Page 73 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

and airport waiting areas, to influence the perceptions of your service.
You can establish your positioning statement by answering the following

questions:
Who: Who are you?
What: What business are you in?
For whom: What people do you serve?
What need: What are the special needs of the people you serve?
Against whom: With whom are you competing? What’s different: What

makes you different from those competitors?
So: What’s the benefit? What unique benefit does a client derive from your

service?

To illustrate, take Bloomingdale’s: (Who): “Bloomingdale’s
(What) are fashion-focused department stores (For whom) for trend-

conscious, upper-middle-class shoppers
(What need) looking for high-end products. (Against whom) Unlike other

department stores, (What’s different) Bloomingdale’s provides unique
merchandise in a theatrical setting

(so) that makes shopping entertaining.”
This was the Bloomingdale’s position for years. Rather than make its “What’s
different?” couture and high-end fashions (Bergdorf Goodman’s niche), or even
fashion at all, Bloomingdale’s positioned itself based on the experience of going
there.
You can find other models for creating your position statement. None work
better than this.
Ask yourself these seven questions—and have seven good clear answers.

Creating Your Position Statement

A positioning statement describes what you want the world to think. A statement
of position, by contrast, admits the truth.

For most services, this statement of position basically reads:
(Who) “John Doe Inc.
(What) is a small service company
(For whom) that serves smaller clients who want pretty good quality but
cannot pay, or do not want to pay, for the services of a larger company.
(Against whom) Unlike its bigger and better-known competitors,