Strengthening a Weak Horizontal Positioning

There’s an important assumption right there in the title of this article, and that’s the fact that horizontal positioning is naturally weaker, all things considered, because it’s often less addressable.

A Definition

But first an important definition: horizontal positioning is not focused on a vertical industry, defined as an NAICS (or the earlier SIC) code. The three consistently largest verticals for decades have been tech, financial services, and healthcare. Those are so broad, in fact, that a viable vertical positioning has to be focused on a narrower slice within those three, and of course there are thousands of possibilities within the larger B2B and B2C world.

As the name might suggest, horizontal positioning is…duh…horizontal. In other words, it’s applying your expertise across many verticals, and what’s unique about how you apply that expertise is that it’s very narrow in terms of service offering design. Vertical positioning (with a few exceptions) is doing quite a few things for a very narrow vertical, while horizontal positioning is doing one thing for many different verticals. It’s common to hear people describe positioning as “discipline for market” or “what you do for whom.” That’s not all bad, but it fails to understand the distinction between horizontal and vertical positioning. Through that lens, you would emphasize the discipline over the market in horizontal positioning, and you would emphasize the market over the discipline in vertical.

Some Examples

Here are some examples of horizontal positioning:

• Helping established brands reach a younger audience.
• Employer branding.
• CRO for Ecommerce.
• Portals to build engaged communities.
• Digital employee recruitment.
• Messaging for companies facing difficult triggers of change.
• ABM for expert advisors.
• Marketing automation for complex sales.
• Design systems for startups.
• Rapid response SEM for multi-location retail.
• Making legacy brands relevant again.
• Bringing gamification to engage consumers.

Keep in mind that there are typically two ways to define a horizontal focus: by a very tight service offering (annual reports, employee engagement, A/B testing, etc.) or a very tight demographic (Hispanic, young people, wealthy people, etc.).

The Allure and Challenge of Horizontal

Now let’s layer in how firms like yours choose their positioning, and we have to acknowledge that it’s not always about expertise. I’ll express this with two statements:

• Most firms prefer a horizontal positioning because it provides more variety and thus feels less restrictive. But…
• The majority of those firms fail to identify a viable horizontal, and so they reluctantly default to a vertical because they can more easily find their prospects.

Here’s an example of that challenge. Say you want to focus on large rebranding projects for Fortune 5,000 companies. That involves doing one tight thing (rebranding) to be applied across many vertical industries, which is the very definition of horizontal positioning. Sounds interesting and lucrative, right? But how are you going to find the buyers…and hit them at the right time? Rebranding initiatives come from all over the place within a corporate setting, and the first time you hear about such a project is when the firm that did land it announces the launch of the new brand. You’ve got to be a famous firm to land those projects.

On the opposite side, here’s an example of a very viable horizontal positioning: investor relations. The buyers are easily found and they need you all the time. And you could add a secondary vertical to that positioning to make it even more viable: IR for financial services or something else.

And sometimes a horizontal positioning sounds really good, until you look a little deeper and it’s obvious that you’ll actually accept all clients and you aren’t being choosy at all. A great example of this is:

• Helping challenger brands dominate a market

The problem is this: everybody (except the established leader) sees themselves as a challenger, and so you’re really just creating a difference without a meaningful distinction. And my reliable guess is that you don’t really know anything special about challenger brands. But what if you started by defining exactly what you mean by a challenger brand:

• Not the leader, but at least in the top four by share of market.
• Climbing up the charts already or with a mandate to do so by the board.
• Willing to spend more on marketing than the average of that category. These numbers are published and it’s easy to verify.
• They are willing to take risks (market leaders don’t take risks because they want to hang onto their share; challenger brands must take risks and consumers expect them to).

And then once you’ve been a little bit more scientific about who qualifies to work with you, have some actual science behind your approach. And then generate loads of insight that plays that promise off.

Strengthening a Weaker Horizontal Choice

But now to the very heart of this article: how to strengthen an otherwise weak horizontal. These are those horizontal positioning choices that sound really interesting (primarily because they invite wide exploration) but when you’re honest, after a couple of drinks, you admit that you don’t’ really have much of an unfair advantage over your competition. Here’s an example:

• We help you reach middle America.

That’s a vast market, first of all, which would make it appealing. It’s largely rural, and what you might have heard described as the “flyover states”. But then picture a potential client talking to one of your competitors and saying something like this: “Hey, the firm we’re talking to specializes in reaching consumers in middle America. Are you also good at that, too?” The answer will almost certainly be yes…unless you can supplement your expertise with something that other firms don’t have.

How would you strengthen those? There are quite a few ways, but I’m just going to highlight one of the half-dozen ways, and that answer is proprietary research or a truly remarkable, replicable process that can be implemented by ordinary employees.

A Fort Wayne firm (located in middle America, of course) has done just that, and so they talk about them as a group, and then they supplement that with solid research that gets applied to each client engagement.

The lesson in crafting a horizontal positioning is to make sure that the target market is as addressable as it is in a vertical positioning, and then to supplement it with something else, and proprietary research is where you should usually start.

The lesson? Horizontal positioning carries many advantages, but it usually needs more strengthening to be viable.