Today it's time to talk about the third P of creating an All About Them brand, positioning. After all, once you've dealt with Price and Product, it's important to understand what your product stands for.
Here's what your product doesn't stand for: the function of what you do. As we discussed yesterday, function is cost of entry. After all, when everything works and everything is available everywhere, we have to ladder up to create a brand that makes people want to buy from you.
Simply put, your new positioning needs to be about meaning. Not only the meaning of your company, your firm or your professional service but the meaning that your product or service bestows upon your customer.
In the good old days – usually referred to as the time before the Internet disintermediated everything – we used to say, “you are what you eat.” In other words, your physical constitution is made up of the things you put into your body. But today we say, “you are what you consume.” This means that we tell the world who we are by the things we consume.
Not only has this new concept of positioning changed that old saying, it's also changed the meaning of a saying I'm sure you've heard and probably repeated. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky famously said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Now being a Miami Beach native, I'm no expert on hockey but even I know that Gretzky was talking about the vision of moving towards your goals. But when that old adage is applied to our customers, the interpretation becomes that you should position your brand not based on who your customer is but on whom they want to be.
What is the takeaway here that you can benefit from? It is a profound understanding that the things you do are no different from what your competition offers. At their most functional level, your products and services are worth what the market says they're worth. But at an emotional level what you do is worth as much as you say it's worth, IF you are positioning your brand in a way that imbues your services with meaning.
To learn more about how to do this and so many more techniques, read All About Them, my new book on how to grow your business by focusing on others.
You can find All About Them at your favorite bookstore or on your choice of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and 800-CEO Read. And because All About Them is all about you, you can order the hardcover book, the e-book for your Kindle, or an audio book on Audible or CD.
More importantly, you can find how to change your the positioning of your product or service to make it All About Them which will make all the difference in the world.