👑 Competitive Positioning
🧱 Structural Differentiation
💛 Repeat Customers
👑 Competitive Positioning
Brand positioning is not a communication device or a way to describe your marketing strategy. It is competitive strategy: Assert your brand.
Over the years, my view of branding has evolved from an aspiration to an assertion. Effective brand positioning is the physical and deliberate ownership of your niche.
It’s not what you aspire to. It’s what you take and own.
The objective is to visibly own your niche. And the Holy Grail is to make it so the only way to compete with your company is to buy it.
This may sound like hyperbole, but it’s achievable in almost every industry. You won’t own your niche by going toe to toe with the big guys. Rather, it requires focus.
There are four steps to competitive positioning:
- Underserved Markets: Identify and grow niche markets that are marginally served by the category leaders or the industry as a whole. These are usually customers with specific needs or challenges that you can serve brilliantly.
- Whole Product Solution: By truly understanding your customers and their needs, you can create products, services, and a company that delights them. You win with a purpose-built company that serves your markets.
- Grow Capacity: Once you achieve product-market fit, focus on increasing capacity and throughput. Your markets will absorb your capacity as you increase it, which drives growth.
- Visibly Own Your Niche: If you don’t blow your own horn, nobody will. Grow a Sticky Brand where your customers know your brand, like it, and trust it and choose it first.
You win by serving your customers better with a company built to meet their needs. Competitive positioning is the application of focus and force.
🧱 Structural Differentiation
Like competitive positioning, brand differentiation is perceived as a marketing function. Nothing could be further from the truth. Differentiation is structural. It originates from your business model and strategic choices.
Zappos, for instance, treats customer service as its primary brand differentiator. Tony Hsieh, former CEO of Zappos, writes in Delivering Happiness, “We decided a long time ago that we didn't want our brand to be just about shoes, or clothing, or even online retailing. We decided that we wanted to build our brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience.”
Founded in 1999, Zappos grew into the number one destination to buy shoes and apparel online. The company was so dominant that Amazon acquired Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, but allowed the brand to live on.
The only way to compete with Zappos was to buy it.
”Customer service” is a shorthand for how Zappos competes and wins. As the company succinctly states, “Zappos customers enjoy free shipping, free returns, and 24/7 customer service!”
Zappos differentiates itself through three structural investments:
- Free shipping, both ways: “Zappos customers get FAST, FREE SHIPPING on every order with NO order minimums.”
- Free returns: “If you are not 100% satisfied with your purchase from Zappos you can return your item(s) for a full refund within 365 days of purchase.”
- 24/7 support: “We are here for you 24 hours a day — 365 days a year.” You can call, email, or live chat with a real human being at any time.
Customer service on its own is not the differentiator. Rather, it’s how Zappos applied customer service that made the company unbeatable.
📊 One Stat to Watch
37,000,000
North Americans had a snow day yesterday, digging out cars, driveways, and sidewalks instead of doing anything on their to‑do list. This stat may or may not be another ChatGPT hallucination, but it feels right. 😅
💛 Repeat Customers
Serving a customer once is great, but there is something wrong if your customers don’t return.
A brand isn’t sticky without repeat customers.
Repeat customers and share of wallet are two powerful metrics because it is far more efficient and effective to serve a loyal customer than to constantly hunt for the next one.
🤔 Thoughts on Today’s Issue?
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