Is It Time to Rethink Your Positioning Strategy?
By Andy Cunningham
Happy New Year, Strategic Thinkers!
Chances are you have a pretty good idea of how your company is positioned in the market. You probably know your competition fairly well and have a decent sense of what your customers think of your product or service. And if things are going really well, read no further. But if they aren’t, and you don’t really know why, consider that your company may not be positioned for success in today’s outlier environment. After all, things have changed — but perhaps you haven’t. What you thought were your assets might actually be creating drag. If so, doubling down on them could be a big mistake. As Albert Einstein famously said, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Perhaps who you are and why you matter is shifting. And perhaps you should, too.
But what to change? A critical factor to understand and inform change-making is context. Most executives believe that internal shifts in leadership, organizational structure, product features, marketing, PR, partnerships, packaging, etc., will improve business outcomes. And they might. But making any of those changes without taking context into consideration is dangerous.
Context is what is happening around you over which you have no control. Yet its effect on your business can be either catastrophic or euphoric, depending on the circumstances. Think about how the pandemic has affected the travel industry. Devastating. And yet Zoom and Slack have profited tremendously in Covid’s wake, giving companies the means to continue doing business face to face. Context has been a boon for these companies.
But smaller shifts in context can also have a huge impact. The recent business trend to define “corporate purpose” has attracted millennial talent in spades and has caused even the most staunch companies to come to grips with the need for purpose. The cost of doing business in San Francisco has driven numerous technology companies such as HP, Lyft, Oracle, Slack, Sofi, and Square to seek less expensive locations far from Silicon Valley for their headquarters. And the long shadow of climate change, now almost universally recognized, has changed how businesses construct buildings (e.g., Adobe in San Francisco, Paragon Point in Redwood City, the San Francisco Ferry Building, and Workday headquarters in Pleasanton are all LEED-certified), and how companies deal with waste (Accenture, Eaton, Estee Lauder, Intel, and Texas Instruments recycle more than 85% of their waste).
Because context informs markets, it should be a critical driver of positioning decisions. Surprisingly, however, it is rarely considered. Despite obvious contextual shifts, humans tend to resist change and persist in the notion that if we just try harder, we’ll overcome any obstacle. But when the world changes around you, it is wise to take heed and examine what you’re doing to ensure it is still the right thing. After nearly a year of the pandemic, and with a new administration taking shape in the U.S., much about our environment is shifting.
Here are 10 signals that indicate you should rethink your product or corporate positioning in the face of change you cannot control:
1. Churn rate over 5% (if you’re a SaaS company)
2. A shrinking market around you
3. Profitability nowhere in sight
4. High cost of customer acquisition
5. Inability to raise or borrow money
6. Low customer satisfaction
7. Cracked or broken flywheel
8. Pressure to lower prices
9. A challenging user experience
10. Customers don’t know what to do with your product or service
If any of these issues are troubling you and you don’t know why, perhaps we can help reposition your product or service to be more relevant, sticky, and successful. You can reach us at the Contact tab or at team@get2aha.com.