The Real Questions Business Owners Asked About Positioning

I had the privilege of spending a whole afternoon in the balmy town of Gemas with a group of business owners last Thursday. The topic: building a moat for your business - your brand.

In the room were business owners across a handful of very different industries—from resorts and fashion to tech, HR, energy, and FMCG distribution—all running companies with turnovers of RM200 million and above.

By any measure, these are already very successful businesses. Yet as different as they were, they kept coming back to the exact same questions.

1. "Why can't we just target everyone? Our product is really for everyone."

There's a line from Al Ries's book Positioning that I keep coming back to:

"The essence of positioning is sacrifice. We must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position. In positioning, smaller is better. It is usually better for smaller targets that you can own exclusively rather than bigger market you have to share with three or four other brands."

It's uncomfortable, knowingly giving up a sizeable chunk of the population. But realistically, how many of us actually have the marketing dollars to go after an entire nation?

When you try to speak to everyone, you end up shouting into a crowded room. Narrowing your focus isn't about shrinking your ambition—it's about making sure your budget actually makes an impact where you can win.

2. "How much does it actually cost to build a position?"

My immediate answer to the room was a question back to them: What's the cost of continuing to operate in ambiguity?

When you don't have a clear position, the financial leakage happens everywhere:

• Where should sales focus their time?

• Who should marketing target, and where should the ad dollars go?

• What new product should we develop next?

  
  

Those are the tangible things we can see. But underneath the iceberg, having a clear position guides the direction of our long-term vision—which in turn shapes what we say yes to, and what we say no to. It shapes the behavior of our people and the culture of our company. These may not be visible in the short term, but having no clarity in the position we occupy will cost us more than we can imagine.

I'll also admit—building a position takes real money. It takes money to build share of mind, money to establish a position, and money to maintain it once it's there.

At the bare minimum, a brand needs to spend enough to get above the noise—and in today's overzealous world of social media and influencers, that's hard. Which is why we need to be laser-focused on who we're targeting first, whether that's a specific geography or a distinct customer segment. With a given budget, it's far better to over-spend and over-index on one geography or segment than to spread ourselves too thin. Once we've gained traction, we can expand from there.

3. "We've been around for years. How do we even start?" This is probably the hardest question to answer honestly.

There's always the temptation to say we can do it ourselves—send the team to a course, watch some videos online, read a few books, and try to change things whilst the plane is flying.

It's possible. But there's one thing an outsider can bring that a business owner or their own team usually can't: objectivity.

Because an outsider doesn't carry the legacy of what's been tried and succeeded, or tried and failed, they can bring real outside-in thinking.

And this is something I've always believed: nothing replaces the voice of the customer, and the voice of our own employees. No positioning or repositioning project should ever start without listening to both first. Related article: https://www.holarchyglobal.com/post/why-your-business-needs-a-brand