In the final instalment of Having a Crack, Simon Davies delves into why choosing a niche is only half the battle, and how a strong positioning can help businesses stand out from the competition.
Your Niche Gets You in the Room. Your Positioning makes you stand out.
Earlier in this series I wrote about choosing a niche. For us it was healthcare — big, growing and short on genuine specialists.
That decision answered one question: where do we play?
But it didn’t answer the more important one. Why would anyone choose us over our competition?
That’s positioning. And it’s where most businesses quietly fall over.
Niche is where you play. Positioning is how you win there
When we committed to health, we joined a small club of specialists. Every one of them understood pharma and knew the regulations.
Inside a niche, expertise isn’t a point of difference. It’s the entry fee.
This is true in every industry. Pick a mortgage broker, a recruiter, a real estate agent or an accountant and read their website. Great service. Local knowledge. Proactive. Trusted. Results-driven. Swap the logos and nobody would notice.
That’s not positioning. It’s wallpaper. If your point of difference is something every competitor would also claim, it isn’t a difference.
The other trap is trying to say everything. I get why. You don’t want to leave anything out. But it doesn’t work, it is complicated, people don’t understand what you stand for. If you try to say everything, you can’t be anything.
Own something
Our positioning was Where Science and Emotion Collides. Five words. Easy to remember, impossible to confuse with anyone else.
In healthcare, the science is everything, and we were genuinely strong at it. Get it wrong and nothing else matters.
But we also believed something the category underplayed. Research and case study after case study show that people buy on emotion and justify rationally — and healthcare professionals are no exception.
So, we set out to be brilliant at both. Awesome at the science. And never forgetting that the person reading it is a human being.
That belief didn’t come from a workshop. It came from my kitchen table. My father was an anaesthetist, and I grew up around doctors who decided on trust and feel as much as data. I saw them buy brands – claiming they were better quality or superior, but really it made them feel something.
Now, we weren’t perfect with our positioning all the time. But it was our true north — the thing we came back to whenever we drifted. It was our point of difference. We led with it in every pitch, and over time people in the industry knew us for it.
That’s positioning that cuts through. You say it, you live it, and eventually the market says it back to you.
How to create your positioning?
Four places to start.
1. Start with why. Simon Sinek’s formula is the simplest tool I know. Most businesses can tell you what they do and how they do it. Far fewer can tell you why. Ours looked like this:
What: healthcare advertising.
How: rigorous science, brought to life with emotion.
Why: because doctors are human. Like everyone, they can’t help but decide on emotion — then justify it with the science.
Your what is your niche. Your why is usually where your positioning is hiding.
2. Find what your industry over-does. Every industry leans on something so hard it leaves a gap. Pharma leaned on the science, so we added the emotion. Financial advice often drowns clients in complexity — be the adviser who makes it simple. Recruiters compete on volume — be the one who sends three great candidates, not thirty CVs. Property agents obsess over the sale — be the one still looking after the client a year after settlement.
3. Bring something from outside. I came into pharma from consumer advertising, and that outside view was our edge. Your previous career or another industry you know is often the thing competitors can’t copy.
4. Make sure it’s true. A positioning you’ve borrowed, or bought from a consultant, cracks under pressure. One you genuinely believe holds, because you never have to remember it.
Then live it
We didn’t just say Science and Emotion. We lived and breathed it.
We understood the emotion that existed around people’s health. Realistically probably the most emotional category there is – people have fears, frustrations and desires – healthcare professionals, patients and families.
We used music, poems, patient case studies and all different ways to bring emotion to life. All of this made us stand out.
In my experience, it helps a lot in business if you can explain your point of difference and why you are better than your competition – why someone would buy from you in a quick and memorable way.
Now, can you do this for your own business?
Have a crack.
