Every Startup Needs a Positioning Statement
Once a startup has created its initial product, one of the most important things a startup can do is build a positioning statement.
You can’t effectively determine your market strategy or any of your marketing without determining what your position is in the market.
To succeed “we need to understand who or what the competition is, what their current relationship to our target customer consists of, and how we can best position ourselves to force them out of our target market segment.”
How do we come up with a position? There are four important steps:
- Name it and frame it – reference what they seek and under what category it resides. Forget jargon. Make it understandable to your grandmother. Be clear and concise.
- Who for and what for – Customers will not buy something until they know who is going to use it and the purpose it serves.
- Competition and differentiation – Customers can’t know what to expect or what to pay until they can place it in a comparative context.
- Financials and futures – Customers can’t be completely secure in buying unless they know it comes from a vendor with straying power.
It doesn’t matter what language you write it in – whatever is best for you.
Geoffrey Moore and Paul Wiefels has a very useful template in their book The Chasm Companion, which is a fieldbook for high tech marketing.
Try to fill this in for your company:
- For target customer/market למי – קהל היעד או שוק
- Who compelling reason to buy מי – סיבה לקנייה
- Our Product is a product category המוצר היא – קטגוריה
- That Provides key benefit שנותן – יתרון
- Unlike reference competitor שונה מתחרות
- Our Product meaningful differentiation -- המוצר
Avi Hein is a marketing manager and currently pursuing his MBA at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
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