Your positioning only changes once your choices change
A new positioning statement is quickly written down. But which assignment will you no longer accept afterwards? Which target audience gets priority? Where do employees invest their time? And what does a customer notice of the new direction?
Without such choices, positioning can end up as mainly a form of words. Your website tells a new story, while the organisation keeps following the old offer and the old customers.
When exploring positioning, it is therefore useful to look at both the market and the organisation.
Start with the customer's situation
Describe not only who your customer is, but also when your offer becomes relevant. A job title or company size still says little about the moment someone seeks help.
What does the customer want to achieve or avoid? How do they solve it now? What uncertainty plays a part in a choice? And what makes delaying more attractive than buying?
That produces a concrete research question. "We want to know whether SME companies find our service interesting" is broad. "What problems arise for organisations managing their own marketing team for the first time?" gives a conversation more direction.
Keep three kinds of information separate
What customers say. This can help you understand needs, trade-offs and language. A positive reaction to an idea is not yet a commitment to buy.
What customers do. Think of the choices they make, how they use a product, and how enquiries progress. Behaviour provides information but does not automatically explain the underlying reason.
What the organisation assumes. This includes beliefs about the ideal customer, the value of the offer, and what the market presumably wants. These assumptions can be sound, but deserve a clearly recognisable place as assumptions.
Put this information side by side. A difference between them can produce a relevant follow-up question.
Also examine what a target-audience choice means internally
Choosing a target audience has consequences for knowledge, capacity, offer and sales. An organisation can commercially want to reach a new target audience while remaining strongly attached to an existing way of working.
So ask what the new choice practically requires. Which questions must the team be able to answer? Which service needs to be adapted? Which existing customers remain important? And what temporarily gets less attention?
This is not a call to be less ambitious. It is a way of turning ambition into a workable choice.
Where can a marketing constellation help?
In a marketing constellation you can give possible target audiences, the offer, the organisation and the desired direction a place. The method can help explore different expectations and make unspoken trade-offs discussable.
For example: the team keeps naming target audience A as the priority, but talks with the most enthusiasm about the work for target audience B. That does not prove B is commercially better. It can, however, be a reason to explore whether the intended choice matches the team's knowledge, motivation and available resources. A representative's reaction also does not determine which target audience will actually buy.
An example: promising ease and selling choice
This is an illustrative example, not a client case.
A provider wants to help entrepreneurs spend less time on a recurring task. The promise centres on ease. In conversations, the team mainly explains how many settings and options the solution has.
One research question is then whether the message matches the problem customers come with. But there may also be an internal choice at play: does the organisation primarily want to offer a flexible tool, or take a task off someone's hands entirely? That may require a different kind of service.
You explore this by analysing real customer conversations, asking customers about their trade-offs, and testing an adjusted message. A constellation can support the internal conversation about that choice. It does not replace the test in the market.
Keep your next test small and clear
Formulate one target audience, one relevant situation and one promise you want to explore. Describe beforehand what you don't yet know and which outcome would be reason to adjust the choice.
Then choose a fitting test. A few exploratory conversations can raise new questions, but do not automatically represent an entire market. A campaign shows behaviour, but a disappointing response could also be down to reach, offer or execution.
So connect the outcome back to the original question. What have we learned? What remains uncertain? And which choice can now actually be justified?
Also record what you are not doing for now
A useful positioning helps distribute attention. So note which target audience or message is not a priority right now. Not because it can never be interesting, but because otherwise you keep pursuing several directions at once.
Discuss the choice with the people who need to carry it out. Read about collaboration between marketing and sales if the translation into everyday customer contact is still unclear.