Page 76 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

things, too.
Almost fifteen years ago, I saw Michael Graves’s brilliant presentation to

the City of Portland, Oregon, of his proposal for a new city hall. Graves
immediately redefined the competition with his design and his manner. (His
ingenious model included people sunbathing and jaywalking, and other
humorous touches that got people to study the model closely.) His position
veered so far from the others’ that he made the others appear almost
identical to one another, thus reducing the five-firm competition to two
firms: Graves’s and the best of the other four.

Graves did more than position himself. He also effectively repositioned
his competitors. Suddenly they all appeared competent, but uninspired.

Once Graves had put himself in the finals, he moved to the middle—not
unlike the political candidate who stakes a slightly extreme position in the
primaries and then moves to the middle in the general election. Graves
allayed some councilmembers’ fears that he would go too far. That pink
wouldn’t really be that pink, they learned. Those wild ribbons cascading
down the side of the building—well, maybe they wouldn’t appear after all.

Graves won, and created a historic piece of architecture.
But before that, he created a very shrewd piece of positioning.
Choose a position that will reposition your competitors; then move a step
back towa rd the middle to cinch the sale.

Positioning a Small Service

You are what you are.
You cannot try to be something that does not fit the way your prospects

position you.
This is often painfully true in the most common service in this country:

the small service company.
Prospects for these services—companies with from one to twenty

employees generally—take the one thing they know about the service—its
small size—and draw inferences.

Unfortunately, most of these inferences are negative: Why aren’t you
bigger? Why have I never heard of you before? Why aren’t you working in
a company I have heard of?

Some service companies do not recognize this problem, and they tilt at
windmills. They try to hide their size or ignore the prospect’s concern about