Pivot by Remy Arteaga & Joanne Hyland

Author:Remy Arteaga & Joanne Hyland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Positioning Statement

As an entrepreneur, you might also encounter the term positioning statement. According to Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, a classic book on positioning statements, Jack Trout and Al Ries wrote that “positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.”4 The positioning statement is a marketing tool to help the startup focus on how to best position the startup relative to both the competition and the market. Geoffrey Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm put forth the following framework for developing a positioning statement:5

For [target end user]

Who wants/needs [compelling reason to buy]

The [product name] is a [product category]

That provides [key benefit]

Unlike [main competitor]

The [product name] [key differentiation]

Here is a fictitious positioning statement for a mobile app:

For on-the-go professionals who need up-to-the-minute stock tips, the StockTipper is a mobile app that provides stock tips from billionaires like Warren Buffett; unlike StockTips, the StockTipper brings you tips from successful billionaires.

This type of exercise is valuable and important, but probably not in the same way most experts suggest. Instead of the positioning statement serving to position the startup in the marketplace, I suggest that the positioning statement be used as an input to the Pivot activities we will be reviewing later in this book. It is a good exercise to determine some of the most important assumptions that are driving the startup. The preceding positioning statement is filled with assumptions—from whether on-the-go professionals really want tips from billionaires to whether the startup can get the billionaires to give tips.

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