In starting up your company, there are a lot of decisions that need to be made, from deciding who you need to hire to what accounting system you should use. Anyone who has started a company from the bottom up knows the infrastructure that needs to be created in order to have a business. However, what many businesses fail to do is determine how they are positioned in the marketplace.
In Tim Williams book, Positioning for Professionals, he centers positioning strategy into four questions:
Who?
What?
How?
Why?
In determining how you answer these questions will determine how your build your positioning strategy. To start, you can create and answer the following sentence with your answers to the four questions: For (who), we (what) by (how), because (why). For example, Tesla Motors mission statement is to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to the market as soon as possible. If Tesla were to answer the positioning question above, it would say: For early adopting and green consumers, we create compelling mass market electric cars by leveraging technological advancements and the demand of electric cars because we want to accelerate the advent of sustainable transportation. That is a fairly unique and strong positioning strategy.
In order to have a strong positioning strategy, you need to have a leading question (out of the four) that is narrow in focus and drives the rest of the questions. If your answers for all four questions results are broad in nature, then it will be hard to position your startup in the market. It is imperative to have a narrow focus in one of the questions in order to have strong positioning strategy. In Tesla’s case, it has a narrow “What” strategy of creating compelling mass market electric cars. Tesla is not just another car company. Rather it makes a very specific type of car and currently has only one model of car in the marketplace (Model S). It’s “What” strategy as a car maker is much different than the positioning strategies of other car makers who typically have either a “Who” or “How” strategy. In fact Tesla’s positioning strategy puts it more in line with Apple than it does with Ford.
For your startup, how do you answer these questions? Which of the answers to the four questions is your leading strategy and is narrow in focus? Where does your startup need to change in order to fully live in your positioning strategy?
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