A Christmas Positioning Story
Since today is my first day back at work after Christmas vacation, I wanted to write a post about one of the items I got my daughter this year. Because even though I specialize in highly technical Kubernetes tools, I recognize great positioning when I see it — indeed, in this case positioning was the reason I bought the item in the first place.
It all starts back in August, when I’m reading the Crunchbase Daily newsletter. At the very end of one of the newsletters, I see this:
If you take a look at any of the photos of me and consider that I have a 5-year-old daughter, you’ll understand why I would care about a product that teaches girls to love their curls. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve clicked through to an article on Crunchbase from the newsletter, but I certainly clicked through to this article.
After I read the article, I clicked through to the website. And I bought the doll. This was the first doll I ever bought for my daughter — between gifts and hand-me-downs, she already had dozens of them. So many that I was trying to purge them from our house. The value of another doll was and continues to be in the negative. I would be willing to pay to have fewer dolls to trip over.
Which leads me to the Healthy Roots Doll. Pay attention to the positioning: It is not a doll or a toy at all. It is an educational tool to help girls learn to take care of and love curly hair. Throughout the article, the founder focused on curly hair and pain points related to being a girl with curly hair. If you have never been a girl with curly hair, you probably have no idea what those pain points are and might even doubt that there are specific pain points. That’s fine, because you are not the target market for this doll. Those of us who were girls with curly hair (or are parents of a girl with curly hair) immediately recognized that this is a product for us, led by someone who gets us.
You might have noticed, if you clicked through to the article, that the Healthy Roots Dolls are Black and their market is primarily Black girls. That is true, but it is also a very good example of how being incredibly specific with your positioning can actually expand your market. The product could have been positioned as a Black doll for Black girls, or even as a way to help Black girls feel beautiful. I wouldn’t have clicked on an article about Black dolls for Black girls, not because that isn’t a worthy product, but because it doesn’t speak to me or my specific pain points, and also isn’t particularly unique. It would have faded into the background for me, and probably for a lot of others as well. There are plenty of dolls out there with dark skin, but very few with realistic curly hair.
There are also some Black girls that this doll is not right for — not everyone in the Black community cares about natural hair care for curly hair, and not everyone even has hair as curly as this doll’s.
Here is what this company’s incredibly specific positioning is doing:
Making it clear who this product is for and who it is not for
Highlighting the product’s strengths
Creating a competition-free space for itself
How many dolls do you think there are on the market? How many of those dolls have realistic curly hair that can be washed and styled?
It might seem like there are few parallels for startups in the cloud native ecosystem. But not only does this story illustrate how powerful positioning can be, products for kids have a lot in common with B2B products. That’s because unlike with other consumer products, kids’ items have different buyers (the parent) and users (the kid). Many B2B products also have buyers (head of development, VP of engineering, etc) who don’t actually use the product themselves or who use it differently than the majority of users (developers, platform engineers, etc).
Second, this is a very good illustration of how very specific positioning can create a competition-free space for the company while actually expanding the size of the potential market.
Do you think your company could benefit from better positioning in the new year? I can help with that.