Which Car Are You?

The news of an impending recovery has not done much to take the heat off of marketers. With the pressure to do more with ever fewer resource, marketers and even CEOs are feeling the heat. There’s another email campaign to be run, yet more leads to be generated and qualified and of course, landing that big deal that everyone’s been working on these last two quarters.

With the tyranny of what needs to be done each day as we go about our business, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.  Even as the economy promises to pick up, one of the biggest challenges we see many customers facing is a plateauing of their business. In working with the number of clients, we’ve found it useful to step back and ask them “Which car are you?”

The first time we do this, we get a range of reactions – from the merely puzzled to the outright incredulous. What does selling hospital supplies, workforce management software or alternative medicinal supplements have to do with cars? Once we run them through an actual exercise of comparing three or four of the most common car brands and how our clients see each of them positioned against the other, the puzzlement dissolves.

Typically we put (depending on the nationality of the audience), four names out of list such as BMW, Lexus, Ford, Mercedes, Volvo, Toyota (which we’d usually qualify as Corolla). I never cease to be amazed at the rapidity with which, a group of squabbling marketers and execs can align on a single word against each of these brands as their primary positioning. We usually end up with a table like this

BMW	Performance
Mercedes	Luxury
Toyota	Value/Economy
Volvo	Safety

This is when we repeat the question to our customers, “Which car are you?” I am yet to be bored by a single one of these sessions. The same folks who converged rapidly on the cars’ positioning, can rarely agree on what a single word positioning is for their business. This is usually acute for companies that are relatively early in their lifecycles – but we’ve found it to be true even for companies that have been in business for decades. Asking them to position their competitors usually helps nudge the discussion forward. In this exercise once a word is taken up by another company, it is not available for our clients to use, much as they like it, want it or thought they owned it.

The exercise usually achieves three things

• moves the discussion away from the product and features to customer benefits
• acts as  dose of reality in acknowledging competitors’ positioning and dispels myths about their own position in the market place, and
• focuses the team, across C-execs, marketing and sales on the need for (and often absence of) a simple & singular positioning of the product and/or company

All in all not bad for an hour or two of work. So I’d urge you to stop and ask yourself at least twice a year, “Which car am I?”

Tags: positioning