One client of Klein Marketing is re-positioning its services in its market. Why did this come about? For several reasons:

1. The way the market positioned them was not the way they wanted to be seen. There is a difference between ‘market positioning’, which is what you do as a company to stake out a unique place in the market, and ‘market position’, which is how the market views your company. They were too often seen as the “guys that installed computers” but wanted to be seen as a company that provides a depth and breadth of managed infrastructure services helping to lower costs, increase productivity, and achieve business and technology goals.
2. Their portfolio of services has grown because they added expertise and talent to serve specific customer needs. In other words, they’ve been developing services based on customer and market demand, rather than because they happened to have a certain capability at something. This is always a good move.
3. The way they spoke about their broader portfolio of services resonated in one-on-one meetings with customers and prospects. People listened to what this company had to say. Clearly a note of relevance had been struck.

This company now has customer and market evidence that the way they position themselves and articulate their story must change. Now comes the rest of the task:

• Refining, testing and validating new positioning elements with customers and prospects
• Developing a plan for rolling out the new positioning externally to the market and internally to all associates — getting everyone on the same page
• Performing an audit of marketing materials and re-vamping  all content to reflect the new positioning 

Once again, a key to successful marketing comes down to getting your story straight.