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

If the gap between your position and your positioning statement is too big,
your customers won’t make the leap. Keep your steps small.
If That Isn’t Our Positioning Statement, What Is It?
A too grand, overly bold positioning statement that tries to leap over too many
lily pads still has value. It can be, and probably is, your goal.
Keep it. It can motivate your people, define your longer-term goals, and
guide your mission statement and long-term plan. It gives you an end in mind, as
Stephen Covey puts it—a significant step toward being more effective.
Just because your statement is too grandiose for now doesn’t mean you can’t
hope and try. But marketing must deal realistically with perceptions, and with
the fact that people cannot make huge perceptual leaps. They can only make
little jumps.
Have big goals and great visions—“big hairy audacious goals,” as one writer
put it. But make sure they are goals and visions—and not positioning statements.
Craft bold dreams and realistic positioning statements.
Repositioning Your Competitors
The country’s top architects know how to design a position. They develop a style
and then stand for it. They don’t do some of this and some of that.
If you want avant-garde, you call Frank Gehry.
If you want postmodern wit, you call Michael Graves.
If you want very corporate late modern, you call
I. M. Pei.
These architects “own” those positions. As a result, they own many other
things, too.

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Almost fifteen years ago, I saw Michael Graves’s brilliant presentation to the
City of Portland, Oregon, of his proposal for a new city hall. Graves immediately
redefined the competition with his design and his manner. (His ingenious model
included people sunbathing and jaywalking, and other humorous touches that got
people to study the model closely.) His position veered so far from the others’
that he made the others appear almost identical to one another, thus reducing the
five-firm competition to two firms: Graves’s and the best of the other four.
Graves did more than position himself. He also effectively repositioned his
competitors. Suddenly they all appeared competent, but uninspired.
Once Graves had put himself in the finals, he moved to the middle—not
unlike the political candidate who stakes a slightly extreme position in the
primaries and then moves to the middle in the general election. Graves allayed
some councilmembers’ fears that he would go too far. That pink wouldn’t really
be that pink, they learned. Those wild ribbons cascading down the side of the
building—well, maybe they wouldn’t appear after all.
Graves won, and created a historic piece of architecture.
But before that, he created a very shrewd piece of positioning.