A Guide to Positioning, Part II

Essence

When developing or evaluating a positioning for your product, it is critical to recognize—and build an imaginary wall between—the two types of positioning. Failing to do so can cause confusion and waste precious opportunities out in the market.

Elevator Pitch

Because it is something they can (in theory) control, marketers focus on “source positioning”—what they want the positioning to be. But the key outcome is “market positioning,” or how a product gets thought about in the outside world. It is easy to conflate the two, but it can be dangerous as well.

Expansion (Plus Examples)

A positioning can be a mindset, a vibe, or a set of ideals. It can be an aspiration or a feeling. In pharmaceutical market research, where customers are often portrayed as purely “scientific thinkers,” there is a widespread belief that product positioning should just be a list of product attributes or claims. (More on that another time.)

Positioning often confuses stakeholders because, to some degree, it always lies in the future. It reflects a conclusion, a shorthand for how it feels to use a product and have it in your life. Your goal in developing one is to settle on that conclusion in advance and help guide the market toward it.

The source positioning is something a manufacturer can control, even if it is nothing but a set of words on a flip chart

So positioning can seem complex. But one of the most profound disconnects around positioning is so simple, so basic, you’d think it impossible: confusing the two types of positioning.

Most important is “market positioning,” what the world thinks and feels about your product. This reflects everything the world knows about a product, as well as what they consider to be important about it. This can take years to develop and morphs over time.

Quite different is “source positioning,” which is what a manufacturer or ad agency or other source of influence wants the world to think and feel. It is a hope, an agenda, an intention. Companies develop it in-house and strategize about how to bring the world around to their way of thinking about the brand.

It doesn’t matter what your industry is or what your product is. Both types of positioning are effectively in play at the same time.

The market decides in the end, but a source positioning helps guide efforts to nudge the market in the desired direction. It’s a rallying flag of sorts for a manufacturer—to help ensure that promotional efforts move towards a common goal.

More important still, the source positioning is something a manufacturer can control, even if it is nothing but a set of words on a flip chart. (And often it is exactly that.)

Why does the distinction matter? Because brand teams, marketing teams, and sales forces tend to use the word “positioning” to refer to both. This can lead not only to miscommunication and wasted time, but to misallocation of precious resources.

A Non-Pharma Example

A middle-aged man of no particular distinction can think of himself as a “George Clooney type.” That can be his source positioning and yes, he can decide on it arbitrarily, with no supporting evidence. That is his right.

Getting others to validate that positioning is another matter. How his dates actually see him is his collective market positioning, e.g., “That guy is a total dweeb.”

So this guy can indeed tell himself, “I am a George Clooney type,” but that is only an aspiration, possibly a distant one. Source positioning is the plan you make to help the world see you in a certain way (and should not in fact be shared with customers). Market positioning is what the world actually thinks.

In marketing efforts, the problem crops up when people start referring to the two phenomena via the same word. They do this chiefly because it is much faster to say “our positioning” without being specific.

This tidy shorthand can lead to problems, say, if your source positioning fails to get traction in the market (as with the fellow above). Should you continue to be guided by “George Clooney type” as your source positioning even after nine different women point out that you are 240 pounds, bald, and have a voice that resembles RuPaul’s? You can say, “Hey, ‘George Clooney type’ is my positioning and I am sticking to it.” But disappointments await, because an (apparently) strong market positioning has drowned that out. Best to reconsider.

A Pharma Example

Consider a midsize biotech company with one launched product and a contract sales force. One day the COO asks the head of Sales, “What’s our positioning out there these days?”

He is asking how the market is thinking about the company and its product, i.e., the market positioning. An answer to this question is going to reflect what the sales reps et al are hearing from physicians about the company’s only product.

If the COO asks the same question to the head of Marketing, the answer is likely to be different because Marketing’s job is to push the market toward the source positioning. The Marketing head is likely to report what the company wants physicians to think, because to Marketing, source positioning—something they can potentially influence—is the positioning.

You can find the same distinction in parenting. How the world feels about your child is unlikely to align entirely with how you want the world to feel. If you have a teenager who cuts class, claws out a 2.4 GPA, and gets an occasional detention, your source positioning might be something like loaded with potential. Yet faculty at the high school may already have awarded her a market positioning of heading for a difficult life. That makes them less receptive to your positive messaging and conditions how they will react to her efforts at betterment.

Companies can save themselves a great deal of headache by embracing these terms and making sure to spell out which type of positioning is under discussion in a given moment. They are never quite the same.

Last Words

“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected”

--Robert Frost