With this said, let us design your positioning strategy.

You will be faced with three main options:

• 1. Positioning your product against your competitors, " Our prices are half of that you may find else where for similar products"
• 2. Emphasizing a distinctive unique benefit "the only book keeping system that instantly calculates your taxes"
• 3. Affiliating your product with something the customer knows and values "the same archiving system used by the library of congress"

Of course these are just examples to help you better grasp the concept, but I am sure you get the point, and you can come up with far more attractive messages to better suite your product.

Your marketing strategy should act more like a guideline, the driving force of your marketing program, so you should always keep it before your eyes, and the eyes of all those who work with you.

Writing a positioning statement should not be a difficult task. For starting off, first you must decide the following:

• Your customer: The type of customer you target.
• The benefits: What you can do for your customers.
• The method: How you do it.
• The USP: Why you do it better than the competitors. (As you may know, USP stands for "unique selling proposition".)

Now you will need to write down the following: (fill in the blanks):

• Our product offers the following benefits: ---------------
• To the following customers (your target market_: ----------
• Our product is better than the competitors in the following manner: ----------------
• We can prove our product is the best because (evidence, differences, testimonials..etc) --------------------

ow you have a positioning strategy, So What? You can't use it to sell your product, which requires a far more complex process, so what is the strategy for?

You will use your positioning strategy to design all your marketing communications, and integrate it with every aspect of your marketing program.

Any and everything you will do as part of your marketing program, from web site design to product packaging and advertising, should aim mainly at convincing customers of the points contained in your positioning statement.

So, put the statement where you can always see it, and always get back to it whenever you are marketing the specific product for which it was crafted.

Your positioning statement reflects what you need to communicate about a specific product, and to whom, so you will always hit the right button, communicating the right message to the right customer at the right time.

I must stress here, the most significant purpose for having a positioning statement, is to make sure that all your communications are consistent with its content. There is no point in having so many different messages for the same product, that lake consistency.

That is what I meant by saying, you must integrate your positioning statement with your marketing program, in all aspects.

Every marketing program should cover only one product, hence must not reflect more than one clearly stated positioning strategy, So:

One last point to ensure the effectiveness of your strategy, which may seem too obvious yet often ignored:

Your Customer must also get the message you are conveying, the way you meant it to be.