Many MDs equate positioning their company with marketing. But Shirlaws includes positioning in the strategic business conversation. We believe positioning your business is something to do before any marketing exercise because positioning impacts everything in the business.

We tell clients that improving sales or delivering better products is not the whole solution if they want to grow.

Positioning the business - step one, the business model

Try completing this easy exercise for your own company in terms of your ‘product', ‘market', ‘service' and ‘price'. Draw an up or down arrow, or place a dash for a neutral answer - we've given some examples below.

1. Market question - what is your proposition to your market? Remember, all propositions are viable and can be profitable. Some people think only ↑ is good positioning but Easyjet does well even with a ↓ proposition.

2. Product - how does your quality compare with competitors (↑), the same (-) or lower (↓)?

3. Service - what customer relationships do you have? Advocates, loyal customer base (↑), customers get what they expect (-), or customers are disappointed with the service (↓)?

4. Price question - how does your price compare with competitors: premium, average, or cheap?

A mixed situation?

You will probably have a mix of arrows. For example, neutral quality product (-), bottom end market (↓), high service level (↑), and low price (↓). In this situation, it will be costing you more than your price and target customers warrant. If you had low service, but a high price and high expectation, you'd soon lose customers.

Trying to shift into the higher end (↑) market? Then the strategy must place all the arrows upwards to deal with high-end customers. If everyone tried to sell into high-end markets, no one would be servicing the mid (-) or bottom end (↓). This would create gaps across the marketplace, but also opportunities - enter Easyjet.

Choose your model

The strategic question is which business model to choose (high-end, mid, low-end)? The company can then be much clearer about brand, what add-on services to provide, and how to package them for the client.

You will be sub-optimising your business if you try to combine different aspects of positioning. Not only that, but you'll be confusing your target market - rather like taking a first class BA flight only to find it full of backpackers.

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