Page 77 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

it. These companies describe their service as second to none, when the
prospect’s clear perception is that the company is no better than fifth to
many.

The small service must start with smallness—just as Oregon started with
rain and Avis started with Number Two—and turn it into a positive.

The small service must start with small. It must dance with the one that
brung it.

In positioning, don’t try to hide your small size. Make it work by stressing
its advantages, such as responsiveness and individual attention.

Focus: What Sears May Have Learned

If you are old enough to remember when bankers were the big shots in
every town and when Univac was the world’s most famous computer, you
also remember when Sears was America’s Department Store.

Years later, bankers have been the victims of inertia, Univac is a memory,
and Sears is a near-casualty of the focus wars in department stores.

Amazingly, even while Americans seem more interested in austerity,
Neiman Marcus appears to be thriving, thanks to a position that can best be
described, as a Neiman’s shopper might, as the purveyor of “Stuff to die for
!” Wal-Mart is the terror of every small-town retailer, thanks to an equally
clear focus on “Good stuff so damn cheap you won’t believe it.” And
Bloomingdale’s, while not the super-nova it was in the eighties, still attracts
a good business by focusing on “Shopping as entertainment.”

Sears, in the first half of the 1990s, on the other hand, became the victim
of focusing on nothing—or more accurately, on everything. Sears had
always touted its high quality (but horribly low margin), durable goods such
as lawn mowers. Now Sears started stressing its “softer side,” its clothing
and linens—a difficult marketing combination.

Sears started with very low prices. Then, hoping to improve margins and
attract what executives thought was a growing and lasting supply of cost-be-
damned Yuppies, they tried to move prices up. Sears tried a little of this and
a little of that—and in the middle of the decade, no American within two
blocks of the Sears Tower could describe Sears’s position. And if no
prospect can describe your position, you do not have one.

Sears quickly discovered that if you do not have a focus, you soon might
not have a business. Sales and profits plummeted. The store put its famous