Company positioning is one of the most important aspects of marketing. Although it is often overlooked because positioning is not as clear and attractive as hunting for followers on Facebook and Instagram. And that’s a shame, because company positioning is the best way to separate yourself from the competition, especially if your industry is packed to the brim.

We often see how many companies first create a product and then turn to marketing agencies for positioning. Product positioning should be taken into account at the stage of product development and be part of it, and not considered as post-production.

Today we will look at three ways to position your product even in an ultra-competitive market.

Target a specific group of people

For a long time, the market of graphic editors was dominated by Adobe with its Photoshop and Illustrator products, and Corel with its CorelDRAW product. Add to this others: Gimp, Paint, Affinity, Pixelmator and you get a niche flooded with cool products. All products are great and useful in their own way, but not for all users.

Photoshop is designed for editing raster graphics such as photographs, Illustrator and CoralDRAW for vector graphics such as advertising brochures, booklets and illustrations. Graphic designers were satisfied. But the web designers were not.

The fact is that these editors are great for creating graphics, but not for displaying web page layouts and application interfaces. Moreover, they required a lot of computing power from the computer, which web designers have always had.

This is how Sketch was born. The program was created specifically for web and UI designers. Unburdened with unnecessary functionality, simple and clear Sketch was created by designers for designers, which ensured not only the love of users, but also a revolution of the entire industry.

According to the creators of Sketch, they did not create a product and then try to sell it to designers. On the contrary, they positioned the product from the beginning, creating design features that would appeal to designers.

Thanks to this, after 2 years it received several million users and was awarded the Apple Design Awards in 2012.

Summary: if the niche is saturated with competitors, find a neglected group of people and focus on it.

Do one or two things very well

Every restaurant, like any other company, must keep track of its resources. The world of restaurant automation software has long been dominated by UCS with its R-Keeper product.

However, we have never met restaurateurs, especially owners of small establishments, who really liked R-Keeper.

The most common complaints were:

  • “It has a lot of functions. I only need three things”;
  • “Staff training takes a lot of time”;
  • “We need to buy expensive terminals to use R-Keeper”;
  • “It is very expensive. I would rather use notepad and Excel”.

A few years ago, the startup Poster POS appeared with the product of the same name and entered the world of small cafes and restaurants to understand what functions they needed for comfortable work. Then the developers from Poster threw away all the excesses of R-Keeper and focused on the main thing: convenience, multi-platform and ease of use.

The developers understood that the biggest problem faced by novice restaurateurs is the lack of time and money. Thus, the product should be accessible to employees, work on any device and not eat up the entire profit of the restaurant.

Thus, at the start, Poster had several main competitive features: it worked on a tablet, was easy to use, could be controlled from anywhere in the world thanks to the cloud structure and cost only 390 UAH/month.

As a result, in the first year of operation, Poster gained more than 900 customers and became one of the most talked about startups of 2013, despite the fact that it belonged to the category of restaurant software.

Summary: when it seems like everyone is complaining about the giant in your industry, find out why. If it is because there are a carload of features and it takes a long time to learn them all, make sure your product/service focuses on doing one or two features very well.

Think about the needs of people

We all use banks. Their history began in ancient times, and they reached their heyday in the Renaissance. And since then they have changed little.

I am sure everyone remembers how before, to take a loan or pay for utilities in a bank, you had to stand in a huge queue, which few people liked. Later, digitalization reached banks.

In Ukraine, the first was PrivatBank with their Privat24 service. Other banks began to appear after him. But all were like one – terrible. An incomprehensible interface designed for clerical workers, web banking was not gaining proper popularity. A large number of operations still fell on classic bank branches, and the issues were solved by the call center.

And then came Monobank. The first bank in your smartphone. No branches, no queues, no call centers loaded to the brim. The developers devoted a lot of time to researching and solving people’s headaches. They developed an intuitive application, offered favorable conditions and took care of what all other banks spat on – the comfort of people.

The application of Monobank has a well-thought-out and beautiful interface: on the main screen there is a balance and transaction history, in separate tabs: deposits, loans and other niceties. It is worth mentioning that Monobank has become one of the fastest banks in the history of independent Ukraine. Moral: focus on making life easier for your customers and do not try to milk them for every move. It will affect your success.

In order to be competitive in the XXI century it is not enough just to create a product. It is important to choose the right location. Today we have looked at 3 examples of companies that show why it is important to position a company. The main thing to remember is that these universal principles are not the only thing that will help position your company, but can be the foundation for building new strategies.

To improve positioning, you can develop a website that will focus on information about your key advantages, and WOW-design will be one of them.