Get to Aha!: Discover your positioning DNA and dominate your competition

GET TO AHA!: DISCOVER YOUR POSITIONING DNA AND DOMINATE YOUR COMPETITION From the marketing strategist who helped Steve Jobs launch the original Apple Macintosh comes a groundbreaking guide to positioning any company for industry dominance.

Positioning works in concert with its more emotive sibling— branding— which offers an emotional expression of a unique role and relevance through logos, look and feel, color palette, use of language, tone of voice, customer experience, and design.

Positioning is actually upstream from branding; you must determine your ideal position in the market before you work on the brand. Why? Because determining your ideal position in the market results from understanding exactly who you are (your DNA) and why you matter (what you bring to the market that others don't).

Entrepreneurs bringing a product to market probably will never admit it, but what they really want is for that product to be all things to all people: It will solve any problem! It will make you happy! It will change your life! But when it comes to positioning, you have to learn how to sacrifice all the extra stuff, at least for the time being.

Positioning lies at the center of every single decision you make, from your go-to-market strategy, to the skill set you seek in your hires, to the way you invest precious resources. It is the foundation for all external messages and campaigns, from branding, to sales strategy, to web copy, to brochure design.

The articulation of competitive advantage results from C-suite collaboration that is based on logical, DNA-based thinking. In the end you may not even know who had what idea. The breakthrough aha! can—and often does—come from the CFO, chief technology officer (CTO), chief information officer (CIO), or any other member of the management team.

Although a sexy brand package is thrilling to look at, if it doesn't capture a company's role and relevance in the market, if it doesn't capture its DNA, it's little more than a made-up face with no strategy or substance to back it up.

In the end, a company's leadership will buy into a marketing campaign only if it has a hand in its creation. No matter how inspired the campaign, if it didn't originate with DNA-based positioning, bringing the management team along on the journey, it's unlikely to see the light of day in the marketplace.

Done properly, positioning creates tremendous alignment among the team members, so much that I sometimes find myself simply helping to connect the dots.

When you know who you are and why you matter, you can articulate a compelling reason for customers and prospects to buy in, and that results in competitive advantage.