Every available alternative can be graphed on the grid. (I’m not calling
them competitors yet, and you’ll see why.) All the potato chips in a given
supermarket. All the types of care for a bad back. All the spiritual
institutions in a small town.
Pick two axes. One is arrayed horizontally (X) and one vertically (Y).
For
each axis, choose something that people care about. It could be
something like convenience, price, healthfulness, performance, popularity,
skill level, or efficacy.
For example, there are six ways to get some diamonds across town. On
one axis we have speed, and on the other we have security. It turns out that
both an armored car and the postal service will happily insure a small
envelope
of diamonds, but one will take a long time and the other will take
an afternoon.
If you don’t care about security, a bike messenger is even faster. And if
you don’t care about speed or security, well, a stamp will work fine.
The magic of the XY positioning of extremes is that it clarifies that each
option might be appropriate, depending on what you seek. Can you see how
this chart would be totally different if the axes were changed to
convenience, cost,
environmental impact, or scalability?
The same approach can work for potato chips (expensive, local, air
baked, flavored, extra thick, cheap, etc.) or for Walmart, Zales, and Tiffany
(price, convenience, status, scarcity). Or a cruise ship and a private jet. Or
perhaps a Ford, a Tesla, and a McLaren. We’re not so much interested in
features as we are in the emotions that those features evoke.
Here are some axes for you to choose from. Because you know your
space far better than I do, I’m sure you can come up with some others.
Speed
Price
Performance
Ingredients
Purity
Sustainability
Obviousness
Maintenance costs
Safety
Edginess
Distribution
Network
effect
Imminence
Visibility
Trendiness
Privacy
Professionalism
Difficulty
Elitism
Danger
Experimental
Limited
Incomplete
After you pick an attribute with two extremes for the X-axis, find a
different attribute and use it for the Y-axis. Plot the options your customer
has on this chart.
Now you have a map of how the alternatives stack up. A map that a busy
human being can use to find the solution to her problem.
Some potato chips are marketed as healthy and organic. Others as
traditional and satisfying. Still others as cheap and widely consumed.
Marketers have been doing this forever. When David Ogilvy and Rosser
Reeves (and probably Don Draper) were making ads in the 1950s, they
figured out a hole in the market and then simply invented claims and
features that would fill that hole. So, one soap is for people who want
purity, while another is for people who care about not having dry skin. It
didn’t matter if the soaps were the same, since they were “positioning”
themselves. And then as marketing pioneers Jack
Trout and Al Ries pushed
it further, challenging marketers to position the competition into a corner
while you worked to keep a spot to yourself.
This is all fine, but it doesn’t hold up over time, not in a hyper-
competitive world. Instead, we can think of the quest for the edges as:
Claims that are true, that we continually double down on in all our
actions.
Claims that are generous, that exist as a service to the customer.
The local music teacher, for example,
needs to begin not merely by
saying “I’m local,” because, as we all know, there are other teachers just as
local. Moreover, “I’m pretty good at teaching” and “I won’t yell at your
kid” are hardly attributes worth talking about.
On the other hand, if he chooses “I’m serious, my students are serious,
and this is about rigor” as one axis, and “My students win competitions” as
the other one, suddenly you have
a teacher worth driving to, a teacher worth
paying extra for.
Is this the teacher I wish I’d had growing up? Absolutely not. It’s not for
me. But for the parent who views the practice room as a form of character-
building, and for the student who sees music as a competition, this is
precisely what they wanted.
And now the teacher has his work cut out for him. Because he does, in
fact, have to be more rigorous and professional than other teachers. He does
have to make the difficult decision of expelling students who aren’t serious
enough. And he has to persevere enough with his
corps of students that they
actually do win competitions.
A few blocks away, a different teacher can take a totally different spot on
the map. She can work with the whole student, focusing on the experience,
not the notes. She can refuse to enter competitions but instead build a
practice based on connection and generosity.
Both teachers treat different people differently. They don’t compete;
they’re simply on the same board.
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