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(I am currently reading "Positioning: .." and I have already read Seth Godin's "All marketers .." .) I think the million dollar question is how do you determin

(I am currently reading "Positioning: .." and I have already read Seth Godin's "All marketers .." .) I think the million dollar question is how do you determine if a lie or a position will stick in the prospective customers minds? Regardless of what position you choose, you will be assessed against an incumbent. If your are going for Blue Ocean Strategy, even then you will be compared to alternatives and substitutes. When you are on the whiteboard deciding which way to go, I am assuming you will be having set of positioning options; how do you pick the best one ? How do you make it more compelling or sticky.

mindcrime 14y ago
When you are on the whiteboard deciding which way to go, I am assuming you will be having set of positioning options; how do you pick the best one ? How do you make it more compelling or sticky. You're right, that is the "million dollar question"! I wish I had an easy answer. All I can come up with so far is to go with your best judgment and iterate, iterate, iterate. I mean, I could imagine doing some A/B testing and micro-benchmarking on a small scale, to get an idea of which message resonates best. But what I'm not convinced of, is whether or not the position that tests well on a micro level, will still hold up on a broader level. Another note on the topic of "stickiness"... I've had several people suggest to reading Made To Stick which deals with that very issue. I haven't gotten around to that one yet though. Someday soon... :-)
- manishsharan 14y ago
  (it seems hat I may have found a kindred spirit -- so I hope to keep the conversation going) Lets go back to where you said people expect open source to be low priced . I am assuming you want to "ride that position" but the questions that arise are (a)is that position exclusive to your company or is someone else also riding that low cost bandwagon (b) is that will that position translate to sales. I work as a consultant in the banking industry ; all managers I have worked with are wary of opensource thanks to a lot of misleading propaganda. So your position of low-cost wont work in this segment of the market; this segment of market wanst SLAs and support and extensive hand holding. Have you done surveys or had customer interviews to validate your position in your target market before deciding your position. I came across this hurdle and tried using some surveys based on Amazon Turk but I ended up asking questions that were either leading or poorly phrased and got responses that did not clarify my dilemma.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    (a)is that position exclusive to your company or is someone else also riding that low cost bandwagon I don't know that anyone in this space has really seized onto that particular position and really "owns" it in the market-at-large. And, to be honest, in a lot of ways, out biggest competition right now is "the status quo", not competing products. Given that our goal is to convert current non-users of this type of technology, not to steal market-share from $COMPETITOR, we may not wind up focusing on the cost aspect at all. Well, other than offering some "earlyvangelist" customers deep discounts just to get in the door and gain some early traction. So your position of low-cost wont work in this segment of the market; this segment of market wanst SLAs and support and extensive hand holding. Have you done surveys or had customer interviews to validate your position in your target market before deciding your position. That's an ongoing process for us. We've done a ton of customer interviews and we're always trying to do more. Note that we aren't yet committed to a "lowest price" message and strategy, but I'm tentatively leaning that way. And you make a good point about how, in some segments, that's a non-starter for other reasons. The fact that this stuff isn't easy is why I think you're right in calling it "the million dollar question". :-) Assuming you have a reasonably decent product/service, it seems that positioning / marketing strategy are pretty crucial to determining if you become a million (or billion) dollar firm or just an also-ran. We're working in the enterprise software, B2B space, where sales are high-touch anyway, so it's hard to say whether or not we can do any low-cost experiments or micro-benchmarks that will actually tell us anything useful. But that's something I've been chewing on for a few days now; trying to figure out a way to do that.
    - manishsharan 14y ago
      A long time ago, I was the Product manager at Computer Associates and charged with launching their newly minted Windows based Firewall s/w ; we did all the usual things -- channel promotions, VAR training and we did not make any impact. Checkpoint continued to rule and our sales were a rounding error. Then we tried a different track : CA already had a well regarded Anti-Virus product in the market -- we rebranded our s/w as a "Network Security Option" and we atleast managed to convert out existing customers to grab a decent marketshare and achieve profitability. I bring up this anecdotal evidence as you mentioned "status-quo" as your competition. We had better results when we leveraged status quo as our "ally and partner" and used it to succeed. In this case status quo was a sister product. In your case, status quo implies that people are doing something already which could be done better/faster/cheaper with your product. Find out what they are doing now, which product they use now and try and build a partnership with that product. Nothing flatters a product manager more that having Business Development guy from a new company calling up and seeking ways to partner. If your product can be integrated with sa Microsoft Sharepoint or Biztalk -- get a developer license and build an integration widget with those. Can it be integrated with IBM or Salesforce or whatever bigger company -- find the best fit for your case, build a solution that profitable to both and increases the mind-share for the big dog and have them take you with them to the prospective CIO office. Just my $0.02. I also am struggling with positioning for my product which is a B2C and goes up against Youtube. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

mindcrime 14y ago

When you are on the whiteboard deciding which way to go, I am assuming you will be having set of positioning options; how do you pick the best one ? How do you make it more compelling or sticky. You're right, that is the "million dollar question"! I wish I had an easy answer. All I can come up with so far is to go with your best judgment and iterate, iterate, iterate. I mean, I could imagine doing some A/B testing and micro-benchmarking on a small scale, to get an idea of which message resonates best. But what I'm not convinced of, is whether or not the position that tests well on a micro level, will still hold up on a broader level. Another note on the topic of "stickiness"... I've had several people suggest to reading Made To Stick which deals with that very issue. I haven't gotten around to that one yet though. Someday soon... :-)

manishsharan 14y ago
(it seems hat I may have found a kindred spirit -- so I hope to keep the conversation going) Lets go back to where you said people expect open source to be low priced . I am assuming you want to "ride that position" but the questions that arise are (a)is that position exclusive to your company or is someone else also riding that low cost bandwagon (b) is that will that position translate to sales. I work as a consultant in the banking industry ; all managers I have worked with are wary of opensource thanks to a lot of misleading propaganda. So your position of low-cost wont work in this segment of the market; this segment of market wanst SLAs and support and extensive hand holding. Have you done surveys or had customer interviews to validate your position in your target market before deciding your position. I came across this hurdle and tried using some surveys based on Amazon Turk but I ended up asking questions that were either leading or poorly phrased and got responses that did not clarify my dilemma.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  (a)is that position exclusive to your company or is someone else also riding that low cost bandwagon I don't know that anyone in this space has really seized onto that particular position and really "owns" it in the market-at-large. And, to be honest, in a lot of ways, out biggest competition right now is "the status quo", not competing products. Given that our goal is to convert current non-users of this type of technology, not to steal market-share from $COMPETITOR, we may not wind up focusing on the cost aspect at all. Well, other than offering some "earlyvangelist" customers deep discounts just to get in the door and gain some early traction. So your position of low-cost wont work in this segment of the market; this segment of market wanst SLAs and support and extensive hand holding. Have you done surveys or had customer interviews to validate your position in your target market before deciding your position. That's an ongoing process for us. We've done a ton of customer interviews and we're always trying to do more. Note that we aren't yet committed to a "lowest price" message and strategy, but I'm tentatively leaning that way. And you make a good point about how, in some segments, that's a non-starter for other reasons. The fact that this stuff isn't easy is why I think you're right in calling it "the million dollar question". :-) Assuming you have a reasonably decent product/service, it seems that positioning / marketing strategy are pretty crucial to determining if you become a million (or billion) dollar firm or just an also-ran. We're working in the enterprise software, B2B space, where sales are high-touch anyway, so it's hard to say whether or not we can do any low-cost experiments or micro-benchmarks that will actually tell us anything useful. But that's something I've been chewing on for a few days now; trying to figure out a way to do that.
  - manishsharan 14y ago
    A long time ago, I was the Product manager at Computer Associates and charged with launching their newly minted Windows based Firewall s/w ; we did all the usual things -- channel promotions, VAR training and we did not make any impact. Checkpoint continued to rule and our sales were a rounding error. Then we tried a different track : CA already had a well regarded Anti-Virus product in the market -- we rebranded our s/w as a "Network Security Option" and we atleast managed to convert out existing customers to grab a decent marketshare and achieve profitability. I bring up this anecdotal evidence as you mentioned "status-quo" as your competition. We had better results when we leveraged status quo as our "ally and partner" and used it to succeed. In this case status quo was a sister product. In your case, status quo implies that people are doing something already which could be done better/faster/cheaper with your product. Find out what they are doing now, which product they use now and try and build a partnership with that product. Nothing flatters a product manager more that having Business Development guy from a new company calling up and seeking ways to partner. If your product can be integrated with sa Microsoft Sharepoint or Biztalk -- get a developer license and build an integration widget with those. Can it be integrated with IBM or Salesforce or whatever bigger company -- find the best fit for your case, build a solution that profitable to both and increases the mind-share for the big dog and have them take you with them to the prospective CIO office. Just my $0.02. I also am struggling with positioning for my product which is a B2C and goes up against Youtube. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.