Insights / Perspective / Market positioning and growth strategy
PerspectivePositioning is a choice to exclude
Strong positioning means being clear about who you serve best and accepting that others are not your focus. Why exclusion feels risky, and why it usually pays.
Ask most businesses who their customers are and the answer is some version of “anyone who needs what we do”. It feels safe. Nobody wants to turn away revenue, and narrowing the focus seems to shrink the market.
Yet the businesses that grow most reliably tend to be the ones that are clearest about who they serve best. Strong positioning means being clear about who you serve best, and accepting that others are not your focus. It is a choice to exclude, and that is precisely why it works.
Why trying to serve everyone fails
When a business tries to appeal to every customer, its offer drifts towards the average. The product has every feature some customer once asked for. The service promise is general. The marketing says that the company is reliable, experienced and customer-focused, which is what every competitor says too.
Customers notice. Faced with several suppliers making the same broad claims, they fall back on the one difference they can easily compare: price. A business without a clear position ends up competing on cost, whether it intended to or not.
Internally, the cost is just as real. Without a clear customer, every request looks equally important. Sales teams chase any lead. Product teams build for whoever shouts loudest. Operations try to handle every variation. The organisation spreads itself thin and excels at nothing in particular.
Choose a customer
Define the customer by need and situation, not just by size or industry.
Size and industry are convenient labels, but they rarely explain why a customer buys. Two mid-sized manufacturers may have entirely different needs: one is expanding rapidly and needs a supplier who can scale with it; the other operates in a regulated niche and values documentation and traceability above all. Grouping them together as “mid-sized manufacturers” hides the difference that matters.
A sharper definition describes the situation that creates the need. For a typical commercial cleaning company, “facilities managers responsible for multiple sites who need consistent standards and a single point of contact” is far more useful than “medium and large businesses”. It tells the sales team whom to call, tells operations what to get right, and tells marketing what to say.
- What situation is the customer in when they need you most?
- What problem are they trying to solve, in their own words?
- What have they tried before, and why was it not good enough?
- Which of your current customers are the most profitable and loyal, and what do they have in common?
Choose a promise
State the one benefit you deliver better than alternatives. Support it with proof.
One benefit, not five. A list of strengths is easy to write and hard to remember. A single promise, such as fastest response, lowest total cost for a defined use, deepest specialist knowledge or easiest to work with, gives customers a reason to choose you and gives staff a standard to meet.
The promise must be backed by proof, or customers will treat it as one more marketing claim. Proof can take many forms: a published service standard, a guarantee, case examples from similar customers, accreditation, or simply the ability to demonstrate the benefit during a trial. The more specific the proof, the more believable the promise.
A test for the promise
Could a direct competitor make the same promise with equal credibility? If so, it is not yet a position. Look for the benefit that your operations, people or history let you deliver and that others would find hard to copy.
Live it consistently
Pricing, service and communication must all reinforce the position or customers will not believe it.
Positioning is not a tagline. It is a set of choices that run through the business. A company that promises premium specialist service but prices like a discounter confuses its customers. One that promises speed but makes customers wait a week for a quotation undermines itself at the first contact.
Each part of the business should be able to answer how it supports the position. Pricing should reflect the value of the promise. Service standards should make it real. Hiring and training should build the skills it needs. Even the choice of which customers to decline should follow from it.
The hardest month was the one where we turned down two large contracts that did not fit. Within a year, our win rate with the customers we did target had nearly doubled.
Chief executive, professional services client
Accepting the trade-off
Exclusion does not mean refusing every customer outside the target. It means not designing the business around them. Some will still buy, and that is fine. What changes is where the organisation invests its effort, its product decisions and its marketing.
Positions can also change over time. A choice made today is not permanent; it is a commitment for the next few years, reviewed as markets shift. What matters is that, at any point, the organisation knows whom it is building for and can explain why.
The fear that a narrower focus shrinks the market is usually misplaced. A clear position tends to raise win rates, improve margins and generate referrals from customers who feel understood. Many businesses find that they grow faster by serving fewer customer types well than by serving all of them adequately.
A practical first step is to list your current customers and mark the ten you would most like to clone. Look at what they have in common, beyond size and industry. Write a one-sentence description of that customer and a one-sentence promise you deliver to them better than anyone else. Then check whether your pricing, service and messages support both sentences, and fix the one that does not.
Source: Intelliversal analysis.
