Update: Just noticed that Eric Ries posted about the show himself – check it out
Living in San Francisco it was easy to stop by the Facebook Developer Garage last night, put on by Kontagent. It was a great show and much more crowded than I expected. Of course they had a great lineup of speakers. I found Eric Ries presentation, with its emphasis on positioning rather interesting. Much of the material can also be found in an early post on his blog Lessons Learned.
He started his presentation by going over the levers of engagement.
- Synthetic notifications – sent directly from the company
- Organic notifications – sent from an action one of your friends did (automatically notify a person’s friends whenever they upload pictures)
- Positioning – “the battle for your mind” as Eric puts it
Then he covered viral metrics and the basics of building viral loops. Viral loops have been all the rage the last few years, with articles like “The 10 steps to creating a viral loop.” But as Eric warns, some of this might be coming at the expense of positioning. With everyone following the 10 steps or whatever, all they’ve done is ensure that their product is the same as every other – the exact opposite of positioning. Some might say who cares, we can track virality and we’re growing by leaps and bounds. Granted it’s a little tougher to track peoples minds but if you’ve lost that battle, you’ve lost the war.
In his blog post Eric suggests that you focus more on your positioning as it is the most powerful of the levers (synthetic being the least powerful) and then use the viral loop to drive it home.
To win the positioning battle, you could try and make your product better than the competition, or find a different positioning that allows you to be the best at something else. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that your competitors offerings are “good enough” and that you cant’ figure out how to beat them at their own game. So you decide to try to reposition around a different value proposition, one that more closely matches what your product is best at. You could try and drive home that positioning with an expensive PR campaign, superbowl ads, and whatnot. But you don’t have to – you have a perfectly good viral loop that is slowly but surely exposing the entire world to your positioning messages.
Silicon Valley is about technology first, everything else second. Ask someone about their new start-up and they’ll most likely tell you about its technology. After we realize that great technology itself isn’t going to guarantee success we gravitate toward the latest marketing trends, but we shouldn’t forget the tried and true realities of marketing of which positioning is one. How did Avis compete with the biggest competitor in rental cars, purely with positioning – “We Try Harder”.
