Do You Need A Positioning Statement?

Do you need to create a positioning statement?

You know, to practise positioning effectively? Like a pro.

To define the four ‘classic elements’ of 1) Target Audience 2) Category 3) Differentiation and 4) Benefit.

Absolutely not. And, I strongly advise against doing so.

For three principal reasons:

1. Immediate Redundancy

2. Toxic Thinking

3. It’s Not Positioning!

Ultimately, it’s an outdated 20th-century ‘business school’ positioning practice that just won’t die.

Here’s why.

Immediate Redundancy

Positioning statements typically get ‘made and laid’.

Laid to rest, that is.

How so?

Usually, a material amount of time — across a team — is put into defining the logic behind a positioning statement and then subsequently physically writing it.

That’s good, in principle. But, then what happens?

The positioning statement gets filed away into the cloud — OneDrive, G Drive, etc.

Nothing more really becomes of it. It’s not utilised as a tool or reference point in any of the company’s subsequent further execution efforts.

It may as well not exist.

Why?

A bunch of reasons.

But, a primary one is the standard ‘positioning statement’ format that practitioners use isn’t very easy to utilise or work from.

It doesn’t communicate how to execute the positioning in any context — marketing, sales, product, tech, etc.

It’s completely abstract from the ‘job to be done’ by whoever is looking at it.

Therefore, pretty useless. Therefore, gets ignored.

How so?

Imagine you work at Coca-Cola.

Now imagine you work in marketing and are working with WPP (Coca-Cola’s ad agency) on a new TikTok campaign activation.

Here’s the positioning statement you need to refer to, in order to build Coca-Cola’s positioning into your campaign:

Tough? Yeah.

Why? It says nothing.

Toxic Thinking

The process of creating a positioning statement encourages inside-out thinking.

Inside-out thinking is toxic to positioning.

What’s inside-out thinking?

A company perceiving prospects’ perceptions and needs through its own lens.

This leads to strategies and tactics that make sense to the company, but no sense to the prospect.

It surreptitiously erodes the requirement to get inside the minds of customers and understand the world from their perceived reality.

It tempts the company into populating it with assumptions, as opposed to validated learnings.

The positioning statement ends up mirroring the go-to-market hypothesis rather than being a useful go-to-market tool to actually validate the hypothesis.

How so?

Let’s take a look at a pretty vanilla positioning statement:

Virtually any company could write something like this and have it ‘make sense’ internally, with inside-out thinking.

Let me do that now, with a (fictitious!) electric car brand called Amped.

As a little background, Amped wants to be a challenger brand to Tesla.

As an upstart, Amped does not have the same capital on hand to manufacture cars as Tesla. So, the cars need to be inexpensive to produce.

Amped has observed that Tesla started (properly) with larger executive cars and has gradually moved downstream to mid and small-size cars.

Amped, therefore, sees an opportunity with microcar models. An unclaimed opportunity! Start small and go large.

This bodes well with its go-to-market strategy since microcars will be cheaper to produce.

Here’s Amped’s positioning statement:

This is the type of positioning statement that a zillion different companies have produced and gotten absolutely nowhere with.

But, it ‘makes sense’ internally.

How so?

The logic originated through the company’s own lens.

Which, goes something like this:

This logic is replete with red flags.

A more significant one is, do inner-city professionals actually need a car?

The presumption of this logic is ‘yes’, because Amped is a car company, so it views the world as a car company.

Its perceived competitors are not walking, cycling, or public transportation. It’s other car manufacturers.

That may sound obvious. But, this mistake happens all the time.

In this fictional case, Amped did not do so well.

As it turns out, a much larger model from a competing electric car manufacturer sold the best in the inner-city segment.

Why? It had a 1-mile range auto-parking and retrieval feature.

Bigger car, easier parking.

This insight was ‘missed’.

It’s Not Positioning!

Lastly, the name 'positioning statement’ is super misleading.

The act of producing a positioning statement, the positioning statement itself, and basically anything you can utilise it for, is not positioning.

Positioning is the act of positioning and owning a unique idea in the prospect’s mind, and associating that idea with a specific brand, thereby stimulating purchasing behavior.

This is achieved and sustained through various forms of execution — brand, name, category, differentiation, messaging, etc.

Additionally, the positioning statement also acts like a pair of positioning handcuffs, restricting the company from being iterative, adaptable, and agile in testing its positioning.

By default, it lures a company into a kind of cookie-cutter positioning template, reinforcing the status quo (to the benefit of the established competition).

It’s very matter-of-fact and rigid, creating a huge blind spot of opportunity. It encourages conformity to an existing category, rather than breaking the rules.

With positioning, there are no facts, only perceptions.

Utilising perception is what positioning is all about. More detail on that here.

UPDATE: What should you use instead of a positioning statement? The Positioning Arrow framework.

That’s it for today. I’ll be back in your inbox soon.

Martin 👋

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