Cuckoo for Positioning: Solopreneur Insights, Vol. 23
Cuckoos don’t raise their own young. They lay their eggs in another bird’s nest.
Why should you care?
Because they can teach you the most important function of Brand Strategy.
A Terrifying Scenario
Imagine a sweet, unsuspecting sparrow returning to her nest after a trip to a nearby bird-feeder. She doesn’t realize that the freeloading cuckoo bird has laid a new egg in her nest while she was away.
This new egg holds the blackness of Satan himself inside. See, the incubation period of the cuckoo egg is several days shorter than other birds, including our lovely sparrow. She sits on all the eggs for weeks. Suddenly, “Oh happy day!” The first egg hatches.
It’s the cuckoo.
The first thought in the mama sparrow’s little bird brain?
“I must get some food for my darling little baby!”
Off she goes to search for some food. Meanwhile, this little cuckoo Hellbird gets to work. It methodically backs itself around the nest, pushing out all the other eggs. Murderer!
When the “mother” sparrow returns, she doesn’t even notice the other eggs are gone. She just gets to work barfing up worms for her sweet little baby can gobble down.
Nature is lovely, isn’t it?
You know I’m not rolling in here like David Attenborough to describe the natural phenomenon known as Brood Parasitism. I’m using it as an illustration to explain a critical idea that means life or death for your business: Positioning.
Let’s Talk About Positioning
Positioning describes the place you hold in your customer’s mind. First, you have to exist in their mind. This is why it’s so important to network and market. The entire point of networking and marketing is to quickly communicate:
Who you are
What you do
Who you do it for
Why that matters
Once you communicate these, directly and indirectly, the customer forms a “position” in their mind about where you belong. There could be hundreds of ways to communicate these ideas. Yet, they will almost always fall under the following categories:
The Primary Elements of Positioning
Value
Quality
Efficiency
Convenience
Experience
Specific outcome
Familiarity
Tribe
Trust
Values and Beliefs
Think about the list above and how you would describe yourself. You might feel like you’re inexpensive or maybe high-quality or maybe you’re fast. You can go down this list and examine your static attributes. That’s exactly what most brand strategy “experts” tell you to do, but then they stop. They send you off to think about these elements in a vacuum. You spend weeks or months crafting the perfect positioning statement, Unique Selling Proposition, and set your price points. You package it all and put a pretty bow around it.
Guess what? You’re like the mother sparrow who put all her time and effort into choosing a location for her nest, building it, laying the eggs, and sitting on them dutifully for weeks. Then, one day, the DemonBird™ comes along and ruins everything.
Like the sparrow, you didn’t change anything at all, yet you got out-positioned by the new bird. Your product is as useful as the broken eggs lying on the ground while the cuckoo above gobbles down your mother’s delicious worm-barf. Not where you want to be.
What’s Really Going On?
Remember when I said that the customers form a position in their minds about where you belong? They form this position RELATIVE to everyone else who is similar to you.
Here’s what this means. You call yourself “high-quality.” In the customer’s mind, you’re one of six other people who they’re considering. In their mind, you’re either “better” or “worse.” Do you see the distinction? They’re COMPARING you to everyone else. Let’s look at the list above from the customer’s perspective:
You’re either:
Cheaper or more expensive
Better or worse
Faster or slower
Easier or more difficult
Ready to go or requires patience
Takes me exactly where I want to go or leaves me to figure it out
Comfortable or unknown
More like us or less like us
Trustworthy or risky
On the same page or requires avoiding topics
You’ll never be the ONLY one in a market. The consumer will always position you in their minds relative to everyone else they know. The next obvious question is: How do they ultimately decide?
Getting Your Positioning Right
The customer makes her buying decision by prioritizing her own Elements of Positioning and choosing accordingly. She doesn’t consciously do this. It happens in an instant in her mind. She has 2-3 priorities that matter more than anything else, and she aligns herself with the products that serve those 2-3 priorities the best.
Let’s look at an example:
Sarah is rich AF. She loves nice things and grand experiences. Today, she’s looking for a new handbag to add to her collection. She sees two ads for two products. The first one explains that the bag is functional, practical, inexpensive, has a lifetime warranty, and is made by a company that wants to save a rare breed of Chilean alpacas.
The second ad says their bag is stitched with threads of gold, shows the latest celebrity using it, and it has a logo she once saw in a Dubai shopping mall. You already know which bag Sarah is going to buy.
Now, Heather comes along and sees the same two ads. She’s a busy mom on a budget who also loves the outdoors. You also know which one she prefers.
Two totally different products that will both sell just fine. Why? Because they not only understand the trade-offs required for effective Positioning, they purposefully LEVERAGE the trade-offs. They simultaneously demonstrate exactly what they ARE and exactly what they ARE NOT.
Sarah cares about the experience, the tribe, and a set of values and beliefs that tell her expensive equals exclusive, desirable, and high-status.
Heather cares about value, quality, and convenience. Since she’s also super-granola and outdoorsy, she aligns with the values and beliefs that make her feel good for helping save the alpacas.
Trade-offs Form Specific Combinations
Trade-offs create combinations in the customer’s mind. Combinations are more difficult to out-position than single attributes. It’s like the mother sparrow who hid her nest away, deep into a thorn bush instead of out in broad daylight where the cuckoo could easily find it.
The most important thing to remember about these combinations?
The customer dictates what they are.
You’ll struggle if you try to force your desired combination onto a customer who doesn’t want that combination. You either need to find a customer who wants your combination, or change your combination to match a viable audience’s preferences.
Many Elements of Positioning go hand-in-hand, sort of like pre-determined combinations. For example, luxury brands like the ones Sarah loves will almost always use a combination of experience, high pricing to distance themselves from “value shoppers”, and anything that reinforces a sense of social status. A low price would kill their brand.
Utility brands like the ones Heather loves will almost always use a combination of value, quality, convenience, and reliability. They tend to add meaning by contributing to causes that are important to their customers. A high price would kill their brand.
Luxury and Utility are just two of many Brand Positioning Frameworks. You have enough to think about at the moment, so I’ll explain how you can leverage those in another article. For now, let’s wrap this up with some action.
Determine Your Combination
Getting the combination right means figuring out your trade-offs. You’re ditching “all things to all people” and trading it for “We’re a perfect fit.” Go through the list below. Use these items as filters as you examine your own Elements of Positioning. Objectively measure where you are now. Then, decide where you want to be. What adjustments do you need to make?
Your audience’s priorities
Your competition’s claims
Your strengths and weaknesses IN RELATION TO your competition
How well your content, case studies, and client list align to these
Remember: There’s a Position for everyone. The only wrong answer is one that doesn’t align with the audience. Perfectly aligning with your audience’s combination makes out-positioning you extraordinarily difficult for your competition.
The cuckoo birds can’t even find your nest, let alone hijack it. But–make no mistake–they’re constantly looking. Routinely assess your Positioning in your marketplace by staying closer to your customers, keeping up with the latest changes, being at the forefront of what’s to come, and providing ever-increasing value.
– Torrey