Stand Out from the Crowd - Get a Grip on Product Positioning! - Digital Scrapbook Designer Professionals

Stand Out from the Crowd - Get a Grip on Product Positioning!

By PChip | Category: Business Management, Writing Tips |

Make Sure Your Product Stands Out from the crowd - get a grip on product positioning Business terms such as Product Positioning and Branding can be confusing to a new entrepreneur. The difference between these two particular concepts is sometimes barely recognizable and difficult to distinguish even for the experienced business owner. Business experts use the same type verbiage when talking about both. These terms refer to ways to show your customer how you, your business, and the products/services you provide - stand out from the crowd. They are “tools of the trade” used to instill a certain picture in the minds of your customer. We use them to help our customer remember who we are.

My View of Product Positioning is Less Dictionary Specific

When using these tools I look towards the purpose of these concepts and the outcome of the effects the final plan will have on the business, more than what analysts say the words actually mean when debating over the terms. Personally, my perspective is that branding is an effort that affects the company image as a whole irregardless of how many different product lines they have. Where positioning strategies are geared more towards building an image for individual products. However, I find that sometimes these two still get mingled into one another because the end result can be the same for either, or for both. Some people will disagree, I’m sure. I hope that you’ll share with us your opinions and understanding of the differences, so we can learn from your experience as well!

Taking a Closer Look at Product Positioning

Since this article is meant to help you work through developing a product positioning strategy, let’s focus our energies there by dissecting this a little further. I’m offering you an example of a brainstorming session directed around creating a positioning strategy for one of our products. Our DSD-Pro team sat down last week to continue working on our new “Business Reports” product. This is a bi-monthly newsletter we will be launching later this week. So keep your eyes open for it.

Brainstorming for us is sometimes handled through teleconferences and electronic white boards. For this session we began our brainstorming by writing the following objectives on our shared white board:

Emphasize a distinctive unique benefit our product has
Affiliate our product with something the customer knows and values
Differentiate our product from our competitors

These are the 3 primary areas we want to focus on and use to accomplish our brainstorming session goal. Which was to create a positioning strategy for our product, by the end of our one hour conference. It probably won’t take you that long to come up with your own strategy. But we set aside an hour for our conference knowing full well that some of our time is spent on chattering about our families and daily dramas, and only around 30 minutes or so is actually spent on discussing the business at hand. It really took us just 20 minutes to come up with our strategy.

There are various angles one can approach when planning your position in the marketplace. For this particular one we took a basic approach for a newly developed product. Each member in the session answered a few simple questions, then we combined the answers and used this information to form our strategy.

Q: What benefits does our product offer?
A’s: It provides quality information in an easy to read format. It’s written for entrepreneurs running a small business — specifically in the digi-scrap industry.

Q: How is our product different from others of the same type?
A’s: It’s textural, not graphical. It’s produced periodically where most are weekly or monthly. We aren’t selling any digi-art products that are competing with our customers products.

Q: What makes our product better than our competitors product?
A’s: It’s not a glorified advertisement. There’s No fluff about digi-scrap-kits, featured artists, etc. No colorful graphics to distract from the business message. Geared specifically towards digi-scrap designers and business owners.

Q: If I were the customer looking at this product, why should I buy it?
A’s: The price is right, because it’s free. It might help me improve my business sales. If I don’t find it helpful I can unsubscribe. I trust the contributing writers. It will be the source I go to rather than spending hours researching these things. It ’s the only product I found that offers this set of benefits.

Our New Product Position Strategy:

We’re ready now to begin our marketing campaign and in every piece we will be painting a picture in our customers mind that uses the answers from our brainstorming session to:

associate this product directly to the impact it could have on their business - the business growth benefits
assure the customers this is a serious business report, not a colorful advertising brochure
we provide quality content relevant to our industry

Did you notice how we screened some of our answers out? There’s a reason for that. The most significant purpose for having a positioning statement/strategy, is to make sure that all your communications are consistent with it’s content. You want to avoid having too many different messages for the same product or messages that lack consistency and confuse the message.

For example, we know that many scrappers expect to see scrapbooky graphics presented online. With our company being represented by digi-scrap artists and presenting a business report that doesn’t include the usual scrapbook looking graphics - we aren’t really being consistent with the industry’s norm. This could represent a conflict in our customers eyes, we obviously don’t want. So our positioning will include telling our prospective subscriber why we chose to be different and how this is a business report, not a fancified sales piece. If we didn’t do this - our readers would open a text report and probably be disappointed not to find the usual type of newsletter filled with the graphics, digital freebies, and artist profiles, they may have been expecting. So we’ll be educating them upfront.

We may in fact insert into our marketing program some of the information gleaned from our brainstorming session. But only if it emphasizes the benefits we are focusing on, shows a direct association with the viewer and their business, and tells the customers how we stand out from the crowd, using all the points in our position strategy. If it weakens the message, or muddy’s it up - we won’t be using it.

Now we will use this positioning strategy to design all our marketing communications to include web page design, product packaging, and advertising. All these will aim mainly at convincing customers of the points contained in our strategy statements.

This article lets you take a peak inside one of our brainstorming sessions to see how we addressed the issue of positioning a product using a streamlined question and answer method. There is a ton of information available on the Internet on the subject of product positioning and the various methods businesses use to plan their strategy. Should you continue to research further, chances are good you may very well find yourself stuck with a case of analysis paralysis. If you start to feel a bit overwhelmed with the information, simply bring your mind back to the who, what, when, where and why behind the reason for product positioning and then get to work developing your strategies for your products! You’ll be glad you did!

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The 5 W’s of Product Positioning:

What is a positioning strategy? A statement or set of statements specifically developed to be used to create an image in the mind of your customers. It’s the picture you want them to visualize of your product, in relation to the market situation, and any competition you may have.

When do you create a positioning statement?Preferably while developing your product. Definitely before beginning your marketing efforts, and right now, without delay - for any product lines you have been marketing that you neglected to create positioning for.

Where does positioning fit into the business? It is integrated into your marketing campaigns, into your company branding, and sometimes into your mission statement as well.

Why is it important to create a positioning strategy or statement? Because it gives you focus in your marketing campaigns. It instills a sense of purpose, recognition, reliability and expertise in the eyes of your customers.

Who needs to do product positioning? Anyone with a product or service to sell.

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A final note here –>> Look for our FREE Business Report subscription form towards the end of the week when we also launch our new website format. The business report is mean, lean, and the perfect tool for any digi-scrap professional. The website format changes are….. well….. pretty.