Four Words
I was having a drink the other day with an old friend and potential future client.
We were discussing the competitive situation in the market in which his company competes. He knows that I’ve carried out some marketing positioning work for some of his competitors and so we got on to the subject of an industry event that he attended recently.
He told me that both he and one of his competitors (who I’ve carried out some positioning work for) gave a presentation at the event. Whilst he didn’t find his competitor’s presentation very credible (no surprise there), he did say that he was frustrated that in speaking to a couple of potential customers in the audience after the event,… Continue reading
A Lustratus REPAMA Guide to the Positioning Statement
I’ve just uploaded a document to Scridb which is based on a series of blog entries from the REPAMA blog.
In this series of 8 blog postings I described the format of the positioning statement that we use to help our clients capture their company or product strategy. I’ve finally got around to committing the description of the 7 elements…
- target customer/ideal client
- main pain/need or desire
- product name
- product category
- main reason to buy
- primary competitor or alternative
- the unique selling proposition – USP
…to ‘paper’. The document is embedded below and can be found on scribd.com.
[scribd id=23826456 key=key-15yeyrl8slzgx9uzm65p width=620]
Enjoy!
Danny Goodall
Related posts that you might also be interested in...
Posted in All Blog Categories, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product marketing | 
alternative, competition, competitor, customer pain, ideal customer, main benefit, pain, positioning, positioning statement, primary alternative, primary reason to buy, product category, product name, unique sales proposition, usp | 
Leave a commentStandards-based marketing and identical twins – the nemesis of differentiation
At the risk of sounding like I’m repeating myself, once again I’ve just got off the phone from a friend and ex-colleague. This is a different friend and a different conversation to my last blog entry, and this time he was looking to do me a favour rather than picking my brains for free. Which was nice.
Anyway, after a while we got on to the subject of how sales of his organisation’s SOA, ESB and BPM offerings were going. A mixed bag was his response. “Where it’s good it’s very good and where it’s tough it’s very tough” was his view.
My mate is in sales looking after a geographic and industry-focused region for a… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, go-to-market, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, positioning, product marketing | alternative, BPM, competition, competitive, Competitive Marketing, competitors, Danny Goodall, differentiation, esb, Lustratus, REPAMA, soa, standards, standards-based marketing | Leave a comment“Aim wider”, “focus everywhere” and other oxymorons
I’ve just had a conversation with a friend, an ex-colleague who was picking my brains (for free I might add!) about what he could do to make his sales year look better.
I asked him how his product was positioned and where his focus was on the market. He told me, and in doing so mentioned 3 industries, 3 market categories and 4 sub market segments, 4 or 5 target audiences and a similar number of problems they address in each of the 3 industries. I told him that this isn’t a focus. It’s a hedging of bets. It’s a baiting of many hooks in the vain hope of landing at least… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, go-to-market, ideal customer, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, pain, positioning, product marketing, prospects, reason to buy, usp | alternative, audience, benefit, competitive, Danny Goodall, focus, lead generation, Lustratus, marketing strategy, product marketing, prospecting, REPAMA, Target audience | Leave a commentPositioning and the Positioning Statement
Positioning and the Positioning Statement
This page contains a summary of a series of blog entries I made during January and February 2009. It describes the format of the positioning statement that we use in the REPAMA competitive intelligence methodology. I refer to the concept of positioning and the positioning statement frequently so I wanted to pull them all together in once place. So here you are.
Danny Goodall
Links to Original Posts
The Positioning Statement
FOR… positioning element
WHO…positioning element
OUR…positioning element
IS A…positioning element
THAT PROVIDES…positioning element
UNLIKE…positioning element
OUR PRODUCT…positioning element
Part 1 – Positioning
Happy 2009! I’ve been in debate with a number of correspondents about the layout and format of the positioning statement… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, go-to-market, ideal customer, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product category, product marketing, product name, reason to buy, Uncategorized, usp | alternative, audience, benefit, competition, competitive, competitor, customer pain, Danny Goodall, ideal customer, Lustratus, main benefit, messaging, offer category, positioning, positioning statement, primary alternative, primary reason to buy, product category, product marketing, product name, REPAMA, Strategic Marketing, target customer, unique sales proposition, usp | 1 CommentTIBCO eats itself
Cannibalization. You don’t get to see that very often unless something strange has happened. No, I’m not talking about the act of eating the flesh of the same species. Instead I’m referring to where a vendor eats into its own sales by promoting one of its products ahead of another in the same market. It is highly unusual for a vendor to be willing to sacrifice sales of one product line to increase another. In my experience these things usually happen through some form of mistake or oversight in planning. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case with TIBCO’s recent announcement of the TIBCO Messaging Appliance.
As we suggested in our… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, high performance middleware, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product marketing, Vendor-Related Posts | 29West, alternative, Cannibalism, competition, competitive, ibm, low latency messaging, Lustratus, Messaging Appliance, middleware, REPAMA, solace systems, tibco | Leave a commentPart 7 – The “UNLIKE [the primary alternative]” element from the positioning statement
The Primary Competitor or Alternative
I’ve been looking at the positioning statement In this series of blogs. This entry will focus on the UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] element.
So just to recap here we’re constructing a natural language statement that captures a number of key strategic marketing positioning elements. This particular element in the positioning statement above is where the ideal customer’s alternative to our product is defined.
First let’s see this element in the context of the complete positioning statement.
FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A[product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, go-to-market, ideal customer, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product marketing, usp | alternative, competition, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, competitive, Competitive Marketing, competitor, Danny Goodall, Lustratus, marketing strategy, positioning, positioning statement, product marketing, REPAMA, Strategic Marketing | Leave a commentPart 1 – The positioning statement
Positioning
Happy 2009! I’ve been in debate with a number of correspondents about the layout and format of the positioning statement that we use in the Lustratus REPAMA-based research. So I’m going to dedicate the next few blog entries to the positioning statement. I hope to answer the following questions.
- What is the positioning statement?
- Why use a positioning statement?
- What is the value of a positioning statement?
- What is the format of a positioning statement?
The first thing to say is that over the years, having worked with some of the best product marketing people in the industry, I’ve seen many different approaches to positioning and equally many different formats for positioning statements. Each of them,… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, ideal customer, marketing, Marketing Strategy, pain, positioning, product category, product marketing, product name, reason to buy, usp, Vendor-Related Posts | alternative, benefit, competition, competitive, competitor, Danny Goodall, ideal customer, Lustratus, main benefit, marketing strategy, oracle, pain, positioning, positioning statement, product category, product marketing, product name, REPAMA, Strategic Marketing, strategy, tibco, usp | 1 Comment
- On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA
- The marketing strategies of open source versus closed source ESBs
- Part 2 – First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- WSO2 – Fits in between Talend and FuseSource…
- WSO2, or rather one of its competitors, has thrown its hat into the ring
- Wordcount.org – it counts words…
Recent Comments
May 12, 2011 (12:01) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? Hmm. I really do like the name Sarah but what about my ego? If I were to call the index 'GoodRead...
May 12, 2011 (11:36) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? I suggest calling it the GoodRead Index. Maybe it's over-reaching a bit, but you'll just have to ...
October 14, 2010 (4:19) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. I hope you could tell that I was being more than a little flippant here Jacques. Perhaps I should...
October 13, 2010 (1:56) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. Allow me to disagrre. At a customer, we have used Datapower for years to process XML (BTW, it is ...
June 7, 2010 (4:38) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Pete,Thanks for your comments, and those of your colleague. I think Danny has answered the 'mar...
June 4, 2010 (4:03) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hi,I'd very much like to develop a point made in the report where it is asserted that software ...
May 6, 2010 (12:35) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Thanks for your comment Blake. This is a marketing-focused blog that looks at different vendors' ...
May 5, 2010 (1:23) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hello There - It seems that this is a very provocative report, especially with respect to the sta...
April 14, 2010 (2:57) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Nice Technology Related Blog. Will visit again.
October 16, 2009 (5:56) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Very interesting point of discussion. I would be very interested to hear your results.