Speaker 1
So my work has been really focused on the practicalities of that. Like, you know, if we recognize that positioning is important, we recognize that maybe our positioning is bad, how do we actually work through it and get to somethin that's better? That's been kind of my fundamental thing i've been working on for the laste ten years. Ellso i' love to hear more about that, since you've taken my onla tool away from me. Now, beting te sonim, i how in the world? Ok, so now, clogery, wat, how do we find how do we, how do we know what to do? Yes, so here's, here's how i reasoned it out. So i'll take you through my thought process. So first i got this positioning statement, and then i get to this point where i'm like, darn it. This thing is useless. I can't use it for anything. So im like, well, how would we do it? You know. And at this point i had repositioned a bunch of products, so i thought, well, i'd done this bunch, maybe i could figure out how to do this. So the way i approached it as i said, well, could we take positioning, break it down into its component piece parts, solve for the piece parts and then smash it together and well, o, good positioning. That was kind of my way of thinking about it. So i started with this, can we break it down into pieces? And it turned out breaking it o pieces pretty easy because we kind of more or less agree on what the component pieces are, and they're more or less the blanks in the positioning statement. So that's thing the positioning statement was good for, is kind of pointing out what was important. Now, you know there's complications, and that everybody's positioning statement is slightly different. But if you do a review of them all and you have a look at it, more or less you settle in on five component pieces of positioning. So the first one is a competitors or competitive alternatives. The second one is differentiated capabilities, or feature s e. Third one is differentiated value, like, what can you deliver that the other alternatives can't, in terms of value for business. And then there's target customer. So what's the definition of a best fit customer? And then the last one's market category, like our u e male or you chat, are you data base or business intelligence tool? So those are the five component pieces. So the way i looked at it as i said, well, ok, have these five component pieces. My problem with the positioning statement was it didn't tell me how to how to get the best answer for those. So i said, well, now i'm goin to break it into these five pieces, and all i got to do is figure out how to get the best answer for the five things, and then we're going to smash it together. And vala go positioning. When you look at it like that, the first thing that you realize that that darned positioning statement didn't give you any cluesbot, was that the five component pieces are actually all related to each other. They are not independent. If i take any of the five, let's take differentiated value, the value that my product can deliver for customers. Like, where does that differentiated value come from? If we don't get to just make it up, where does it come from? It comes from my differentiated capabilities. So those things are tied like i can't figure out one without the other. And then when i think about it, well, what's a differentiated capability? Well, it's olly differentiated if i know what i'm differentiating it against. So i need to understand what the competitive alternatives are in order to figure out what my differentiated capabilities are. So those three things are actually really tied. I can't figure them out independently. And then even when i go to a fit customers, my definition of a best fit customer is, you know, who's a best fit customer? Well, theyare the customers that really, really care a lot about the value that only i can deliver. That's what makes them a best fit customer. So valued and customer segnents, those are tied. And then the last one's market category. And it's a little asateric, but if you think about it, if i think of market category acontext setting for a product, then my best market category is the category i position my product in such that the value i can deliver is kind of obvious to the customers i'm trying to communicate it to.