Your Business Positioning Statement and Why It’s Important

A positioning statement is vital to any retail store, restaurant, and entertainment-based business since it defines who you are and what makes you different from your competition. Basically, this statement feeds your marketing messages and becomes a vital part of how you promote yourself. Businesses that are selling in a highly competitive field or offering similar products and services will deteriorate without one. This can be attributed to the following reasons:

-    If you do not position yourself and communicate that position, your customer WILL do it for you. Like it or not, you already have a position. This may or may not be the opinions you would like them to have, but the formation of  those opinions is inevitable
-    The companies that try to be “everything to everyone” become “nothing to no one.”
-    Your positioning statement gives your company focus and without a solid focus, chaos exists.
-    Your company is already being perceived. Companies that win know how to influence that perception and turn it into positive differentiations.

Creating the statement is done through thoughtfully answering the following questions:
(1)    Who are we?
(2)    What do we do?
(3)    Who is our customer?
(4)    What needs do those customers have?
(5)    Who are we competing against?
(6)    What’s different about us?  -or- What is our key benefit?
(7)    Why is that benefit important to your customer?

Once you have a grasp on the answers to those questions ask yourself, “Is this positioning statement matching the position that already exists in the minds of my customers? If not, make that your goal to alter your communication and take small steps to bridging that gap. If so, congratulations! You are on the right track.

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…

Branding and marketing… it all comes down to one thing: image. Your image is the basis for everything. It is what causes people to associate certain feelings and perceptions with your brand, product, or service. As we have discussed numerous times, people will choose a brand over another because of these associated feelings.

Every aspect of your marketing MUST tie in with your image. This is crucial, and yet so often we see advertisers sending mixed messages to the consumer. For example, a restaurant that wants to portray an image of hip, young, fresh, and new needs to take that image into account with everything. This surpasses just logos and promotional materials and must span down to couponing, where to advertise…everything! Corporations spend huge amounts of money trying to change consumer perceptions that have been built up. It may be time to ask yourself…what image do I want to portray? And what image am I actually portraying? After all, perceptions are reality.

It’s all about the DEMO

What does your audience look like?

Demographics and Target audience… Both terms that are used by advertisers on a daily basis, but how much time is really spent delving deeply to find out exactly what makes that target consumer tick? What are their likes? dislikes? Where do they work? What kind of car do they drive? Where do they spend their time? The questions could go on and on!

Not understanding your target is like buying a birthday present for someone you have never met. You take a CHANCE and hope that they will like what you are offering. Before a brand or campaign is built, the audience must be dissected and understood. If you’re target is a 20 year old male, good luck finding him on the radio. He’s watching a YouTube video instead! Advertisers sometimes try to “guess” what it is that will appeal to their potential customers, but might end up missing the mark. Finding answers to these questions is not always a simple solution, but it is the solution that will yield the most.