The most important thing you can do for your startup is to focus on yours brand positioning. But often, startups don't treat it with the same care that they treat general marketing, go-to-market work, and product development. A well-established brand positioning statement it will give you clarity of focus and can act as a compass for all aspects of your business. When making strategic decisions about launching a new product or service, you need to be sure that it is consistent with your brand positioning.

If you are in the process of creating sales and marketing collateral, it should be guided by your positioning statement. Often, startup founders and leaders use their judgment and intuition in making such decisions when those decisions should actually be driven by a clearly defined brand position. Given the critical role it can play, this article will focus on a positioning framework you can adopt today for your startup.

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3 Cs

In marketing, we often hear about 5 Cs (company, customer, competitor, co-workers and climate) but, if you're pressed for time, three of those C's are strong enough to help you come up with a compelling positioning for your company. These critical C's are your customers, competitors and your company. While this exercise will still require resources and time, it will be one of the most important things you do for your startup.

This is a very effective framework. You should identify an exhaustive list of all the characteristics of your products and brand. The next step should be to identify your competitors' strengths and what they offer; make sure you do a comprehensive competitive analysis when you take this step. You should then leverage that search to zero in on those elements that are unique to your company and not offered by your competitors.

The last and most important aspect is understanding your customers, what they want and how badly they want those things. If your company offers something that your customers want but your competitors don't, that's the golden aspect to focus on and should drive your positioning. That means doing some hard choices and choose that one truly differentiated aspect desired by your customers. You will be tempted to choose several aspects, but the hard and right decision is to choose one and use that benefit to drive your positioning.

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Why does this matter?

If you have something that customers want, but is not unique to you and is also offered by your competitors, you will likely find yourself in a price war and struggle to get good ROI on your marketing dollars. On the other hand, if you have something that's unique to you, but your customers don't want it, you'll probably spend a lot of wasted marketing dollars and struggle to convince customers to spend money on your product. It is critical that your customer research it's comprehensive and helps you find out everything about your customers' needs and willingness to pay to meet those needs.

Personal experience: A case in point

In my previous role, I led marketing for a VC-backed menswear e-commerce startup that had over 100,000 customers. The company was three years old when I joined, and it specialized in chinos – a single, hero product. Of course, chinos were made in over 30 colors, but chinos themselves were not a unique product. On the contrary, it faced a lot of competition. But how can we distinguish it?

I focused on what did we do differently. Our product fit was universally loved by our customers and received many repeat orders, but there was one particularly unique aspect about our fit: We had never changed it in our three years of existence. As someone who wore chinos almost exclusively, I knew that as a consumer, I didn't like constantly shopping for my staple pants; I preferred to be able to refer to the same brand repeatedly for them.

A good scan of our competitors told me that everyone else changed their fit with each season. I was intrigued. I then went on to do customer research which revealed that men did not like to shop at different brands for staple items like chinos (due to brands constantly changing the fit of their product). They wanted to be able to stick with one brand and keep ordering their favorite chinos.

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I had arrived at our holy trinity – something our customers really wanted and we delivered, but our competitors didn't. This was extremely powerful. It then began to inform and influence all of our strategic decisions and our brand narrative. It also had a significant impact on our business – we were in the process of growing others business financingand this played a major role in garnering more interest.

Initially we were struggling to attract investors as we were unable to communicate a clear and unique competitive position, but this new positioning and brand story dramatically changed it. Not only were we able to attract more investors, but we were also able to get $500,000 in funding commitments.