You will be able to describe your positioning using competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value and target customer.
Most small businesses describe themselves by comparing with everyone. Better quality, more experienced, more caring, more affordable. Better than whom, though? A parent looking for maths tuition in Tampines isn't comparing your centre with every centre in Singapore. They are comparing it with the two centres near their block, a private tutor a neighbour mentioned, and the option of buying assessment books and doing it themselves. If you don't know what those alternatives are, you can't say why you are the better choice.
Positioning is how you define what your business is and why it is the best choice for a particular customer, compared with the alternatives that customer actually has. The most practical method for small businesses comes from April Dunford, a positioning consultant, in her book Obviously Awesome.
Dunford's method opens with a question most businesses skip: if you didn't exist, what would your customer use instead? She calls the answers competitive alternatives, and they often include things that aren't businesses at all. You saw in lesson 3.2 that doing nothing is one of them.
For Priya's maths centre in Tampines, the alternatives are a large chain tuition centre at the nearby mall, a private home tutor, and parents teaching the child themselves with free online videos. Because the list is specific, you stop trying to beat some imaginary average competitor and start comparing yourself with the three things a parent is really weighing up.
Next come your unique attributes: the things you have or do that those alternatives don't. They have to be features or facts that someone could check. "Caring teachers" is a claim anyone can make, while "classes run until 9pm on weekdays" is something a parent can verify by looking at the timetable.
For Priya, the attributes include evening classes until 9pm, a maximum of six children per class, homework done at the centre so it doesn't come home, and a short weekly message to parents about what was covered. When she held each one up against the alternatives, the differences were plain. The chain centre has more slots but larger classes. The home tutor offers one-to-one attention but costs more per hour and rarely does evenings at short notice. The parent with YouTube has the lowest cost, but not the time or patience.
Other businesses have attributes just as concrete. A caterer might have a halal-certified kitchen, which matters a great deal for an office ordering for a mixed team. A home-based bakery might offer weekend delivery to the east, or cakes without nuts made in a nut-free kitchen.
An attribute is only worth mentioning when it does something the customer cares about. Dunford calls this the value. You get it by asking "so what?" of each attribute until you reach an outcome the customer would say out loud.
Classes until 9pm, so what? So a parent who works until 7pm can still get their child to tuition on a weekday. Homework done at the centre, so what? So there is no argument about it at home in the evening. Weekly updates, so what? So the parent knows what is happening without interrogating a tired ten-year-old.
Notice that each value statement links back to a job from lesson 3.2. If an attribute leads to no value anyone cares about, it doesn't belong in your positioning, however proud you are of it.
The last step in this part of the method asks who cares most about that value. Dunford calls them best-fit customers: the people for whom your attributes matter so much that they would choose you quickly and stay.
For Priya, that means working parents who get home late, who want the evenings back, and whose child needs steady help rather than competition training. If that sounds like the target customer from lesson 3.1, it should, because positioning and targeting feed each other. Working out your value tells you who your best customer is, and knowing your best customer tells you which value to lead with.
Dunford's full method has further steps, and one of them is choosing the market category you want customers to put you in. For a small business starting out, the four parts in this lesson give you enough to write a clear position. If you want to go further, her book is short and practical.
Your positioning, in plain terms, now reads something like this. Against the alternatives a parent actually considers, Priya's centre is the one with evening classes and homework done on site, which gives working parents their evenings back, and it is built for families who need steady help rather than a race to the top.
In the activity below you will start with the first two parts for your own business: the alternatives, and what you have that each one lacks. Use the real alternatives your customers mention, not the competitors you worry about most, because they are often not the same.
List three alternatives your customer would use instead of you, then write one attribute you have that each one lacks.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).