Positioning In Small Business Marketing

Writen by J D Moore

Positioning is another one of those marketing jargon words that everybody throws around and is important to understand. It's also important to understand how positioning specifically applies to your small business marketing.

Basically a marketing position describes your unique place in the market. The key word here is unique. What makes you different from your competitors? What features and benefits do you offer your target market that the other players don't?

Here are a few things that may go into your positioning:

-Price Point - This doesn't necessarily mean you have the lowest price. You may be the most expensive in town, and that's OK if you convince your customers you're worth it.

-Service - Almost every business claims they have great service. If you can provide exceptional service compared to your competitors, your customers will remember you. I'll never forget calling a surly plumber to try to get him to my house for an emergency on a weekend. he acted like he didn't want my business and then told me it was going to be $200 for him just to show up, no thanks. I called roto-router who gave me amazing service, a guarantee, and the whole bill was less than $200. I now use them for all my plumbing.

-Features and Benefits - Positioning is not just about what makes you different, it's also about what you emphasize. Folgers announces to the world that it's "mountain grown coffee" ( a feature). Guess what? All coffee is mountain grown. Folgers just claimed this feature first. What's something that none of your competitors are talking about?

-Credibility - Legal Seafood's clam chowder is served at every presidential inauguration. Many products get celebrity endorsements. Many companies tout how long they've been in business. All of these things build trust in the mind of the consumer. What trust-building factors do you have that the competition does not?

-Negative Features - Is there something you don't have that annoys customers of your competitors? I'm not saying use negative advertising, but just mention the feature and tie it to a benefit. I'm annoyed when I have to pay for parking to go shopping at Mall. Instead of touting free parking, a mall that wants to speak to me might declare, "you'll never have to pay for parking". This drives home the pain of shopping with a competitor without going negative.

-Anything Else - Literally anything that differentiates you from your competitors can be part of your positioning strategy - your location, your hours of operation, the way your office smells. Small business owners need to think creatively here.

In a great article by John Jantsch he states that a positioning strategy must answer the question, "why should I buy from you?" This is brilliant in it's simplicity; it cuts through all the strategic junk that complicates marketing. If you can't answer this question, your customer is not going to do the work to figure out an answer on his own.

Does your small business marketing stink? Let's Fix it! J D Moore is a small business marketing coach. Read his blog at http://marketingcomet.typepad.com

Advances In Print Technology What About

Writen by Marlon D. Ludovice

A number of dramatic technological innovations have been added greatly to deal with the character of printing process. Linotype is a method of creating movable type by machine instead of by hand and was introduced in 1884 which marked a significant leap in production speed.

The typewriter made the production and "look" of standardized print much more widely accessible. The process of setting type continued to go through transformations with the development of photo-mechanical composition, cathode ray tubes and laser technologies. Also the Xerox machine made a means of broadcast print documents available to everyone. Wherein Word processing transformed editing and contributed dramatic new flexibility to the writing process. Computer printing has already moved through several stages of innovation, from the first daisy-wheel and dot matrix "impact" printers to common use of the non-impact printers: ink-jet, laser and thermal-transfer.

Now with the availability of internet in the world and interactive multimedia, providing ways of employing the printed word that add new possibilities to print's role in culture made it much easier. The printed word is now used for real-time social interaction and for individualized routing through interactive documents. It is difficult to gauge the social and cultural impact of new media without historical distance, but these innovations will most likely prove to signal another major transformation in the use, influence and character of human communication.

Indeed, far way the printing had been very much stable to give a better service to the people. The immediate effect of the printing press was to multiply the output and cut the costs of books. It thus made information available to a much larger segment of the population who were, of course, eager for information of any variety. Libraries could now store greater quantities of information at much lower cost. Printing also facilitated the dissemination and preservation of knowledge in standardized form -- this was most important in the advance of science, technology and scholarship. The printing press certainly initiated an "information revolution" on par with the Internet today. Printing could and did spread new ideas quickly and with greater impact. With the innovation and advancement in technology sure way printing press is on the go to serve us better!

About The Author Marlon is a graduate of BACHELOR OF ARTS, major in POLITICAL SCIENCE. Well actually i'm not fun of writing, i dont write at all. i am not expecting that i will be in this field. But i love to read books...almost everything interest me. reading is my passion! but now that i am in an article writer team, writing gives me an additional thrill in myself...Before i love to read books but now im also in a writing stuff. I can't say im a good writer but i am trying to be one. For additional information and comments about the article you may log on to http://www.aprintingpress.com