Horizontal Positioning

Small business owners are constantly asking how to compete with larger, more established businesses. I hear phrases like: "They're the 'Market Leader'" or "Everyone knows that they offer the 'best' product of that sort"...

Positioning in the modern marketplace is not 'vertical'; or arranged from best through 'mid-level' to worst. Rather, positioning is 'horizontal'; arranged on a level plane according to how well they meet the particular needs and characteristics of a particular market at a particular time.

For instance, a Royal Gala apple is not intrinsically 'better' than a Mackintosh or worse than a Granny Smith. Each apple has particular qualities and some will prefer one or the other for a given application: eating, making cider, baking pies...

The point being that for one target market, for that particular set of needs and characteristics, your offering is EXACTLY the solution they are looking for.

Note: This is why professional marketers tend to respond so negatively to the suggestion that a product or service's target market is 'everybody'... Such a claim demonstrates a failure to
understand that incredibly vital relationship between a target Market's needs and the particular qualities of a product or service.

Larger companies have woken to this reality and have responded by making far more varied and/or customizable product lines aimed at increasing market share in more and more identified market segments.

For an excellent illustration of this, check out Malcolm Gladwell's talk at TED in 2004:
http://www.ted.org/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

In contrast, small businesses are generally best served by identifying and marketing to that one (or very few) relatively small and incredibly well-defined and understood market segment(s) whose needs and characteristics they match better than ANY competitor.