Is Positioning a Marketing Exercise?

I once had a VP of Marketing tell me that she ‘owned’ positioning, and that all positioning questions should go through her. Let’s forget for the moment that this was incredibly rude and move on to the more interesting questions: Does marketing own positioning?

Let’s think about what decisions positioning influences. It definitely influences messaging, which is certainly part of marketing. It influences where you would want to run ads, which magazines you’d be interested in appearing in and which journalists you’d like to reach out to, what you should write blog posts about, which trade shows you might be interested in. So far, all marketing, right?

But… positioning is a huge part of sales, too. One of the top symptoms of bad positioning is sales conversations that don’t go well, where prospects seem confused and don’t understand the product’s value. Positioning determines who sales reps should target in outreach, which companies they should try to reach and which job title is their most likely buyer. Positioning is the foundation of any slide deck the sales team prepares.

What about product development? Positioning helps product teams decide which features to include and when to tell customs to take a hike when they request some new shiny object. Positioning can tell you which features are really essential to keep and which ones are distractions. Positioning should inform your product roadmap, too. Positionin can shift over time, but it shouldn’t be shifting because your product team decided to ignore your positioning.

So… back to the question. Is positioning a marketing exercise? It might be spearheaded by the marketing team, but positioning is a fundamental business strategy and should not be delegated out to a marketing department. Assuming we’re talking about a start-up, the founders and the CEO need to be involved in any effort to re-position, because they will often have near-veto power. In the context of a large company, where any re-positioning effort involves just one product of many, the person in charge of that business division should be involved in the re-positioning, not just the marketing person.

Positioning is not just a marketing exercise. It influences who you sell to, what features you include in your roadmap and even things like the appropriate price point or what kind of demo data to use in sales presentations. Asking your marketing team to handle positioning on their own is a mistake.