This week, I wanted to expand on a topic I covered on my podcast a few weeks back: what is your company’s point of view, and how do we communicate that?
These posts couldn't be coming at a better time. Appreciate so much that you're sharing these ideas (and working my way through the book at the same time to learn them in detail). Thank you April!
So many tech firms are founded by an inflection point or a point of view that gets exploited with a solution. These companies slowly acquire customers, grow and feel like they need to position themselves into spaces that appear to be unique or bigger.
All the while, the essence of that point of view gets lost. As new marketers (and members of other functions) join, the history gets rewritten with each person trying to put their spin on it. Happens all the time.
The same is true of the core problems that a solution solves. In the beginning, it is clear why the solution is quantifiably better but this too gets lost over time. In the end, it gets replaced by "feature fantasia" and category claims while the customer is left on their own trying to figure out the quantifiable outcomes that they can expect from the offering, let alone when they can expect them.
Things can absolutely get really muddy as the company grows. But sometimes the change is needed - we just have to make sure we hit pause once in a while to re-set the positioning and the pitch. This is particularly true after an acquisition.
Having an organisational point of view is much less daunting than having a positioning statement! Makes it easier for smaller, non-tech, commodity service/product businesses to start thinking about marketing from a custome-first approach.
Hey thanks so much for the comment and the thoughtful question!
In general I feel like we can reverse-engineer market insight from our differentiated value but sometimes it takes some effort.
One question I like to ask is "What do you folks know that in your opinion your competitors get totally wrong?" That often gets us thinking about the point of view and from there we can extract the insight.
These posts couldn't be coming at a better time. Appreciate so much that you're sharing these ideas (and working my way through the book at the same time to learn them in detail). Thank you April!
Hey thanks - glad you are finding this stuff useful!
Another great article April!
So many tech firms are founded by an inflection point or a point of view that gets exploited with a solution. These companies slowly acquire customers, grow and feel like they need to position themselves into spaces that appear to be unique or bigger.
All the while, the essence of that point of view gets lost. As new marketers (and members of other functions) join, the history gets rewritten with each person trying to put their spin on it. Happens all the time.
The same is true of the core problems that a solution solves. In the beginning, it is clear why the solution is quantifiably better but this too gets lost over time. In the end, it gets replaced by "feature fantasia" and category claims while the customer is left on their own trying to figure out the quantifiable outcomes that they can expect from the offering, let alone when they can expect them.
Things can absolutely get really muddy as the company grows. But sometimes the change is needed - we just have to make sure we hit pause once in a while to re-set the positioning and the pitch. This is particularly true after an acquisition.
Having an organisational point of view is much less daunting than having a positioning statement! Makes it easier for smaller, non-tech, commodity service/product businesses to start thinking about marketing from a custome-first approach.
Hey thanks so much for the comment and the thoughtful question!
In general I feel like we can reverse-engineer market insight from our differentiated value but sometimes it takes some effort.
One question I like to ask is "What do you folks know that in your opinion your competitors get totally wrong?" That often gets us thinking about the point of view and from there we can extract the insight.