There are plenty of other companies competing for attention in the world. People are busy. They have their own worries and concerns, so to get noticed you have to matter to them. You have to be relevant, important, different.
It’s not about you.
Good positioning requires thinking like your customer, understanding their view of the world, and making sure your product or service has value to them. What you think is great about your product is pointless if your customers don’t care. You have to have a market orientation.
And not caring is your biggest enemy. It’s not the competitors. It is apathy. To survive the bombardment of the modern world, customers have learned to tune out most advertising. They skip your ads, they scoff at your puffery, they actively avoid your mailing lists. Except when they don’t.
Because it’s a curious contradiction: we know marketing works. We can prove it. Despite everyone believing that advertising doesn’t work on them, we know it works on everyone.
