Strategy is about positioning yourself so that your strengths will allow you to win. But that also requires being able to see the dynamics within your market and recognising that position of strength. Coming out of this season of economic pause, you will need to question all of your long-held beliefs as to how your market functions to position yourself to win.
Active Knowledge Question:
During this pause, are you working actively to reposition your business for whatever the new norm will be in your marketplace?
Preparation and Barriers
Over the past two weeks, we have considered how this current pause provides an opportunity for you to reshape your business, so that it is competitively fit for the new marketplace it will likely find itself in. We have also discussed making sure that your head, and that of your leadership team, are in the right place to uplift your business’s performance during this current season.
Stepping forward, you must begin to think about whether the markets you used to compete in, will be the same as the markets that will emerge once the pause is lifted?
The first step in moving forward is to recognise what may hold you back. Every business is plagued by barriers to success that:
- Stop you from moving forward.
- Cause you to miss the turn off that everyone else took.
- Blind you from seeing what is possible.
- Hold people back from performing at their best.
- Literally suck the competitive energy from your business.
- Simply act as an anchor that you drag forward day after day slowing your progress.
In whatever form they may impact your business, you do not want these barriers, and your first efforts should be to unearth them and remove them. These barriers are self-made and self-imposed, they are internal and therefore completely within your control to remove but do not underestimate how entrenched they may be. They are typically created and upheld by leadership at various levels.
The three common categories of barriers are:
- Paradigms: ways of thinking that block new possibilities and opportunities.
- Bureaucracy: process, regulations, and layers of authority that do little to support customer focus, customer value, efficiency, effectiveness of delivery and individual contribution.
- Self-interest: A me-first attitude that places the ‘self’ above others in an unfair manner that weakens the business motive to compete.
Typically, you will find that if one of these barriers exist then so will the others. These barriers are removed by having a well-tuned competitive engine that will self-cleanse your business and work to stop these barriers from even gaining a foothold. But in the absence of an awareness of and focus on the competitive engine, you will need to look into each category of barrier and search them out and remove them.
Step one is preparation for considering what that new norm may look like and to do that you must:
- Consider what opportunities exist now to reshape your business.
- Ensure your leadership team are all on the right page in their response to the pause and that they are uplifting performance – their heads are in the right place.
- Unearth and remove existing barriers to success so you can clearly search out change and opportunity.
Areas of Change
Step two is identifying an evolved market position that will enable you to win in your chosen market.
Considering how the market may emerge will be shaped by three aspects:
- Boundaries of the marketplace
- Competitive landscape
- Positioning for strength
Boundaries of the marketplace
How will the boundaries of the market in which you have chosen to compete have changed? What will those boundaries be? These boundaries are not hard but rather reflect the focus of your business and include:
- Its geographical boundaries.
- The specific needs of the customers that you seek to meet.
- The demographics of the customers you are targeting.
- How your customers define value and the value you intend to deliver.
- The channels to market.
- Pricing points.
It is important that you think of the market as your ‘chosen marketplace’ with the key emphasis on the word ‘chosen’. Who you direct your competitive efforts at, that is your customers and their needs, should always be recognised as a deliberate decision.
In addition, when considering these boundaries, factor-in changes to the agents that influence your market. Look beyond when you expect the pause to cease and ask what is changing in the medium to longer-term that may impact or influence all and any of these boundary markers? And what should be our response to them?
Competitive landscape
Having set the boundaries of your chosen marketplace, you are then able to ask and answer, who else is/will be playing in this marketplace? Who will be our competitors, and how will they be seeking to compete?
Industries typically compete across a common set of criteria such as range, pricing, location/channels, brand, trust etc. This criteria can be a useful ruler to determine where competitors are positioning themselves in the marketplace, and the value they are seeking to deliver to win customers. Of course, you want to identify a customer value that leverages your strengths, exploits your competitors’ weaknesses and importantly hones in on a value proposition for customers that no one else can match.
And you must question and answer how this competitive landscape may change as the new norm emerges? How may your competitors seek to reposition themselves to outcompete you?
Positioning for strength
Positioning is dynamic and never static, and the capability to adapt is always critical, but you commence with a sense of where you should position yourself in a marketplace to outcompete everyone else. And you outcompete them by delivering greater customer value than anyone else can against specific needs of customers.
Having gained a view of the new norm for the boundaries of your chosen marketplace and how others may choose to compete in this market, the question becomes, where should you position yourself, so that the value you deliver simply crushes any competitor’s value?
The answer lies in:
- Lifting to the surface, your business’s core strengths as relevant to your customers’ needs and your marketplace.
- Identifying a position in your marketplace, which places those strengths to the forefront in a way that is relevant to customer needs.
- Avoiding direct head-on competition with competitors.
- Articulating the competitive posture that your business will adopt to outcompete the market enabling everyone to focused on its delivery.
Mavericks and Your Engine
Two closing points to remember:
- The ‘establishment’ in any business can find it challenging in many ways to envisage a newly evolved market. The mavericks in your business, on the other hand, delight in breaking that establishment apart and exploring different ways of doing things. Think carefully about who is involved in developing and overseeing what the future may look like for your business post-pause and how you should respond to win in that market.
- The ability of your business to compete effectively rests in the competitive engine in your business. It sets the ceiling and floor for the performance and success of your business. This pause provides an opportunity to overhaul your business and significantly lift its competitive fitness, don’t allow this opportunity to escape you.
To emerge from the current economic-pause ready to win a greater market share and improve your performance, you must be ready to sprint once that starting gun is fired. Knowing where you are going to position your business, and what that means in terms of change, is critical so as not to be left behind.
An entirely new level of performance.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
