If there is one question that should be asked about any business decision, it is: "Is this direction best for us?" – a simple question that rarely has a simple answer.
Understanding what positions are good ideas, how to conjure good positions from the ether, and the alchemy behind improving an average position so it can become good, are part of the magic in working with Reimaginers, which is all about effectively positioning your business to resonate with your target market(s).
First things first, I analyse every strategy, every business system and every brand position, according to the ethos of my methodology. The tip of that iceberg could be summarised in these four questions:
- Is my idea interesting?
- Is there competitive advantage in this idea?
- Is the idea relevant to its audience?
- Is it engaging the audience into action?
Imagine the fit between customer, market and business in a Venn diagram. People tend to focus on just one of the circles, maybe two, whereas the best ideas usually answer needs and take advantage of opportunities from all three areas and consider how they fit together as a system – the system that will be the next version of your business.
If you just focus on the customer, all the ideas converge to the same point, with a lot of brands in the same space, and the result is no brand memorability and competing on price. The opposite of a unique position! As ultimately what is in the customers' interest is to have their problem solved for free, and that isn’t good for business. Further to this, customers don’t know what they want, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say. Asking customers what they want can often lead to an idea that won’t be successful in practice. It is always better to observe what they do than to ask them what they would do. While outside of the scope of this article, there is an entire Reimaginers framework just dedicated to asking the right questions in surveys and interviews because businesses struggle needlessly because they based critical decisions on answers to the wrong questions.
A focus only on the market circle and the needs and the shifts of the marketplace leads to positions that are what I call here today, gone tomorrow. Ready for ANOTHER rebrand? Of course you’re looking for trends that are sustainable, however businesses here tend to translate other business ideas verbatim and are always a step behind the market, not evolving for the unique needs of their audience and having no strategy that is truly their own to keep fresh over time. It's a classic outcome of large language models like ChatGPT, dishing up ideas that seem good but are too generic to create a stable foundation for growth. Strategy based on the opinions of many (literally how an AI agent is trained) cannot give you a differentiated position to call your own. Even worse, if you've treated your position as set and forget, that's exactly what will happen to your business in the minds of potential customers. A lot of businesses in this category do really well at the start, and then fail soon after because they don’t understand their customer or business needs. In as little as one week, you can have a direction that brings you new opportunities now... and a way to nurture it so it's still bearing fruit five years from now.
Positions that focus only on the third circle, that of the idea and business itself always lack product-market fit. These are often the hardest to get off the ground. Too often, owners put in so much work and the product just doesn’t sell like they imagined it would when they open. Not all unique positions are good ideas. Ideas can lean toward gimmick. They can be ideas only you think are amazing. They can also be business ideas that have a market need but the customer isn’t willing to spend money to have that particular need met! The result is you've created a hobby that costs you, instead of a business that pays you. By integrating positioning insights from the other areas, a successful business could be one small pivot away.
Effective business positions happen at the coalescence of these three areas. Ask yourself: where can you make use of the opportunities of the marketplace and avoid its limitations, whilst exciting the customer but in a way that only your business can solve to build a really sustainable competitive advantage over time? That is where good ideas come from.