![]() As Al Ries and Jack Trout, widely recognized as positioning pioneers, wrote in 1986: “The true nature of marketing is not serving the customer… is a war where the enemy is the competition and the customer is ground to be won.”) (This view of growth marketing-as primarily focused on outmaneuvering competitors-was very much in vogue in the decade leading up to Crossing the Chasm’s publication, and led to thinking that sounds almost ludicrous today. By way of entry into this market, our immediate goal is to transition from an early market base (England) to a strategic target market segment in the mainstream (the beaches at Normandy). For our product to wrest the mainstream market from this competitor, we must assemble an invasion force comprising other products and companies (the Allies). Our long-term goal is to enter and take control of a mainstream market (Western Europe) that is currently dominated by an entrenched competitor (the Axis). Specifically, Moore equates your company’s attempt to expand beyond early adopters with D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II: Rereading Crossing the Chasm recently, I was struck by the fact that its organizing metaphor is military invasion. (The version above comes from its pages.) That book, as far as I can tell, was also the first to codify the positioning statement as that Mad Libs, fill-in-the-blanks exercise we’ve all come to know. To innovators, entrepreneurs and CEOs fretting over stalled progress after early market adoption, Moore delivered the comforting, utterly unfake news that the “chasm” was a normal-even necessary-stage in the growth of any successful venture. In 1991, an English professor turned tech marketer named Geoffrey Moore published what is arguably the world’s most influential book on growth strategy, Crossing the Chasm. Which made me wonder: Why do leadership teams still do this? And if constructing a concise statement to articulate your category definition, benefits, and advantages is misguided, how in the world do successful companies stand out from competitors ? Where the Positioning Statement Comes From Worse, if your category definition and/or claims did see the light of day, competitors parroted them, dragging you deeper and deeper into a never-ending war over features and functions, speeds and feeds. In your quest for more compelling sales decks, web pages, and content, your positioning statement wasn’t much help. ![]() After carefully weighing feedback from your investors, your co-workers, and industry analysts, you defined a killer category and an airtight argument about why you were fit to be its king.Īnd then, if your experience was really like mine, nothing happened.Ĭustomers didn’t buy more. ![]() You surveyed the offerings of competitors to identify shortcomings. You interviewed customers, aiming to capture what they found compelling about your products. If your experience was like mine, you teamed up with colleagues, perhaps under the guidance of an outside consultant, to craft some version of this sentence:įor …our product is a that provides. ![]() If you’re a member of a leadership team today-or have been over the last 25 years-odds are you’ve participated in a positioning exercise. ![]()
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