Positioning for Professionals: How Professional Knowledge Firms Can Differentiate Their Way to Success

Chapter 5. Positioning as the Centerpiece of Business Strategy

As a brand, would you rather be moderately appealing to a large group of prospects, or intensely appealing to a select group of prospects? Most businesspeople would say the latter. But most often, their business strategy centers on the former.

In life and in business, our natural tendency is to go broad instead of narrow, to want the most and the biggest. Diversification feels safer and smarter.

The problem is that if your approach is to "keep your options open" and "not limit yourself," then you actually don't have a strategy. By definition, having a strategy means deciding to do one thing but not another. By deciding to have low prices and broad selection, Wal-Mart is making a conscious decision not to have a high degree of sales help and ambiance. Given finite resources, Wal-Mart can't deliver low prices and high service. Deciding what you'll do at the expense of something else is the very essence of strategy.

Wal-Mart, like other very successful businesses, actually wants to be "pigeonholed." So does Southwest Airlines, which doesn't attempt to fly to every destination, offer every class of service, and fly every kind of aircraft. Rather, it actively seeks to "limit" itself to being the leading domestic low-price carrier. By flying only the Boeing 737 to only America's least-congested airports, Southwest has turned in twenty straight years of profitability.

At any given time, McDonald's has close to 60 items on its menu ...