on those elements that are unique to your organization and not offered by your competitors.
The last and most vital aspect is to understand your customers, what they need and how much they need it. If your organization offers something that your customers want but is not offered by your competitors, this is the golden aspect you need to focus on and should influence your positioning. This will mean making difficult selections and selecting one truly differentiated aspect that your customers want. You can be tempted to select many elements, but the difficult and right decision is to select one and use that one profit to guide your position.
Why does this matter?
If you have something that customers want, but it is not unique to you and is also offered by your competitors, you’ll likely be engaged in a price battle and will struggle to get a good return on your marketing investment. On the other hand, if you have something that is unique to you, but your customers don’t desire it, you’ll likely spend a lot of cash on marketing in vain and have a hard time convincing customers to spend money on your product. It is very necessary that customer research is comprehensive and helps uncover every thing about their needs and willingness to pay to have those needs met.
Personal experience: example
In my previous role, I led marketing for a VC-backed menswear e-commerce startup that had over 100,000 customers. When I joined the company, the company had already existed for three years and specialized in the production of chinos – the only hero product. It is true that chinos were produced in over 30 colours, but chinos themselves weren’t a unique product. On the contrary, it had to face enormous competition. But how could we tell the difference?
I focused on what we did otherwise. The fit of our product was widely liked by our customers and received tons of repeat orders, but there was a particularly unique aspect about it: we never modified it in the three years of our existence. As someone who almost exclusively wore chinos, I knew that as a consumer I didn’t like buying basic pants repeatedly; I preferred having the ability to approach them multiple times with the same brand.
A radical review of our players told me that everybody else modified their fit each season. I used to be intrigued. I then conducted customer research which showed that men do not like to buy brand staples resembling chinos from different brands (due to the proven fact that brands repeatedly change the fit of their products). They wanted to give you the chance to stick to one brand and keep ordering their favorite chinos.
I had arrived at our Holy Trinity – something that our customers really wanted and that we offered, but our competitors didn’t. It was extremely powerful. It then began to inform and influence all of our strategic decisions and our brand narrative. This also had a significant impact on our business – we were in the technique of securing additional funding, which was instrumental in driving interest.
We initially had difficulty attracting investors because we were unable to communicate a clear and unique competitive positioning, but the latest positioning and brand narrative dramatically modified this. Not only did we attract more investors, but we also managed to raise $500,000 in funding.