Positioning: The Why, the Who, and the How w/ Sharon Scott

Positioning is a fundamental part of marketing strategy. But it’s not always explicitly defined, particularly in small, fast-growing companies. In many cases, it’s based purely on the original intent of the founder, and reflects early-adopters. But as a business scales, it’s worth taking time to think through the Why/Who/How of your product or service, so you can develop the messaging and the Go-To-Market strategy that’s going to have an impact.

Sharon Scott knows how to craft a positioning statement. As a marketing strategist and founder of OtterScope, Sharon works with companies to define their place in the market. And in this episode of The Marketing Mix, she shares the frameworks and strategies she uses to get to the “why” of brands and products.

We also discuss how marketing acts as the bridge between internal stakeholders, and the alignment of Product and Marketing teams. And Sharon shares some thoughts on how AI might be used to assist in customer research and the positioning process.

Key Takeaways:

• Positioning considers the "why" of a product combined with the "who" of the target audience, along "how" the brand adds value
• Even for tech products, a user’s emotional response is an important part of the positioning
• Don’t underestimate the value of unplanned, casual conversations across teams to break out of the silos
• AI tools might not be ready to play a major role in positioning, but they can help with early customer research tasks

Connect with Sharon:

 Find Sharon on LinkedIn

And check out OtterScope

A couple of good reads:
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - by Al Ries and Jack Trout. One of the classic books on the subject
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. I mention this during the conversation with Sharon

Transcript

Positioning is one aspect of marketing strategy that often gets ignored in small businesses. A founder will just “know” what their product does and who’s buying it. And that’s good enough for a while. But as you aim to scale the business, and cross over the chasm to a larger audience, understanding the “true” positioning of the brand or the product becomes more important. And is worth a fresh look.

On this episode, Sharon Scott shares her experience in helping companies understand their “why.” We dig into the key aspects of positioning, and talk about how emotions should be part of the positioning framework. And we also look at the potential to use AI to help with customer research.

[Intro Music]

Steve Cummins:    

Today I'm talking with Sharon Scott, who is a marketing strategy consultant and founder of OtterScope. And Sharon has a particular focus on companies involved in outdoor pursuits, or as she puts it for people who love to get outside or get outside their comfort zone, which I think is a great line.

 Sharon, welcome to the Marketing Mix.

Sharon Scott:   

Thanks Steve, so happy to be here today.

Steve:

Great. So we are going to be talking primarily about marketing strategy and positioning. Now, there are a lot of pieces to marketing, and strategy is just one of those pieces. And actually, I think it's one that is often overlooked amongst all of the enthusiasm about tactics and hacks that people want to talk about. So let's just start off. Maybe you can tell me how you define marketing strategy and why that is something you particularly choose to focus on.

Sharon Scott:    

Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, if you get three people in a room, you'll get four different definitions of strategy. And you know, you can go all over the map and you can go from Peter Drucker's very, very dry, long involved... It's, you know, the choices you make over different environmental conditions to grow the business. But then later on he said culture eats strategy for breakfast, so.

You know, some people just say it's the path you're going to take to win. The way I like to position it sort of is as it's, it's the why of your product with the who of your audience. And then a little bit of the, how you're going to provide value, create value through that.

That's where it gets a little bit messy and tricky for some folks because you do have to talk about some tactics to deal with strategy. It's it's a mosaic. It's all these tiny little pieces that sometimes make sense in and of themselves, but they make a ton of sense when you bring it all together. So that's what I like to say. Another metaphor that I like to use for it is strategy is the map and the map. For those of us who still know how to read maps.

It is a really great tool because it, you know, if I got it set up right, I can look at it and say, okay, there's a giant cliff over here. I probably don't want to go there unless I'm hang gliding. There's a giant body of water over here. Maybe we should bring a canoe. Or this is an, you know, this is an interstate highway. I'm going to drive a car. And so the map gives you the landscape and the lay of the land and where you are. And then the tactics and the plans and the goals all get into the routing of the GPS that's taking you there.

Steve Cummins:    

For sure and I am still one of those people that before I go on a journey, I use Google Maps all the time, but I will look at that Google Maps route Before I fire embarking it. So at least I have a rough idea of where I'm going So, you know, I don't have any physical maps anymore But I believe I could still read one somebody put one in front of me.

So, all right, so we're talking about strategy. So when I work with small businesses, I like to use this framework that I call the paid framework, which is positioning, awareness, demand generation, and enablement. And I go on the theory that, particularly for small businesses, they don't have a lot of time to go into all the theory of marketing.

These are four areas that can really have an impact on their business. And in my experience, I find that positioning is the one thing that particularly a lot of founders really don't want to get involved in or want to ignore because they don't want to narrow down their focus. They want to be all things to all people. As marketers, you and I know that's probably a recipe for disaster. How do you approach that positioning part of the strategy when you work with a client?

Sharon Scott:    

I think positioning is really important. And I think the reason a lot of founder-led or startup businesses or businesses under $10 million in revenue don't think about it so much is because they feel like they intuitively or innately know what they're doing and why they're doing it. And particularly because founders and startup leaders are often enthusiasts.

and they're trying to solve their problem and then finding a market for it, that can be really tricky to not project their needs onto what is a product market fit measurement of is there a market for this or is this a business or a hobby? And so when I think about positioning, I like to think about it in some of the classical ways and then one of the classical pieces of positioning frameworks that I kind of ditch in favor of a different one. So I do like to look at the classical pieces of positioning as your audience, your vertical or your category. So it's kind of the who and the what. Kind of going back to those grade school questions. Then the why. What's your point of differentiation? That's a pretty classic setup in there.

I think a subset of that is the reason to believe or the social proof, however you want to state on that. And then most frameworks will talk about the last piece of positioning being the brand promise. And I actually prefer to swap that out for how do we want our customers to feel after we've dealt with them.

Sharon Scott:    

product is the brain and the brand is the heart, you have to have both. There's so many great products out there. And to differentiate and stand out among the crowd, you really have to have both. You have to make people care and feel something. And I think that's a piece that's missing in the classical frameworks for positioning that ends with the brand promise. In other words, it's...

It has to be both about you, the customer, and us, the brand or the business.

Steve Cummins:    

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. So a lot of my background is in the tech world, right? So emotions aren't necessarily the first thing that come to mind when you're looking at tech products. But the reality is, whether you are buying outdoor equipment or you're buying a piece of software that's gonna make your life easier or you are making a business decision that could impact your career, there is emotion involved in those things, right?

Maybe the emotions are more fun when it's outdoor equipment versus a piece of software, but it's still emotion, right? It could be in a business sense, it could be fear, right? You do not want to screw up. You don't want to be the person that invested too much money in the wrong product or the wrong service. It could be excitement because you really want to be using the latest piece of software. So I like this idea of saying, well, instead of the brand promise, let's tap into the emotions.

What are some, some tools or approaches that you use to understand which emotions you're tapping into and how to really get that message across?

Sharon Scott:    

It starts with the internal team and the internal audiences, because these are the people or person if it's, you know, a solopreneur at this point in time that really is in it day to day that knows the product or the service or the value proposition like nobody else. And I always like to follow the rule of 50%. If you're a thousand percent enthusiastic about something,

when you share your enthusiasm with someone else, they're only gonna be half as excited. So as a founder, I'm a thousand percent excited about this. You know, as a potential client, I'm talking to you and you say, yeah, I'm about half as excited about that. And by the time they then present it to somebody else in their org that maybe has to sign up off on it, they're again half as much percent about it. So I think, you know, keying into that,

excitement and enthusiasm is really important. So it really starts with just surveying people, talking to them, having conversations, going through the five whys with people. Why's that? Why's that? Why's that? And then particularly if it's in a vertical that I'm not intimately familiar with, then I'll say, and why do I care?

So you start with the internal audiences. And then providing you have budget and time, you go on to try to get some customer or client interviews to understand, hey, when you've chosen these people in the past, why was that versus brand X or brand Y? If you don't have time or budget or if you're pre-revenue at that point, then you have to go through it in different ways. And that's anything from going to different social channels.

Reddit is a gold mine for people who care passionately about super nichey things. And then of course, LLMs, you know, chat GPT is just remarkable these days. It's not the be all end all of consumer insights, but you can get a pretty good bead of what people thought about your brand at the last update, which was, you know, two years ago or something like that. And then you go from there.

Steve Cummins:    

I want to come back and talk about chat GPT in a minute because I think basically any conversation you have about marketing these days, we can find a reason to talk about chat GPT. But before that, you brought up this interesting point about particularly a founder being so passionate about their product, right? Which is great right up until it's not because sometimes they're wrong.

And that can be really tough trying to explain to them they're wrong. And when I say wrong, you know, there's this, um, you said you, you like going back to classic marketing. So there's, there's something particularly in the tech world called Crossing the Chasm, which was a book written probably 30 years ago now by Geoffrey Moore, but it talks about how. Companies do very, do very well early on by selling to these early adopters who, who get, get the excitement that the founder, inventor, whatever gets, right? They're using it for that purpose. And then the problem is you're going to get, you're going to be successful and grow the company if you tap into a different set of customers. And those customers are using it in a different way and they have a different set of expectations. And I think that's where you get that friction between the founder saying, no, I know what people want this for. I know what my positioning statement is. And it's, well, yeah, that was the positioning statement three years ago. But if you really want to grow, it's time to revisit it and change it, to tap into that larger, later adopter market.

So positioning obviously isn’t just about the marketing team. There are a lot of stakeholders. And one of the roles of marketing is being that bridge between the sales team, the product team, the customers, customer support if you have a dedicated customer support team, right? A lot of those groups often work in silos and marketing is the one that moves between them and gets them talking together.

You told me in an earlier conversation, so you came up through the product organization, which I think is a great path to marketing. I did something similar myself. I think it helps to understand the product world. Can you talk a little bit more about how you make sure that product and marketing are aligned and some of the processes that you use to make sure that you don't have product running off one direction and marketing trying to do something else?

Sharon Scott:    

Yeah, in an ideal world, the teams are highly matrixed and co-located, honestly. And I know that's a hot button item with remote work and things like that. So I think maybe in modern times, maybe the best way to say is that they're not asynchronous, that you can talk to each other and that you

you build this trust relationship across functions and I do like that crossing the chasm metaphor of, reaching out and saying, hey, product folks, what bugs you the most about marketing? Well, I hate feature creep or scope creep. Like, okay, help me understand what does that mean to you because that means different things to different people. And vice versa. So I think having at least annual and ideally quarterly conversations and in real time, real life meetings with people is really helpful because you get to know each other and understand each other and that's when the lightbulbs go like, oh my gosh, I had no idea testing meant all of this, you know, from a marketer's perspective versus an engineer's perspective. And so getting people to see each other as people really makes a huge difference in that.

And then bringing each other on very early in the process, depending on how your organization is structured. Where does the idea come from? Where does the project work come from? How do we go about assigning work in there and making sure that we're looping each other in on a regular basis? And at the startup level where it might be the founder and six contractors. It's really hard. You can't do that. But you have to build a culture of conversation and accountability. And in my perspective, humanity is like, right, you're a person first. You're not an engineer first. You're not a marketer first. You're a person first. And let's talk like people first and then put the business veneers over it. I know that sounds oversimplified, but it really makes a huge difference.

Steve:

Yeah, it's communication, right? I mean, everything you said there really boils down to that. And, you know, the funny thing is I, so I take your point about co-locating people, but I've also worked in organizations where the product group is sitting over them in one side of the building or, you know, one side of the floor, marketing's on that and they never talk to each other. Anyway, yeah, I didn't say it was healthy, but I've seen it happen.

And yet I've also seen organizations where they're remote, but they use Slack really well to talk to each other, share ideas, and I also think if you're, if you're in a company, I see this with a lot of startups where they are remote, but they make a point every three months or six months to get everybody together in a room. The cooperation is actually better there because it's almost as though people feel, well, I've only got a week. I've got to make a point to, you know, get to know the sales team and the design team and what have you. 

I think if you're intentional about it, it can work, but you're absolutely right. It's got to be that constant communication. Shouldn't be any surprises. Product needs to understand what marketing does. They're not just the people that create the flyers and the ads, right? Marketing needs to understand everything that goes into developing a product. And I think if you have that, then it starts to pull everything together. 

Sharon Scott:    20:39.47)

There's one thing I want to piggyback on for just a minute there that you mentioned is when those rare off-sites or team lunches or whatever happen, I think this is a very interesting point compiled with your product of mentorship for junior marketers and stuff like that. Just to remind the team is your job at this event is to sit with people you don't know. Our nature at these things is to sit with our group and the people we know and our comfortable people. And the magic happens is when we talk to somebody who's in a different function that maybe I've never talked to before and I learn about them or in a house of brands business with somebody in a different business unit completely. It's like, oh my gosh, that's how you do it. We do it completely differently.

That's where the magic happens there is when you break out of, when I break out of my comfort zone and sit next to somebody, I don't know. Whether they're junior or senior to me, doesn't matter. You're just going as human to human. That's where I find tremendous value in those sorts of team building events.

Steve Cummins:    

Yeah, you're so right about that. I worked for a Danish company for a while and they were very big on what they would call coffee walks, which is exactly what it sounds like. You would leave the office, you would walk five minutes down the street, get a coffee and chat, but they actually forced it, and it sounds like a bad way, but they would do these random pairings. So every month you would just be paired with somebody from another group who you may or may not have met before. And you would set a time to go and do this coffee walk to do exactly what you're saying. And they even tried to do it with remote people. It's a lot tougher to get that rapport through a video screen. But yeah, I think it's an eye opener to everybody when you start seeing what other people are dealing with. Even some things that were like a marketer are saying, oh, I just need an image of this because we're pushing something out on Twitter, right? And we think it's just, you know, like going snap a photo and then you realize everything that's involved with it. So yeah, I think what you say there is right. You got to go talk to random people and work out what their issues are. 

Now you did mention large language models and chat GPT a little bit earlier. Yeah. I find one of the challenges with it is there's so many things you can use it for. And it takes a bit of trial and error to make it work.

I know you've worked with them a little bit. Any particular use cases you'd like to share that you think have been a really valuable way of tapping into generative AI?

Sharon Scott:    23:36.77)

Yeah, there are, like you said, a lot. And the applications just keep growing and growing and growing, you know, the recent announcement of text to video, 60 second videos, it's just mind boggling in a lot of ways. And the leaps that are happening between versionings are just remarkable. 

I like to use ChatGPT to try to ferret out the shortcomings or the downsides. If I have a brilliant idea for a campaign and I do really great work setting things up of what's the persona that I want ChatGPT to take on. And then I say who my audience is, and I say where I want to publish this and what the timing is and all those pieces. And I set it out there and I say, now I want to do a campaign that focuses on XYZ or ABC. 

Steve:

 I like that idea of using it to help you get unstuck or do a sanity check on a campaign. Going back to positioning , I’m curious if you can see ChatGPT or generative AI being helpful in the research phase, which can often be time prohibitive and expensive particularly if you’re in an early growth stage. Any thoughts on that?

Sharon Scott:    

I think part of it is through prompt practice.

Please provide me on a basis of active users of relational databases. What are the five top pain points? Okay, great, thank you. And then you kind of have to remind it. Now, you're still thinking about this amalgamation of these types of users in North America.

I just threw in another wrinkle there, I said North America. Now how would a solution that does x, y, z help with any of that? And then it'll say yes or no or however the case may be. So I think those are the pieces. You can ask it to scrape websites, which is really helpful

I feel compelled to tell a story. A friend of mine was talking to a thought leader in a very different industry who's working on a new book and she asked this thought leader, how things were going blah, blah. And the thought leader said, it's amazing because I went and I asked chat GPT, what would I, the thought leader, say about this sort of thing?

And ChatGPT came back and the thought leader said, that's actually pretty good, I'm going to use that. So that's that level of machine learning, of machine to person to person to machine and all that stuff in there. So I think the wonderful thing about it is, you can use ChatGPT for free and experiment, see what works.

And know that it's not perfect. Know that it is not a substitute for speaking to 20 actual humans this week. Know that it's a good general piece, but as you're able to scale and invest in this, you're much better off going to panels and finding enthusiastic users or having consumer circles and pieces like that. They're much more powerful and much more helpful. And if you're pre-revenue or if profitability is tight, then this is a wonderful substitute in the interim.

Steve Cummins:    

Yeah, I think that's right. I think the path you're leading us down is in those prompts, you've got to come up with a solid persona. You've got to sort of give it some ideas on where to get the data, some resource to go look at. And then it's just that constant whittling down until you get what you want. And I think your last point is very valid. It should be a part of the process, right? This is not, hey, we're going to develop our product entirely on what came out of this, but maybe it leads you in a certain direction and saves you some time on the more expensive parts of it. But sure, I don't think there's ever going to be a replacement for getting out and talking to people and really asking.

Sharon Scott:    

No. And I think it's funny, though it's not an AI conversation when I was prepping for our conversation and I thought about positioning, I was like, what should I do an example positioning statement for? I'm like, I'll do it for chat GPT. So you want to hear my theoretical positioning statement? I have to read it because it's long.

Steve Cummins:    

There you go. Yes. I do.

Sharon Scott:    

So going back to the positioning, “For digitally enabled people, that's your who, who want expert level information on a variety of subjects that helps them generate content, ChatGPT, so that's all the who and what vertical you're in and then we're going to get into the point of differentiation next. So ChatGPT is the only publicly available LLM that seamlessly synthesizes data into human friendly outputs, okay? So that's the segment of the why or the point of differentiation. And then the reasons to believe is we do this by leveraging machine learning, human ingenuity and scale to help people feel confident in our outputs and to help people feel confident in our outputs is the emotional benefit. I don't think that's what their positioning actually is, but I was like, okay, so now that they're doing video and graphics pieces in there, I was like, okay, that's a pretty solid positioning statement in my mind. It's not for people who aren't digital. If you don't have a smartphone or internet connection, it's not for you.

Steve Cummins:    

It's funny because particularly the second half of your statement, I was sitting there thinking they need a positioning statement like this because I don't think they're signing up to certain parts of that. It would be interesting to know. That just comes across as a purely tech-driven company and how much thought has been put into that positioning. I guess because it was such a huge success as soon as they sort of launched their beta test. They probably haven't even done the basics of a lot of that and are just trying to keep up, but it's an interesting business model for sure.

Sharon Scott:    

Yeah, it is, you know, it's definitely a lot more of the seems to be a lot more of the if we build it, they will come, which is extraordinarily rare in modern times. Yeah, that's what makes unicorns. Most businesses are not unicorns. So most of the rest of us have to do positioning and foundational work and value propositions.

Steve Cummins:    

Yeah, fortunately, because that's the stuff you and I find interesting. So I'm glad most companies do need that. 

So I think as you've just demonstrated, particularly in the last few minutes, things are always changing. There's always something new to keep up with. How do you keep up with the trends, whether it's the tech trends or something like chat GPT, marketing strategies, any favorite websites, books that you tend to go to?

Sharon Scott:    

I read a lot of articles on LinkedIn. I know people are a little more concerned about the quality of their LinkedIn feed these days. And yet I still find a lot of value in it for me. And so I like to look to their McKinsey.

Steve :   

Yep, I've had issues with that.

Sharon Scott:    

incredibly expensive to hire them, but man, do they give away a tremendous amount of super valuable content. And they have, you could get five newsletters a day from McKinsey at least if you really wanted to. So my recommendation there is to self edit and decide I want to focus on this one. I got a lot of newsletters in my inbox that daily that I don't read and some that I find moments or I get a generative AI update daily that I read probably once a week and hopefully I catch most of what's really important in there. I'm a big fan of Product Hunt. That's a little more in the tech world and the software enabled world. They cover a lot of different bases and they do it in a very friendly and approachable manner for a non-engineer. And I like that a lot. And then for meta pieces, not the Facebook meta, but macro meta pieces, I gifted myself with a subscription to the Atlantic last year. And they have a lot of newsletters as well and getting things to what to know today. And they put it in an approachable manner with a point of view that I appreciate from the news standpoint. And they go a little deeper. They don't just skip on the surface of these phenomena. They go a little deeper on things, and I really value that.

Steve Cummins:    

Yeah, I think it's a nice balance because newsletters, I'm the same as you, I get a ton and I read some of them. But a lot of it tends to be surface level. So it is nice to have a couple of resources that you can dig in deeper as well. 

So you've been very generous with your time talking to me on the podcast. I guess the one question I should ask you about positioning is, how do you position yourself and Otterscope? And you know, who do you work with?

Sharon Scott:    

Yeah, I was afraid you were going to ask that. Because the interesting thing about positioning is that it is dynamic. It needs to have that red thread we like to talk about in marketing a lot, and it evolves a lot. So if I were doing a positioning today, I would say that for passion-fueled brands that get people outside are outside their comfort zone, Otterscope is the place to develop strategy and tactics. To win in your chosen markets and endeavors. We do this by taking 20 years of experience in the outdoor active lifestyle industry as a merchant, product leader, and marketer to create goods, experiences and brands that help people get outside, and feel confident in the direction they're headed.

Steve Cummins:    

And that is how it's done. That's positioning done by a marketing strategist. Fantastic. And again, I put you on the spot with that. So I appreciate you doing that off the top of your head. Yep. It's great, isn't it? You took the time to write positioning statement for somebody else's product and forgot to do your own.

It's working on your business or in your business, right?

Steve Cummins:    

I know, I know. It's what they say, the cobblers kids have no shoes. So, well, again, thank you. You've been very generous with your time. Have very much enjoyed talking to you about marketing strategy. In the show notes, I will put your contact information so that people can follow up with you and look forward to talking to you soon.

Sharon Scott:    

Thanks, Steve. Yeah, real pleasure.

Take care.