Being slightly better isn't a position
As we come to the end of another quarter, I'm wrapping up another brand positioning piece, which is currently my favourite part of my role.
I'm a firm believer that finding the unique space within an industry that only you can own is your winning ticket for business, because if you can't explain why someone should buy into your solution over anything else on the market, your customer can't either. And if they have no reason to buy, you have no sales.
But what's most enticing about brand positioning for me is that there are so many different ways to approach it, and none of them are wrong.
I often talk about how I try to find your unique space by finding your intersection, looking at different areas only you can bring together to create something new. But the very first step in brand positioning happens long before you can do that, and it's the most important step in your whole business: defining what customer problem you're actually solving.
How do you find the right problem?
We've all heard that (potentially fake) quote that if Ford asked their customers what they wanted in the 1800s, they'd have said faster horses, not cars. Many have also heard the advice to solve the real problem, not just the most obvious one. But too often, strategists don't go deeper than that.
How do you find the real problem, underneath the one that's currently being solved? If we can't just ask our customers, how do we discover the difficulties they do have?
Much of my job centres on exactly that, so to help uncover the thinking, I've been reflecting on how differently I've approached the various brand positionings I've worked on this year. What approaches I use to find the true problems that businesses can solve.
Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive list; that would be an entire, and likely unhelpful, book. But these are some of the top ways of thinking I've used this year that you can use on your own business too.
Inversion
Reframing the problem.
Often industry sectors are inundated with various businesses solving the same problem in the same way. Yet many of these solutions miss the real goal.
There's very rarely just one solution to a problem, so reframing exactly what you're trying to achieve and removing any constraints the existing industry has built up can allow you to discover an original, potentially improved, solution.
One of my favourite examples of this is Houston Airport. Passengers worldwide complained about long waits at baggage claim, and airports spent buckets of money on small, incremental improvements to the processes and equipment. Improving wait times by a matter of seconds each time, which no customer truly noticed.
So when the question instead centred on how we could make the wait time disappear, the solution was entirely different: move baggage claim farther from the gates so passengers walked more and waited less.
This made complaints vanish, without spending on expensive new equipment.
How could your own problem statement be reframed into a brand new and improved solution?
Ladder
Asking 'how' and 'why' something is a problem.
Similarly, you could be solving the problem at the wrong point. The simple ladder framework is one of my favourites to talk through in workshops. The idea is to start with your current problem statement in the middle, then move down by asking 'how' and up by asking 'why'.
This year, I worked with a restaurant chain that offers fresh, healthy food, made on demand for take-out. The positioning wasn't necessarily wrong, as they'd found a great gap in the market. But the execution was letting them down: wait times were long, which made people unhappy with the overall experience and not want to return. The chain wanted to speed up food production.
I didn't think this was the best approach. So by asking 'why' repeatedly, we concluded we needed to increase customer satisfaction during the wait time. When we asked 'how' repeatedly, we came up with a Click & Collect mobile app ordering system, allowing production to start before the customer arrives and removing the wait time. Neither of these increases the speed of food production, and when we talked to a small customer sample group, they said it could've made them question the food's freshness (a key part of their positioning).
Instead, we reframed the problem around improving customer satisfaction in other ways: ensuring staff greets each customer, providing comfortable seating and free water while they wait, and using screens to show what stage their order is in.
We also reduced queue sizes and wait times by letting customers order digitally in advance through the store's website.
These solutions are much better than trying to speed up food preparation, and they help solidify the brand's positioning.
Why is your problem occurring, and how else could it be solved?
Rumsfeld Matrix
Finding the hidden problem by watching, not asking.
You may be lacking a competitive advantage because you're using the same signals as everyone else. What other problems might there be to solve that no one else has uncovered yet?
The Rumsfeld Matrix is a great tool for exploring this and finding a brand-new variation to solve.
Within this, the 'unknown knowns' are often the best quadrant to pay attention to. It is ultimately made up of things we don't know we know. Which, admittedly, sounds counterproductive: how do we solve something we don't notice? But that's exactly the point. Typically, we skip identifying what we don't notice and focus only on what we fully see.
But if everyone does that, there's a whole heap of things we are just accepting that you could solve.
Say you want to launch a new coffee machine. There are already lots on the market. But can you monitor how people are actually using them? I love a cappuccino; black coffee does not do it for me. But the milk part of a coffee machine! Drives me mad! If anyone actually watched a week in the life of my coffee machine, they would see:
These are the unknown knowns. If you asked me what I want in a coffee machine, I would probably tell you I want a quieter machine (also something I would love, because being woken up to the sound of a coffee machine at 6 am isn't as romantic as that sounds in books) or that I want to be able to save settings for my specific drink preference (boujee). But these points are the bits that aren't at the front of my mind, the known problems, but would actually have a positive impact on my life.
So what's your equivalent of a self-cleaning and refrigerated milk compartment in a coffee machine?
(And if you do know this exists, please point me in the direction!)
Solution depth
Going deeper on the problem.
Especially when comparing yourself to other solutions in the industry, it's easy to box yourself into solving just one step within a customer problem or journey. But sometimes, depending on the industry, you may be in a position to help customers connect multiple steps through your expertise, either by increasing the depth or the breadth of your solution.
I recently worked with a Mortgage Broker who helps assign people the right mortgage for large-scale renovations. They have great reviews and a clear niche, but no clear way to stand out from other brokers in the industry. So we mapped out the full customer journey, both before and after working with them.
We found that finding a mortgage is only one part of the process their customers need. The biggest customer problem is finding and coordinating with all the other professionals they need across their journey: a surveyor, a legal team, the trades for the renovation, planning permissions.
My client has been in the industry for 20+ years and already had all of these contacts and recommendations, but wasn't communicating that anywhere. So we packaged a premium offering where his team can coordinate not just a single step of the mortgage process, but offer a 'concierge' service: they assign you the right professionals for your project and handle all communication with them for you. Solving the larger problem for the customer and instantly becoming a no-brainer when reviewed against their competition
Can you go deeper on your own problem, be that breadth or depth, to solve a wider expanse of your customers' journey?
What's the right problem for you to solve?
Whether or not Ford ever said it, the faster horse quote is the most useful way to think about positioning, because almost every industry is full of them.
Houston's airport didn't need faster bags, the restaurant didn't need a faster kitchen, I don't need a quieter coffee machine (although I wouldn't say no), and nobody renovating a house is lying awake wishing for a slightly better mortgage broker.
When you solve the same problem as everyone else, the only thing left to compete on is being a little faster, a little cheaper, or a little nicer than the business next door. And being slightly better isn't a good brand position.
If you can't explain why someone should choose you, your customer can't either. Very often, the reason you can't explain it is that you're solving the same problem as everyone else. And the answer isn't to just get slightly better at that solution, but to solve it in a way no one else has noticed yet.
So before you begin your work on your positioning, your services, or your next campaign: are you still selling faster horses?
