Positioning

This is the written script of Halftime, episode 30 of the Makers of Sport® podcast. Halftime was a short show on the off weeks between interviews where I wrote and read on topics in professionalism, entrepreneurship and business for creatives in sport. The episode aired March 30, 2015; the audio is on SoundCloud and the show notes live at makersofsport.com. The show's opening and closing announcements are trimmed here.

Positioning is very important in business and especially in entrepreneurship or freelance. As with most of these episodes this will be short and sweet and I advise you to do your own research on this topic as it is very complex and tough to cover in under 20 minutes.

So what is it? Entrepreneur.com defines positioning as “How you differentiate your product or service from that of your competitors and then determine which niche market to fill”.

About a week ago I asked the question on twitter @makersofsport: “What differentiates you in this sports niche”. There are a lot of very talented folks doing creative work in the sports industry. If all you sell is the service, you are truly not distinguishing yourself from other equally talented people.

In business, unless there is some form of monopoly, you are always going to have competition. There are always going to be people or companies as good as you are or even better out there doing exactly what you do from a service or product perspective. You have to determine what truly makes you different. Unless you are truly one of the best in the world (and I’ll go ahead and give you a little tough love here, you’re probably not), it’s not your skill set or product that differentiates you. It’s always something else. Maybe as a freelancer it’s your personality. Maybe it’s your ability to get things done quicker. Maybe it’s a specific style you have that makes your work distinct. Maybe it’s your ability to be a unicorn and work in the web, or in print and branding.

Personally, as someone that doesn’t specialize in one horizontal service, I pride myself on being the person who may not be the best at any one service, but might be the best combination of a number of services and skill sets. Because of this, In the past couple year alone, I’ve had the pleasure of working on sunglasses packaging, an NCAA school’s athletic branding, as well as numerous user interfaces for digital products. All of that in one vertical market, sports. Of course I need to update my site or Dribbble but you know what they say, “the cobblers children never has any shoes”.

Anyhow, if I were performing the above tasks for more than one market, I’d be what is called a generalist. Being a generalist is the problem with most creative firms in the world. They will work on anything, for anyone and because that is the case, the creative industry gets saturated with these generalists and drives the price down on services or products. Generalists always compete on price. Those that specialize in a vertical market, rarely do because most of the time your industry expertise helps sets you apart from other firms.

So let's talk about vertical and horizontal markets for a second. Horizontal markets are typically the service or product you provide. Think General Motors and all of the vehicles markets they serve (trucks, sedans, vans, SUVs. They sort of have something for everyone and do not specialize in one customer market. In the creative industry, this might be print design, ui design, mobile design, photography, video, etc. The full-service agency model. These are all services or products one is providing.

A vertical market, however, is an industry. So just as General Motors provides many vehicles to multiple customer industries, Porsche focuses on one very targeted area of the car industry, the sports car. This is their vertical market. Porsche is still a competitor to General Motors; however, Porsche as a company decides to do one thing, for one segment of the car industry and do it very well. The book Positioning for Professionals by Tim Williams (which I highly recommend and is in the show notes) lists these two car companies as an example and states that in the past decade, GM was the least profitable car company in the world. The company that was the most profitable? You guessed it, the one that positioned themselves in a vertical market.

Now for us, the chances are if you listen to this show, you are already passionate about providing a creative service in a vertical market. For us, that vertical is sports. That’s good news for most of us, but if you stay up to date with sports design or photography on twitter, dribbble, instagram or behance, even this niche is becoming quite saturated so we might need to position ourselves even deeper into our industry. Take Joe Bosack & Company for example. Joe’s firm provides brand strategy and visual identity services to NCAA schools. For that reason, Joe Bosack & Company is known among among college athletic departments across the country. Or take my fellow Kentuckian Dan Simon. Dan pretty much has a foothold on branding in minor league baseball.

Tyson Beck and his Posterizes.com crew, specializes in digital art for basketball. Now obviously this has lead to other work for Tyson in other sports, but the brand Posterizes is about one thing, basketball artwork. That is a great example of positioning within this sports niche.

My personal positioning is the ability to provide design, branding and creative direction across multiple disciplines in the college sports industry. This doesn’t mean I will turn down pro sports work, it just means that I market myself and my services in college sports because of my deep understanding of that business. Even my lacrosse client which is more of a consumer-facing client and not a school, focuses on the lacrosse recruiting and training industry so it falls in line with this positioning.

I advise and recommend that you take some time this week to really think about what you want to do in this particular niche of sports and write one sentence that encompasses this. Do you want to branding work in professional sports? Then don’t list yourself as a sports branding designer (I wonder how many of those are on twitter or Dribbble), but really determine what it is that sets you apart from other equally talented sports branding designers. Maybe that is a designer that provides strategic visual identities for professional sports. If I’m choosing between a “sports branding designer” and a designer that specializes in strategic visual identities for professional sports, I’m going the later every time if I’m a professional sports executive.

We tend to live in a small bubble in this niche but I can tell you that there are plenty of sports-related creative jobs out there for you. Think about the number of high schools in your state right now. How many of those high schools use a logo or mascot that is completely stolen from a professional or college team? Probably many. I know schools in the state of Kentucky are attempting to change their athletic identities due to this and when they reach to advertising or creative agencies in the Lexington area where I live, who do you think has a better shot at the job? The advertising agency that does car advertising, horse advertising and any other business thrown thrown at them? Or the firm/freelancer or consultant that focuses only on sports, is deeply ingrained in the sports industry, has a podcast about the sports design industry and has rebranded a high school athletic program before? It’s a no brainer.

Lastly, positioning allows you to be selective in who you work with. You may have to scale down to scale up at first taking on some sports-related gigs to build a client base and portfolio, but eventually, studies have shown that a tipping point will occur when positioning effectively and you will eventually have the opportunity to say no to clients, set and determine your price far higher than generalist firms and even in some cases, forgo the RFP process. A few years ago I was bidding on a project with a few friends for a large convention center and entertainment venue. It was a web project and myself and my colleagues had extensive experience working on some fairly projects in that world. We were competing amongst multiple firms and spent many hours preparing an response to an RFP. We lost and you want to know who we and all of the other firms in the area lost out to? A company that was not local to the area, but only worked on convention center websites. That firm had positioned themselves to win most of the work in that market when competing against generalist companies.

So to wrap up, please consider doing a bit more research on positioning and I highly recommend reading 2 books on this subject matter, one mentioned earlier, Positioning for Professionals by Tim Williams and Win Without Pitching by Blair Enns. Picking a market to specialize in is very scary when you are interested in many different things and different breadths of work. But I guarantee you that if you have the opportunity to talk to any firm, freelancer or person that has effectively positioned themselves in a vertical market does not regret it financially or from a connectivity standpoint. In fact, It has become quite trendy in the Silicon Valley to write about the end of client services, I truly believe with so many general client service firms in the world that positioning your work for a vertical, is the only way to achieve high margins in your business and establish a foothold over generalist businesses.