Changing your positioning is a big deal. So much of your Go to Market plan relies on a positioning strategy that is well thought out and embraced by your company.
Whenever I need to manage a change to positioning, I start with understanding whether the real need is to change the positioning or whether the need is to tune the messaging strategy. A lot of folks confuse the two. Remember: your positioning defines how you want your target audience to think about your offering. Since shifting perception takes a long time, your positioning should be stable and long-term. Your messaging strategy, on the other hand, is the full narrative and set of statements that reinforce your positioning. It is the story that cements your positioning. Since messaging can shift over time to respond to competitive dynamics or new customer insights, it is quite often that you need to tune your story, but you don’t need to change your position.
But, if I do need to reposition, here's how I start:
First, I work with my team and stakeholders with a basic positioning statement template: For [your target market] who [target market need], [your brand name] provides [main benefit that differentiates your offering from competition] because [reason why target audience should believe your differentiation claim.]. Repeat after me: I will not rush this process. Your go-to-market strategy is only as strong as the positioning foundation on which it stands. Shoutout to Thomas Dong for providing this.
With new positioning statement in hand, I then approach rolling it out as I would a normal Tier 1 product launch (see blueprint above). This means creating a wide array of content and documents so that all of your internal and external stakeholders are aligned.
Finally, I tend to think big and creatively when there is a new positioning to be supported. For example, when my team repositioned PayPal years ago, we used the moment as an opportunity to create new messaging, a new website, enable the global sales team, and develop a new brand logo -- which meant sunsetting the giant physical logos on our office buildings (we sold one on eBay for charity!).