Pelorus

SLOSIP is an innovative New Jersey-based company that has taken communications convergence to new heights.  By uniting the two most important pieces of technology in every office – the telephone and the personal coffee maker – SLOSIP promises huge gains in knowledge worker productivity and cost savings.

SLOSIP’s first product, TALKPOT, was launched at the World Exposition of Telecommunications and Beverage-Making Technologies (WETBMT).  Company executives were encouraged by the response and based on little more than how much free coffee they could giveaway Sales VP, Eddie (“Big Dawg”) substantially upped his sales forecast.  CEO Ernie Eversmart and CFO Wayne Watchabuck almost spilled their coffee when they saw the forecast and asked Eddie to redo the numbers.  Chastened, Eddie grudgingly enlisted the help of his nemesis, Melissa Marvelous, the Marketing Communications Manager.  She brought in a numbers guy, Stan Deviation, and together the three of them came up with a forecast that senior management and Karl Rover, the lead Vulture Capitalist (and former politico), bought into.  Now SLOSIP has some money for the marketing budget and Melissa is elated.

This morning Melissa has an appointment with Eddie to talk about marketing communications strategy.  She wanted to get his input on how to position TALKPOT to the marketplace.  Her first question was what “space” he thought TALKPOT was in.  Eddie didn’t understand the question.  Privately, he thought that “space” referred to the area between Melissa’s ears.  Noting the quizzical look, she explained that she wanted to know in what product category customers would slot TALKPOT.  She added that TALKPOT crossed three product categories, appliances, communications devices, and office supplies.  Understanding where customers perceived the product vis-à-vis comparable products was critical to developing ad copy, deciding which media to use, and even influencing where the product should be sold.  She persisted with more annoying questions, who, exactly, will be buying it, for what reasons, who would we be competing against?  She even pressed for something called a “value proposition.”  Big Dawg wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of thinking this hard so early in the morning but saw where Melissa was coming from.  He also knew that the answers to these questions would also effect his decisions on sales planning and execution.  Besides, he knew that product awareness was near zero and he needed all the help he could get from marketing.

It was clearly time to go the whiteboard. After some lively discussion Eddie and Melissa concluded that TALKPOT was really unique in its attributes.  So what was TALKPOT most “like.”  After much gnashing if teeth and brains it was determined that TALKPOT was really a new breed of phone, not a new breed of coffee-maker.  And not just any phone, it was a new SIP phone.  Therefore, it could only be effectively sold to businesses that had an IP communications system.  For now, this primarily meant big businesses, not small businesses.  This seemingly obvious conclusion wasn’t so obvious when they started the discussion.  The next questions were who would buy it and why?  In big businesses, telecom and IT gurus held the purse strings for telephony products, but no IT manager in his right mind would buy something as trivial as a telephone glued to a coffee maker unless told to.  Therefore, the mission of marketing was to create pull-through, to develop enough desire among the business honchos of the world that they would insist on a TALKPOT for their offices and conference rooms.

Back to the whiteboard.  Melissa sketched a series of diagrams, each consisting of two intersecting lines at right angles to each other and labeled each line with product attributes.  The attributes included convenience, features, cost effectiveness, quality, appearance, functionality, and ease-of-use.  Then they plotted all the competitive SIP phones and TALKPOT on each of the two-dimensional diagrams.  This exercise resulted in several “perceptual maps” which showed where TALKPOT fit with competitive SIP phones on these key attributes.

It did not take long to figure out that there were a lot of companies that offered SIP phones but for the most part they simply mimicked traditional feature phones but at lower price points.  There were also a few very advanced phones but these were very pricey.  Few competitors seemed to occupy the middle ground.  And none seemed to be able to make an ROI case for the phones, therefore the low price.  Eddie and Melissa decided to position TALKPOT as the ultimate phone for middle managers who wanted convenience and features but needed a cost/benefit story to get past the green eyeshades people.  The cost/benefit story would be the executive time saved from making frequent trips to the coffee machine.  Now Melissa had what she needed to develop her marketing plan.

Lessons Learned

• Positioning is the foundation of all marketing activities.  Until you define your product, its target market, and the reasons why the target market would want to buy it, you cannot begin to market it.
• In marketing, positioning is the “place” a product occupies in a given market as perceived by the target market.  The “place” is not physical but in the prospective customers mind.
• Positioning is expressed relative to competitors.
• Based on the unique or significant features and benefits of the product relative to the positioning it occupies, develop the value proposition that will propel the marketing and sales efforts.