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Positioning Yourself and Your Business for Maximum Success

Guest post by: Michael Farrell

Article Overview: Positioning is one of the most important marketing concepts you will consider in your business career, suggests Mike Farrell with aspenIbiz. Read this short post as it will reveal several positioning strategies that many people overlook and cost themselves a lot of many as a result.

Positioning Yourself and Your Business for Maximum Success

Positioning is admittedly an advertising buzzword but it is legitimately one of the most important marketing concepts you will ever consider in your business career. One of the definitions of positioning is the controlling how your customers and prospective customers think and feel about your business in comparison to other, similar businesses competing for their attention.

Here are several positioning strategies that may seem obvious but many people overlook the obvious and cost themselves a lot of money as a result.

Positioning Strategy 1 - How to Describe What You Do to Attract the Customers You Want.

Let's start with the name of your business. The best business names telegraph what the business does. For example, Dunkin Donuts is better than Starbucks. At the start, Apple and Amazon were mystery names however obviously they are now hugely successful brand name companies. The question you have to ask is whether or not you want to invest an enormous amount of money and patience in creating awareness and understanding of what your name represents or to start with a name that clearly represents what your business is and does.

Positioning Strategy 2 - How to Price.

You don't ever want to be in a business that obtained its customers with the lure of "lowest prices." You cannot build long-term customer retention via the cheapest price. The way you get a customer has great impact on how you will sell to that customer again. There will always be someone willing to offer a cheaper price. If the only thing binding your customers to your company is the lowest price, your business will be as fragile in its tenth year as in its tenth week.

Be sure to sell quality, value, service, and unique benefits; do not sell price.

One of the most interesting things about price is not its impact on profit and income but its impact on positioning. Often, under-pricing sends the wrong message. The business owner thinks he is optimizing sales by offering the lowest price possible but he actually creating skepticism and causing discerning customers to look elsewhere.

In the New Economy, the successful businesses, based on factors other than low or aggressively competitive pricing, outnumber successful businesses that feature low or lowest price promises by at least 500 to 1. Be sure to play the odds.

Positioning Strategy 3 - How to Make Your Image Work for You.

To be perceived as successful and trustworthy in your business, you must match the image of a successful business in your field.

Places of business, product packaging, literature, and advertising, all are subject to the same image concerns as are individual appearances.

We are taught that you can't judge a book by its cover but we can't help but judge a book by its cover. You will be judged that way, too!

Most businesses are better served by thinking about their marketing tools as "salesmanship in media" rather than as "advertising." In simple terms, copy is king. Message matters most. Yes, the wrong presentation for a given market can sabotage event the best message. But the more common error is a beautiful presentation of - nothing.

Ultimately, there must be appropriate marriage of substance and style to make your image work for you. Customer's expectations must be met and exceeded, anxiety avoided, reassurance given by the image presented by you, your staff, your physical location, and your marketing material.

Positioning Strategy 4 - Self-Appointment.

When we are kids, our parents "appoint us" old enough to stay home alone or old enough to babysit our younger brothers or sisters.

At work, employers or supervisors "promote us" as qualified to do a certain thing or handle a certain responsibility.

This conditioning is not particularly useful when you step into the world of owning your own business.

Please understand that you do not need anybody's permission to be successful. If you wait for someone to grant you the permission to be successful, you will wait a long, long time.

Business success just is not conferred upon you.

Power and influence is not granted - it is taken.

Expert positioning is all about self-appointment, self-promotion, and self-aggrandizement. Make this note: you become a promotable expert by decision, acquisition, and organization of information, pronouncement, and promotion. Not by anointment by some authority on high.

How do you do this? Write books, give teleseminars, build lists of customers interested in your product or service.

Your positioning decision is the difference between a six-figure income and a seven-figure income based on investor partnering potential, with many clients, as this is the income-multiplying power of positioning.

In positioning yourself and your business for success, you have to clearly determine who you are, then drive that message home to your marketplace. It is also important to make the right decision as the marketplace will usually accept the positioning you chose for yourself, and present to others, as you really are in control of the positioning.

I Hope You Enjoyed the Article and I Trust You Found It Insightful! Let me Know What You Think.

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Article Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Business Success, Internet Marketing, Mike Farrell aspenIbiz, Price Strategy, Product Line Marketing, Product Positioning



Related Forum Posts
Top 19 Copywriting books - 1. Ogilvy on Advertising. David Ogilvy. Wiley. 2. Positioning: The Battle for your Mind. Al Ries and Jack Trout. Warner. 3. The New Positioning. Jack Trout. McGraw-Hill. 4. Tested Advertising Methods. John Caples. Prentice-Hall. 5. How to Make your Advertising Make Money. John Caples. Prentice-Hall. 6. Guerrilla Advertising. Jay Conrad Levinson. Houghton Mifflin. 7. Direct Mail Copy that Sells. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall. 8. Sales Letters that Sizzle. Herschell Gordon Lewis. NTC Business Books. 9. Herschell Gordon Lewis on the Art of Writing Copy. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall. 10. Romancing the Brand. David Martin. American Management Association. 11. The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with William Bernbach, Leo Burnett, George Gribbin, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves. NTC Business Books. 12. Confessions of an Advertising Man. David Ogilvy. NTC Business Books. 13. My Life in Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books. 14. Scientific Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books. 15. How to Become an Advertising Man. James Webb Young. NTC Business Books. 16. The Lasker Story as He Told It. NTC Business Books. 17. Advertising Concept and Copy. George Felton. Prentice Hall. 18. The Copy WorkShop Workbook. Bruce Bendinger. The Copy Workshop. 19. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads. Luke Sullivan. Wiley. This should keep you busy for at least a year. Enjoy!
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Re: Books for the Entrepreneur - Here's one of my most recent books The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success By Brian Tracy
Re: Books for Business Owners - Hi DougSchadle, Thanks for sharing your favorite business book with us! A good book I'm reading now is "Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed" by Brian Tracy as it was a birthday gift from a friend. Tracy's book is helpful in identifying what's important in your life and then setting an action plan to achieve it.
Landmark Forum Education - I was at an Introduction to the Landmark Forum meeting yesterday and I heard from a lot of people that own businesses there state that the Landmark Education was a key ingredient in their Business Success. Has anyone on the this Forum been to the Landmark Forum 3 day Course? If yes, how has it impacted your business? Thank you for sharing.


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