Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

positioning

My best definition of positioning

Positioning is the place your company holds in the minds of your current and prospective customers on any given factors, relative to your competition.

I had to pull this from one of my old conference talks because, frankly, I thought it came from the seminal book, Positioning, by Al Reis and Jack Trout.

But it turns out, it’s more like a mashup of the ideas they talk about.

The takeaway is this: positioning isn’t something that exists objectively in the market.

You can’t simply say what you do better or differently than the competition.

That’s messaging. It helps, but it’s not positioning.

Positioning lives in the minds of your current and prospective customers relative to the competition.

Those two bolded parts matter.

What matters most is whether your intended positioning sticks in the minds of current and prospective—and how it fits in relation to the competition (their other choices).

You can help guide your company or product positioning with good product, marketing, and messaging strategies, but that’s it.

Much like brand, it’s an ongoing dance.

Work that lights you up

You can treat your work like a job.

You don’t have to like it, either. You can punch the clock, run the time out, go home, and call it a day.

You can do that for fifty years or more if you want. You can earn a good income and have time to do other things that make you happy.

Or, you can build a business that lights you up.

You can be genuinely interested in solving the problems you work on each day. It can have meaning for you.

There’s no wrong way to do it. But there is only one life.

Which path will you choose?

Meaningful work

Lately, I’ve been helping the marketers I mentor find work that means something to them.

I didn’t start out trying to help them do that. But it ends up happening more times than not.

The goal is to find something that fires them up. Something that will sustain them long after the shine of the new thing has worn off.

Ideally, it’s a problem they solve, a type of client they help, or both.

If you haven’t found meaning in the work you do—but love the practice of business and marketing—that’s totally normal.

Your business is an evolution. You can shape it into whatever you want. And it will be a lifelong process.

The best advice I can give you is to try to find meaning before you scale.

The last thing you want to do is climb the ladder only to find out it’s been put up against the wrong wall.

Keep following your curiosities until something sticks.

You’ll know it when you find it.

How to switch your niche or business model with less risk

In 2008, Netflix announced it would begin phasing out its DVD delivery model to begin focusing on streaming services.

They said they would continue offering DVDs by mail for the next five to ten years while they built the new streaming service.

Netflix still offers DVDs via mail, by the way.

Switching business models—or niches—can be a risky proposition. The best way to do it, in my view, is to phase out of one and into another.

No need to make sudden and non-reversible changes. That’s too risky for me.

When the time is right, you can phase out the old model/positioning, reducing your risk in the process.

It may take longer, but it’s far less risky.

And if it works for Netflix, it can work for you, too.

Would you use an axe or a baseball bat?

Imagine you were going to cut down a tree.

Would you use an axe or a baseball bat?

Picking a niche is like using an axe. It takes less effort to cut through the noise and you’ll ultimately get better results for you and your clients.

Choices and trade-offs

One of my absolute favourite books on business strategy is Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t by Kevin Maney and Jim Collins.

I was re-reading it yesterday and this quote from the intro struck me:

If business leaders fail to make choices—fanatical, obsessive, focused, disciplined choices—to build for the long term, and succumb instead to grasping as much as they can in the short term, they will build mediocre companies.

The reality is, we make trade-offs in our businesses whether we’re intentional about them or not. If we don’t make them, they happen to us.

There’s no right answer for everyone—it just depends on what you want to build and whether you’re willing to make the necessary trade-offs to get there.

How to stand out in a sea of competitors

Do you feel like it’s hard to stand out among the sea of other marketing consultants?

One of your available secret weapons for standing out is going smaller either in what you do or who you do it for.

My preferred approach is picking a smaller target audience and going deeper on serving their few core needs.

You can pick a smaller pond and make a bigger splash—which makes standing out a lot easier.

Once you get traction, you can begin to broaden again if and when the time feels right. Or, you could do smaller again.

It’s counter-intuitive, but standing out more often means going smaller, not broader.

The smallest possible step

We all get stuck sometimes. We want to do something but for some reason we don’t act on it.

So instead, we dance around it. We procrastinate. We ponder. We ask a few people what they think.

Their positive assurances gives us some relief from the tension. It feels like progress has been made.

But then nothing happens. The idea fades away. We lose interest, and tomorrow it’s something else.

Repeat the process all over again.

What’s really happening?

Fear is happening. Whether you call it that or not, that’s what it is.

And we all experience it—especially with the ideas most dear to our hearts. Which is all the more reason we shouldn’t give into it.

If you want to see if an idea will work, take the smallest possible step.

You don’t know if something will work—or even if you’ll like it—unless you try. Take the smallest possible step.

Why your new products or services don’t sell

The longer I do education and advisory work, the more I notice how hard—if not impossible—it is to create and sell a new product or service based solely on my own imagination.

And the closer I am to my ideal target market, the easier it is for me to know what to offer.

Why? Because I talk to them. There’s no magic secret there.

If you’re just getting started, optimize for conversations. Reach out to people. See what they are working on. Build or join a community with them.

Try to observe what challenges they have without imposing your ideas on them.

Start with the ideal target market, actually speak to them, deliver a custom solution, then figure out how to productize and communicate it later on.

No matter how smart you are, it rarely works any other way. Not for something new, at least.

Best in the world at what you do

I was listening to the book, Almanac of Navl Ravikant, while doing some yard work today. One line in particular stood out, so I thought I’d share it:

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

Interestingly, when I was Googling for the tweet to write this, I found the original Tweet from Naval’s now famous Twitter thread, and I noticed I had retweeted this specific tweet a long time ago.

It’s funny how you can read an idea, retweet, and then forget about it entirely. Discovering it twice was fun.

Regardless, it gets me thinking about how we position ourselves.

Could you define yourself in terms that make you best in the world at your particular thing?

What would that definition be? And who would value it?