Positioning is Business Strategy

I have a marketing background; many positioning experts who are more famous than me (like April Dunford )have a marketing background. It’s not uncommon for me to see a VP of Marketing or CMO who’s listed “owned positioning” or “determined company/product positioning” as one of their responsibilities in a LinkedIn profile.

The problem with that is twofold. First of all, positioning is business strategy, not marketing strategy. It has very important ramification for messaging and marketing in general, yes, but also your product roadmap, your sales strategy and, especially in an open source company, even your engineering decisions. It is tied to your point of view and your vision for your company. Positioning is about deciding on your company’s identity. VPs of Marketing are smart, and they are also critical to the company’s success. But giving them responsibility for your positioning is like letting a sailor steer the ship.

— I sometimes also see product leaders and sales leaders given responsibility for positioning. The problem is the same: It’s not “just” product or “just” sales, but company-wide.

The second problem is that positioning your product/project/company is not a solo task. Even if the CEO is the one who’s ultimately responsible for ‘owning’ positioning, he/she shouldn’t just sit down alone and try to figure it out. First of all, assuming more than one founder positioning is an exercise that all founders, not just the CEO/co-founder, need to buy into 100%. But secondly and more importantly, you will get worse results if just one person sits alone and tries to pull the best positioning possible for the company out of his or her ass. Different people in the company will have different perspectives, different interactions with customers and users and a different relationship with the project and product. Including some non-founders is good, too, because they don’t have as much baggage about what the project/product was supposed to be, and are thus more able to embrace what the project/product actually does better than anything else.

You need perspectives that are not just from marketing. You need someone from sales; you need someone from product. You need someone who interacts with the open source community; you need someone who talks to customers.

Not just because you need these people to buy in, but because their perspective will give you a better idea of what customers/users are comparing you with, what characteristics define your best customers, and what your unique differentiators really are.

CEOs and founders of all kinds: Don’t delegate your project/product/company positioning to your first marketing hire. And if you work with an external consultant like me, understand that we all work like therapists, not surgeons. You and your team, will have to be awake and engaged during the process if we’re going to get a good result.

But also, CEOs and founders: If your company’s positioning is off, it’s your problem. It’s not up to your CMO to fix. It’s up to you.

Oh, and I’m happy to help you, if you think your positioning might need fixing. Sometimes you really need an outside perspective, too, and someone with a tried-and-true process for figuring it out. Reach out if you want to chat about it.