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More About This Title Positioning for Professionals: How Professional Knowledge Firms Can Differentiate Their Way to Success
English
Positioning for Professionals shows how a well-defined value proposition can help professional service firms create their own success instead of copying the success of others, including such concepts as:
- How and why professional service brands become homogenized
- Why standing for everything is the same as standing for nothing
- Why there’s no such thing as full service
- Deep and narrow as a strategic imperative
- Why it’s better to be a profit leader than a market leader
- Differentiation and price premiums
- How to map your brand on the matrix of relevance and differentiation
- How to define a value proposition that will make your firm intensely appealing to the customers who want you for what you do best
Based on the proven premise that the most profitable business strategy is not to aim at the center of the market, but rather at the edges, Positioning for Professionals is written for leaders, managers, and other senior executives of service companies in with a particular emphasis on professional service firms.
English
TIM WILLIAMS leads Ignition Consulting Group (www.ignitiongroup.com), a business consultancy devoted to helping professional knowledge firms create and capture more value. As a recognized thought leader in marketing, Tim is a frequent speaker for marketing and business organizations worldwide. He is a regular contributor to business and professional publications and is author of Take a Stand for Your Brand, ranked by Amazon as one of the top ten books on brand building. As an adviser in developing professional service brands, Tim has worked with both large and small professional service firms—most notably advertising agencies and other marketing communications firms—in both the U.S. and abroad. He began his career on Madison Avenue working for large multinational advertising agencies and later served as president and owner of several midsize independent firms.
English
Introduction xi
Chapter 1 Size Is Not a Strategy1
Maintaining Pricing Integrity 2
Better to Be a Profit Leader than a Market Leader 3
Why Bigness Doesn’t Lead to Greatness 5
Hired to Be Effective, Not Efficient 6
Chapter 2 How and Why Brands Become Homogenized 9
The Urge to Copy 10
The Folly of All-in-One 11
Line Extension Is Not Branding 12
There’s No Such Thing as Full Service 13
The Natural Fear of Focus 14
Chapter 3 The Mature Company ’s Identity Crisis 17
Differentiation and Price Premiums 18
Columbus, Not Napoleon 19
The Diffusion of Identity 22
Landing in No-Man’s Land 22
Strategy at the Edges 23
Not Best Practices, But Next Practices 25
Chapter 4 Expanding Your Business By Narrowing Your Focus 29
There’s No Such Thing as a General Market 30
Vertical Success versus Horizontal Success 32
The Strategic Value of Going Deep 34
Chapter 5 Positioning as the Centerpiece of Business Strategy 37
What Are You Really Selling? 39
Becoming Hard to Imitate 39
Two Critical Dimensions of an Effective Value Proposition 41
A Category of One 43
A Brand Is the Customer’s Idea of the Product 44
Natural Outcomes of a Powerful Value Proposition 46
Chapter 6 Building Brand Boundaries 47
Brand Boundary 1: Calling 49
Brand Boundary 2: Customers 55
Brand Boundary 3: Competencies 60
Brand Boundary 4: Culture 66
The Confluence of Calling, Customers, Competencies, and Culture 72
Chapter 7 Validating Your Value Proposition 75
Be Rooted in the Future, Not the Past 76
The Value Proposition Team 77
Asking the Right Questions 80
Chapter 8 Without Execution, There Is No Strategy 83
Services 85
Staffing 92
Self-Promotion 100
Systems 107
Staging 112
Executing a Positioning Strategy with Alignment Teams 116
Rebuilding Your Ship While at Sea 119
Chapter 9 Getting Paid for Creating Value 121
The Perils of Cost-Based Compensation 122
Changing the Language 124
Pricing as a Core Competency 125
Why a Value-Based Approach Is in the Client’s Best Interest 126
The Alignment of Incentives 128
Creating a Virtuous Circle 131
Chapter 10 A New and Better Way to Price Professional Services 133
Forms of Value-Based Pricing 133
The Right Clients for Outcome-Based Agreements 136
The True Meaning of Partnership 138
Uncovering Missed Opportunities to Make Pricing a Core Competency 139
Key Questions in Setting a Value-Based Price 140
If Complex Global Companies Can Do It, So Can You 142
Better Time Tracking Is Not the Answer 144
Thinking of Compensation Plans as a Stock Portfolio 147
Setting the Stage for a Value-Based Approach to Compensation 150
A Declaration of Value 154
Appendix A: The Before-and-After Survey 157
Appendix B: More Ways to Differentiate Your Brand 161
Appendix C: Indicators of the Firm’s Success 165
Notes 173
About the Author 179
Index 181
