12 truths about B2B positioning

1. Most people don’t know what a positioning is. 

Well of course most people don’t. What I mean is even most marketers don’t really know the difference between a positioning and a brand narrative. Or they think they’ve got a positioning but really all they have is a tagline, or a creative concept fit for a campaign. So if you’re embarking on a positioning project, take some time to define your terms up front and understand what you’re aiming for. Our guide to creating successful B2B brands will help you translate some of the more common jargon.

2. Positionings are pretty boring at heart. 

They’re basically a list of answers to a handful of important questions about your company or product. (Here are the six B2B brand positioning questions we use at Beneath.) The fun stuff happens when you take that list of positioning elements and craft it into a great B2B story.

3. There’s no such thing as having no positioning.

Your positioning is in the mind of the beholder, and they’ll come to their own conclusions one way or another – whether or not you’ve made an effort to influence them. So don’t let this stuff linger on your to-do list. You’re going to want to control the narrative as well as you can, as soon as you can.

4. Every B2B positioning is a repositioning. 

You’re either refreshing your old positioning, disabusing your audience of their preconceptions and assumptions (see point 3), or fighting the default perceptions of the category you’re in.

5. All positioning is relative. 

Originality is hard, maybe impossible, and often undesirable in marketing. Even if you’re creating something that’s actually new and innovative, you need to use a comparison or analogy at some point, to give your audience a firm cognitive footing  before you ask them to make a leap with you.

Sometimes you might draw an explicit comparison between your product or service and another one, to show why yours is better. True originality isn’t hiding your sources; it’s deriding them, or at least piggybacking on their salience. Look at Avis (“We’re number two. We try harder.”), SevenUp (“the un-Cola”), Miller Lite (not heavy). (Examples borrowed from Ries and Trout, I think.) Turns out one version of a powerful positioning is simply stating that you can do what your competitor can’t. Be what they’re not.

6. The best positionings are surprising and then obvious, in quick succession. 

Like a good joke, I suppose. They reveal the kind of truth that was hiding in plain sight. In this sense, the “funniest” venture I’ve seen recently is The Enhanced Games (the Olympics on steroids). Although, saying that, when it comes to big, generational companies and technologies (the kind that attract VC funding), the timeline of the joke is often extended – and it can take years for most people to realise a crazy-sounding idea was actually a genius one. Just look at Airbnb, which sounded like something that would never catch on, let alone take on the hotel industry. Instead, it exploded and grew the whole market for travel.

7. B2B positioning is sometimes built on a foundational metaphor, which we call the Illuminating Metaphor. 

Find yours. It will help. Here’s a blog post about metaphor in B2B marketing.

8. A strong B2B positioning sets you up for fractal messaging.

By which I mean it helps you tell the same story at every level of brand expression. No matter how much you zoom in or out, or what context you find yourself in, you’re essentially repeating a self-similar pattern. So every single expression of your brand – your sales pitch, home page, email signatures, whatever – tells the same story. Individually and together, the pieces create a coherent picture.

9. You don’t have to say everything, everywhere, all at once.

Before you get the wrong impression about that notion of fractal storytelling above, it doesn’t mean you have to stuff your story into every branded nook and cranny. It just means everything has to be coherent and complementary. There’s a time and a place for telling your story end to end, and there are times when it’s better to be patient, layering the detail gradually.

10. The wrong story, well told, is the most dangerous positioning mistake. 

If you think about the possible outcomes of your B2B brand-building efforts, you can end up getting the strategy wrong or right and the execution wrong or right. Of the four possible combinations of those elements, the really dangerous outcome is when you have a bad strategy (or just the wrong strategy for you right now) and you’ve executed it really nicely. You’ve got the wrong story, told well, so it looks and sounds good, and may even be helping in the short term, but in its creeping, insidious way, this situation will come back to haunt you further down the line when you realise you’ve invested lots of time, money and effort in the wrong direction. For a fuller explanation of this positioning predicament, and a handy diagram, read this post on the dangers of the wrong story, told well.

11. Your positioning is temporary. It’s meant to change. 

But it has to change for good reason, not just because you got bored of it. (And when you do get bored of it, remember that your audience has given it a fraction of the mental space you have.) No, the real time to change your story is when it’s served its purpose and helped you get to the next stop along the way to your final destination. Once you’ve conquered one market and you’re ready for the next, or you’ve grown your product to serve new users or use cases – whatever strategic goal you’ve hit, you can let go of one positioning and grab the next one to swing you onwards. Not sure when to let go? Here’s a blog post about knowing when it’s time to change your brand story.