Lustratus REPAMA - Strategic Marketing Analysis

Part 4 - The "OUR [product name]" element from the positioning statement

In this series of blogs we're looking at the elements of the positioning statement format that Lustratus uses in our REPAMA research methodology.  In this entry I'm going to tackle one of the easier elements, where little specific planning or strategy is needed.  So here we're looking at the "Our [product name]" section of the 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 primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

Having said that little planning or strategy is required here, what I should have said is that from the perspective of the product marketing task of creating the positioning statement, the product name is usually already in place.  But not always.  Obviously an incredible amount of effort, research and focus group feedback can go into selecting the product name. And whilst the name doesn't usually change based on the ideal customer or the pain that they have, it might be that specific products are "created" so as to appear focused on a specific audience and/or problem. 

I've had experience of companies (mea culpa!) where the engineering effort required to bring such a product to market stretches only as far as to add an adjective or a noun to a product name in order to make it appear more targeted at a specific problem or prospect. 

Whilst the science of product naming is outside the scope of what I want to cover here, if you're interested there is an good discussion on that subject, as well as many others in the seminal book by Ries and Trout "Positioning: The battle for your mind".  It's a good read even if its roots are in advertising and it appears a little dated now.  Perhaps I'll revisit it later with a book review. 

So other than that, that is the product name section - really just a place holder for, as you might expect, the name of the product (or service).

<More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW It should be borne in mind that Lustratus' focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we're dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

Part 3 - The "WHO [has this specific pain or problem]" element from the positioning statement

To continue the series of blogs looking at the elements of the positioning statement I'm going to look at the customer pain or problem section. 

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 primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

In the last blog entry we had started to create the unique position in a prospect's mind where our products and services uniquely sit.  We did this by first identifying the ideal client.  Now we're going to expand on the ideal client segmentation by adding a specific pain, need or desire that the ideal customer can relate to or a situation that they find themselves in.  The "who" element describes the situation, nearly always negative, that the ideal customer finds themselves in and the implication is that we can positively alter the ideal customer's situation.

The following questions often help to narrowing down the "who" element of the positioning statement:

• What is the ideal customer looking to do or achieve that they cannot do without help?
• What must the ideal customer do that they are struggling to do?
• What is the desired state that the ideal customer is looking to achieve?
• What is the problem that the ideal customer is wrestling with?
• What situation (needn't be negative) does the ideal customer find themselves in?
• etc.

Some examples

In a previous blog entry on the positioning statement we looked at an example REPAMA reverse-engineered positioning statement for Microsoft ESB Guidance.  Here, we saw that Microsoft's "who" section was was defined as:

WHO are building solutions that leverage the SOA pattern

For those readers who are not experts in SOA (service-oriented architecture) or the infrastructure software market in general, "SOA" here is an esoteric software architecture model that many organisations believe provides great benefits.  Microsoft, amongst other vendors, claims that its products help its users to implement SOA more effectively. 

Microsoft is effectively saying that it believes that the situation its target customer (Microsoft BizTalk Developers) finds themselves in is that of "building solutions that leverage the SOA pattern".  Interestingly, in our attempt to reverse-engineer Microsoft's positioning statement, we see that Microsoft has not aimed at an overtly negative pain for the ideal customer.  Rather it has chosen to simply focus on a situation the ideal customer finds themselves in.  Other vendors from the ESB REPAMA SAS report show a different approach to the pain.  Oracle with its Oracle Service Bus product chooses to identify the following area of pain in our reverse-engineered positioning statement:

WHO need to enforce quality of service, security and performance policies across an enterprise-wide network of multiple SOA domains

Progress with its Progress Sonic ESB product identifies this need

WHO need to connect many different IT resources using many different technologies in many physically different locations

So whilst Microsoft has chosen to simply state a situation, other vendors have chosen to highlight specific needs or deficiencies.  Remember the positioning statement in its entirety should be used to make the ideal customer feel that you have designed and built the product (or service) specifically for them in response to their specific problems.  Other, more generic examples might include:

• WHO are struggling to implement the latest governmental regulation
• WHO need to remove costs from their IT operations
• WHO fail to bring new products to market ahead of their competition
• WHO are unable to ascertain their risk exposure in a timely manner
• WHO cannot currently meet their corporate governance requirements
• etc.

So that's the main pain, need or desire section, I'll tackle the "OUR [product name] section in a later blog entry.  <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW It should be borne in mind that Lustratus' focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we're dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

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, to a greater or lesser extent has been valuable.  Most positioning statements that I've seen and used have had a very similar structure.  Although I have seen some that have been very different, in fact more like a what I would refer to as a value statement or a value proposition.  Perhaps I will revisit them in a future blog but here I'm going to focus on the classic positioning statement.  So as I've mentioned there is no single way to construct a positioning statement but Lustratus has settled on a specific format that captures and conveys the seven key product marketing elements and it is this format that I will concentrate on here.

What purpose does the positioning statement serve?

It's probably best to start with a definition for positioning first.  And if positioning statements are contentious then the the broader subject of positioning is even more so.  Whilst there are many views on this, for me, positioning is about creating a unique, compelling and defensible space in the minds of your prospects where your product/service and only your product/service sits.  Your ideal prospect must feel that you created the product/service for them alone to answer their specific problems and very importantly they must understand exactly how you are different/better that the alternative/competition.  Most product marketing professionals understand this well but as mentioned above, the development of positioning strategies and the statements that captures those strategies can take many different forms.

In my experience most positioning statements are designed to be internal tools for the development and then internal communication of a unique and compelling market proposition.  The positioning statement seldom gets used externally (with customers or prospects) in its raw format.  External marketing communications strategies are typically developed using the internal positioning statement as a guide. 

The positioning statement conveys the following seven product marketing elements:

1. The Ideal customer
2. The main pain that the ideal customer has or the negative situation they find themselves in
3. The name of the product
4. The name of the product category - the generic way to refer to the class of product (I often see this omitted)
5. The main benefit that the product provides and the key reason that the prospect should buy the product
6. The primary competition or alternative
7. The unique selling proposition (USP)

The format of a positioning statement

A positioning statement is natural language-based and should read fluidly and easily as a single sentence and yet should contain all seven of the marketing elements above.  This sounds like a complex task and to aid us in that development we use a specific structure for the statement.  This is shown below.

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 primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

So the "for", "who", "our", "is a", "that provides", "unlike" and "our product" elements give our positioning statement the structure it needs. 

An example positioning statement

An example positioning statement is shown below. It is taken from the upcoming Lustratus REPAMA Segment Analysis Study into the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) market segment. In the study we reverse-engineer the seven marketing strategy elements of positioning statement (as well as many others) used by a number of the vendors in the ESB space - in this case the products examined were Microsoft ESB Guidance, Oracle Service Bus, Progress Sonic ESB and TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus.  In the example below we've attempted to capture Microsoft's position and proposition in the ESB market.  

FOR Microsoft BizTalk Developers WHO are building solutions that leverage the SOA pattern OUR Microsoft ESB Guidance IS A loosely-coupled messaging environment THAT PROVIDES an infrastructure for enabling a service-oriented architecture UNLIKE traditional ESBs OUR PRODUCT provides a superset of ESB functionality, extending the ESB pattern to include modelling and execution of business rules, workflow, and adapter integration

It's notoriously difficult to be precise when reverse-engineering a vendor's positioning statement and sections like the "that provides" and "our product" are especially difficult to define precisely.  But hopefully it shows how an organisation like Microsoft might set about defining its approach to a particular market segment.

In the next several blogs I'll expand on the positioning statement and cover each of the seven elements in a bit more detail.  <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Other posts in this series

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

Danny Goodall.