Establishing a strong competitive position is critically important to your branding, communications and marketing efforts. Positioning defines how you are different from competitors and how you create value for your market. Those messages will be incorporated into all of your initiatives.

There are four basic criteria for effective positioning: unique, believable, sustainable and relevant to the market.

When a company is unable to smartly define and communicate their competitive position and value proposition, they end up having to spend more time and money trying to persuade prospects to choose them. Too often this ultimately leads to competing on price, a tough position to sustain over the long term.

Several questions should be considered when developing competitive positioning: How is your offering unique? What sets your product, service and company apart from your competitors? What value do you provide and how is it different from competitors? Is your positioning sustainable into the future? Is it believable? Will prospects believe that you can deliver on your product and service promises? Is your positioning relevant to your target market? Conducting adequate competitive research is an important element of this process, and will yield valuable information to help inform your positioning.

You not only want to be different from competitors; you want to be importantly different – different in ways that are important to your target market.

You want to be able to differentiate your cow from all the other cattle on the range. Even if all the cattle on the range look pretty much alike.

Establishing competitive positioning isn’t only for start-ups and companies preparing to launch a new product or service. It’s also for existing companies facing a changing market, and for companies who have new competitors and new products entering their market. Whether you need help developing a new competitive position or want to evaluate the positioning of a current product or service, COS can help.

Contact COS, LLC.