The company positioning statement determines how a company is perceived in the market, defines its competitive advantages, and influences its overall success.
It’s surprising how many medical device companies fail to recognize the importance of a compelling positioning statement.
Without a clear positioning statement, your communications lack focus—and there’s a real risk of inconsistency.
What Is a Positioning Statement?
As mentioned previously, a product’s value proposition can be expressed through a positioning statement, which typically refers to the sector, target customers, and key differentiators. If it’s important for a product to have a clear positioning, the same applies to the company itself.
A company positioning statement is extremely useful for internal alignment, but it can also be used externally to ensure coherent communication. If your management team isn’t aligned on the answers to a few basic questions… well, you have a problem.
For example, if different departments offer conflicting answers—or if someone can’t answer at all—you’re facing clear internal misalignment.
This can result in your company sounding like a multi-headed creature, with each mouth saying something different and creating inconsistent messaging.
The Purpose of a Company Positioning Statement
The company positioning statement expresses how you want to be perceived. It’s the message you aim to deliver at every touchpoint with customers, prospects, partners, and others.
Its goal is to create clarity, alignment, consistency, and coherence in how your company interacts with the outside world.
Remember: market positioning is how the market perceives your company—not how you wish to be perceived. That’s why a clear positioning statement is critical to guide both your internal team and the market.
How to Build a Company Positioning Statement
Here’s a framework to help you build a clear, defensible, and differentiated positioning statement.
To create an effective statement, answer these key questions:
- Who are you?
- What is your business?
- What customers do you serve?
- What market needs do you fulfill?
- Who are your competitors?
- What differentiates your products and services?
- What are the benefits of your products or services?
Company Positioning Statement Workshop
The best way to develop a company positioning statement is to bring together top management and internal stakeholders for one or more workshops.
Some participants will contribute actively and offer valuable insights; others may be less vocal. Regardless, it’s essential to have a broad enough panel and secure top management’s validation.
It’s especially useful to include key roles involved in internal and external communication.
Before the workshop, share your strategy, business plan, and marketing plan with all participants to establish a common foundation.
The workshop can be led by an internal or external facilitator who guides the discussion and captures relevant ideas.
Participants should discuss and answer the seven positioning questions and work toward alignment. Ideally, opinions won’t be too divergent.
It can be eye-opening to share survey results from customers, distributors, and partners. This provides an external perspective on how your company is currently perceived.
Additionally, analyzing the positioning of key competitors and market leaders—and what they claim about themselves—can offer valuable insights.
Through the workshop, managers will hear different perspectives, understand each other better, and reach consensus.
After the workshop, the facilitator should use the shared ideas to draft one or two positioning statements and a set of key messages for group review.
If needed, a second session can focus on refining and selecting the final statement and narrowing down the key messages. At this stage, it’s crucial for the facilitator to drive consensus and closure.
Finally, the company should begin actively applying the positioning statement across all internal and external communications.
Conclusion
In my opinion, a company positioning statement is a key element in guiding both internal and external communications. Surprisingly, some companies don’t have one—or rely on an implicit version without ever investing time to develop a clear statement.
Without a well-designed positioning statement, your interactions with the market will likely be inconsistent.
And when communication is inconsistent, it confuses customers and can ultimately lead to mistrust.
The benefit of a positioning statement is that it gets everyone in the company on the same page.
Marketing communications shouldn’t be the sole guardian of the statement and key messages. Everyone who interacts with the market should use the positioning as a guide and reference. This may require training and ongoing reinforcement, but it’s worth the effort to ensure your market perception is accurate.
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