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

Choose a position that will reposition your competitors; then move a step
back towa rd the middle to cinch the sale.
Positioning a Small Service
You are what you are.
You cannot try to be something that does not fit the way your prospects
position you.
This is often painfully true in the most common service in this country: the
small service company.
Prospects for these services—companies with from one to twenty employees
generally—take the one thing they know about the service—its small size—and
draw inferences.
Unfortunately, most of these inferences are negative: Why aren’t you bigger?
Why have I never heard of you before? Why aren’t you working in a company I
have heard of?
Some service companies do not recognize this problem, and they tilt at
windmills. They try to hide their size or ignore the prospect’s concern about it.
These companies describe their service as second to none, when the prospect’s
clear perception is that the company is no better than fifth to many.

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The small service must start with smallness—just as Oregon started with rain
and Avis started with Number Two—and turn it into a positive.
The small service must start with small. It must dance with the one that brung
it.
In positioning, don’t try to hide your small size. Make it work by stressing
its advantages, such as responsiveness and individual attention.
Focus: What Sears May Have Learned
If you are old enough to remember when bankers were the big shots in every
town and when Univac was the world’s most famous computer, you also
remember when Sears was America’s Department Store.
Years later, bankers have been the victims of inertia, Univac is a memory,
and Sears is a near-casualty of the focus wars in department stores.
Amazingly, even while Americans seem more interested in austerity, Neiman
Marcus appears to be thriving, thanks to a position that can best be described, as
a Neiman’s shopper might, as the purveyor of “Stuff to die for !” Wal-Mart is
the terror of every small-town retailer, thanks to an equally clear focus on “Good
stuff so damn cheap you won’t believe it.” And Bloomingdale’s, while not the
super-nova it was in the eighties, still attracts a good business by focusing on
“Shopping as entertainment.”
Sears, in the first half of the 1990s, on the other hand, became the victim of
focusing on nothing—or more accurately, on everything. Sears had always
touted its high quality (but horribly low margin), durable goods such as lawn
mowers. Now Sears started stressing its “softer side,” its clothing and linens—a
difficult marketing combination.
Sears started with very low prices. Then, hoping to improve margins and
attract what executives thought was a growing and lasting supply of cost-be-
damned Yuppies, they tried to move prices up. Sears tried a little of this and a
little of that—and in the middle of the decade, no American within two blocks of
the Sears Tower could describe Sears’s position. And if no prospect can describe
your position, you do not have one.
Sears quickly discovered that if you do not have a focus, you soon might not
have a business. Sales and profits plummeted. The store put its famous tower on
the market and moved to more affordable quarters. All that made Sears tolerable
to its shareholders were the corporation’s Repair Centers, All-State Insurance,
the Discover Card, and the underlying value of the company’s real holdings.

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In late 1995, however, the stores showed signs of rallying. By December
1995 same-store sales increased almost six percent despite a sluggish retail
economy. Sears’s major weapon in the rebound was an intense focus on the
store’s “softer side.” Executives decided to let the impressive word of mouth for
Sears’s durable goods drive that portion of its business. They moved furniture
out into separate free-standing furniture stores. Then, with aggressive “softer
side” advertising, the addition of more national clothing brands, wider aisles,
softer lighting, and fancier displays, they drove up women’s clothing sales 10
percent—an important improvement for a chain in which women make more
than 70 percent of the purchases.
At this writing, it appears that Sears’s focus on the softer and higher margin
portion of its business might revive the stores. (Though one could also argue that
Sears owns a unique “one-stop shopping” niche that has great appeal in this age
of time-strapped consumers.)
In any case, if Sears had not found this focus, this section would not be
subtitled “What Sears May Have Learned.” It would be titled “Remember
Sears?”