A few weeks ago I wrote about positioning statements and value propositions. At a recent tradeshow, we put some theory into practice.
In the picture below, you can see members of Sandvine’s Asia-Pacific team getting ready for SDN and OpenFlow Asia-Pacific Congress, in Hong Kong. This is a relatively small, focused show, so you don’t get the massive booths you’d see at something like Mobile World Congress. Instead, we went with a pop-up style booth.
In thinking about our booth messaging, we had a couple of things to consider:
- A small physical presence like this doesn’t give you a whole lot of real estate to include many messages and visuals to get attention and convey what you do
- The show is focused enough that we can take certain domain knowledge and familiarity as a given; for instance, the audience would know about SDN and OpenFlow technologies, but we had to be mindful that they often wouldn’t know what our company does
So what did we go with? Behind the team, you can see most of the statement that’s on the booth. The full text reads, “For operators who want to deploy policy control as a VNF, Sandvine’s Virtual Series delivers a 3GPP-compliant platform to fit your future”.¹
Does this sound familiar? It’s an awful lot like Geoffrey Moore’s positioning statement: For <target customer> who <statement of the opportunity>, our <product/service/name> is a <product category> that <statement of benefit>.
From theory to practice, baby!
Some members of the Sandvine Asia-Pacific team getting ready for “SDN and OpenFlow Asia-Pacific Congress” in Hong Kong.
¹You’ll just have to trust me that attendees know what “policy control”, “VNF”, and “3GPP” mean (this falls directly from the “Know your audience” guidance in the related post)
Lee Brooks is the founder of Cromulent Marketing, a boutique marketing agency specializing in crafting messaging, creating content, and managing public relations for B2B technology companies.
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