The 3 Elements of a Strong Positioning Statement

As discussed in "The Star Principle", the three most important words for a start-up are, "Positioning, Positioning and Positioning." Getting your Positioning right is vital - probably more important than hiring people, incorporating your business or anything else. So I got thinking about what makes a good positioning statement. They are:

1. Specific and Quantifiable:
Every successful business has a specific and quantifiable positioning statement. It may or may not be reflected in their tag line (which is different from the positioning of the product.) But it must be very, very specific. For example:
Twitter = What are you doing (in 140 words)
Google = Search from a non-cluttered search page
Nike = The choice of world-champions (note: Their "Just Do It" is just a tag-line.)
iPod = 10,000 songs in your pocket
Virgin = Fun and fighting for the common man
Jolt Cole = All the sugar and twice the caffeine

2. Unique:
The positioning statement must not be taken up by anybody else in the niche. For example, Cuil.com (my favorite punching bag) attempted to get into search by copying two of Google's differentiators - the empty search page and the indexing of billions of web-pages - and failed because Google already had that positioning. So, if you're an entrepreneur, you need to go back to segmenting the market in different ways until, based on your product attributes, you come up with a method of segmenting the market which makes your product positioning unique.

3. Offer a Clear Benefit to Target Market:
Let's say you came up with a purple colored cola drink. Would this be successful given that it is specific and unique? It's hard to say, but my gut says that this will not work because it does not offer a clear value proposition to end-consumers (unless you're targetting children who would enjoy getting a purple colored tongue ...) So your positioning statement must at first glance appear useful to your target market. It does not matter if it does not appeal to other segments outside of your niche. You're fine as long as you're able to make rabid evangelists out of your initial set of adopters. One successful star business is Jolt cola which appealed to it's target customers (students and young professionals) and carved a niche against the cola giants.

Good luck with building your Star Business!