The “Price Is Right” and Market Positioning

*I’ll leave it to you to decide what inspired this!

Don’t treat your brand or product positioning like Contestant’s Row. Often instead of competing against the larger group, contestants decide simply to bid one higher than the person beside them. While this is a smart move if you are the last contestant (and that is the highest bid), people in the middle of the bidding get caught up in the excitement and fall back on what they thought they were supposed to do when they had followed along at home so many times before.

Instead of surveying the competitive landscape and offering a unique bid that might give them a better chance to win, they effectively cancel out a chance to win by worrying too much about the person before them.

The bottom line is that in marketing simply bidding “one higher” isn’t going to work. You need to OWN a space in the consumer’s mind that is uniquely yours. I’m going to go Inception on you right now and place a reference within a reference. The Price Is Right has done a very good job of owning the daytime game show space. Can you think of any others that come close? By offering a unique blend of entertainment that combines excitement, unpredictability, and ever-changing setups, the show gives consumers a product that is unlike most any other game show.

There are two lessons to be learned here:

• Old tricks do not work in every situation – Be aware of changing environments and be prepared to act quickly.
• You aren’t always competing with the people directly beside you – By focusing solely on direct competition we can lose sight of the game. In the meantime, some other competitor swoops in and takes all the prizes.

Be proactive and identify (or create) a differentiator that helps you own a unique position in the target market’s mind. This way you don’t always have to react to what others are doing. Instead, you can build the game around the rules that you set. Sure they can be the last bidder, but you can be the host.