The 5 Elements of Marketing – Part 4 – Messaging and Competitive Positioning

Feb 13, 2018 The 5 Elements of Marketing – Part 4 – Messaging and Competitive Positioning

Brand Messaging

What is competitive positioning?

It is creating a message that will differentiate your company from your competition.  In order to do this, you need to understand what the competitors are saying about themselves as the reason to buy from them.  As a Marketing Consultant, I do this kind of analysis all the time.  It is extremely enlightening.

I am often amazed when looking at the websites of the competitors of a client.  Sometimes, these websites don’t give a single reason to buy from them.  They simply say what they do or what they sell.  I ask myself, do they really get any business from a website like that?  Then there are other competitors that do give a pretty convincing reason to buy from them.  Depending on the industry, the size of the companies that are competitors of my client becomes important.  The larger the competitor, the more likely they are to get their message out to the potential customers of my client.  I need to craft a message to beat all of the competitors (if possible) but particularly the larger competitors.  Most of the time though, we are only going for a subset of the market and we need a message that resonates with the exact group we are trying to sell to.  Just remember that trying to sell on a low price as a small company is not likely to keep you in business very long as it is highly unlikely that you are the lowest cost provider.

Why is it important?

You need your messaging to stand out from the crowd.  You need your messaging to be persuasive.  You need messaging that will resonate with potential customers.

What is messaging?

It is the thing you say that gets the prospective customer to call you and buy from you.

As a Marketing Consultant, I can tell you that competitive positioning and having the right message is essential to success.  Of course, it needs to support your Marketing Strategy.

Bryan B Mason

Apollo Consulting Group, Providence, RI