Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

that will give you a competitive advantage.
The Fear of Positioning
A quick quiz:
Which terrifies service marketers most:
A) The suggestion that they must position their service?
B) The shower scene in Psycho ?
The correct answer is A.
Why all the fear? Because standing for one thing means you cannot expressly

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stand for other things. You must sacrifice.
“NO! We cannot give up that business! We have to say we are this and this
and this! We’re sacrificing opportunity. Forget it!”
Rather than sacrificing opportunities, a narrow focus often creates
opportunities. For vivid proof, consider Scandinavian Airlines. In 1980, faced
with $20 million in losses, SAS executives decided to position the airline as “the
business traveler’s airline.” Listen carefully and you almost can hear, all the way
from Stockholm, the hollering that preceded that decision:
“What, and sacrifice tourist travelers? Run ads with blond Yuppies in Power
Suits? The tourists will ditch us! We have to address them.”
The sacrificers, however, won their argument for the business traveler’s
position. And they won something else: m o re tourist customers.
It worked like this:
SAS created EuroClass for business travelers. EuroClass had olives in the
martinis, bigger seats, phones, telexes, a separate four-minute-faster checkin
counter, and free drinks, newspapers, and magazines.
The move revived SAS: The airline made $80 million profit in EuroClass’s
first year. But something else happened. Because business travelers fly at full
fares, airlines earn much bigger margins on business travelers. By filling up so
many seats with full-fare passengers, SAS could afford to dump prices on the
remaining seats. That is, they could offer even lower fares to tourists.
And they did. Soon, SAS was blessed with the highest percentage of full-fare
travelers of any European airline—and the lowest tourist fares in all of Europe,
too.
In short, positioning SAS as the most desirable airline for business travelers
made it the most desirable airline to business travelers a n d tourists.
Some sacrifice.