Founders: Positioning is your problem

An unfortunate number of marketing people have reached out to me recently to talk about their company’s positioning. On the one hand, this is great — people are talking to me! But there’s a catch. The marketing people are reaching out because the founder and/or CEO thinks that positioning is a marketing problem.

Positioning definitely impacts marketing. It is the foundation that your marketing is built on, and marketing (and sales) teams will be the ones suffering the most. That’s because they are most on the hook for delivering revenue, though — something that I imagine the CEO / founder cares about, too.

Positioning is not just a marketing problem. Positioning a product is deciding what that product is. Is it a cloud security platform? User behavior analytics? Multi-cluster management? Cloud native monitoring? Log analytics?

Whatever you decide, every time someone says something publicly about the product, he or she will have to articulate the product’s positioning. The person most likely to be talking publicly about the product is the CEO, so he or she should definitely be involved in figuring out what label to slap on the product.

Let’s face it: This is also the founders’ baby. If they don’t buy in to the positioning, the entire positioning exercise (whether done with me or internally) is a waste of time.

So founders: you own positioning. Don’t ask you new marketing hire to do it for you.

Are you a founder who’s trying to delegate positioning because you just aren’t sure how to approach it? Reach out — I’d be happy to talk through the options.