#2 How acquisitions impact positioning (and vice versa!) - with Gwen Lafage, VP Brand & Content @ Sinch

How do you position a peer-to-peer community? Where do you start? You don't need to be a celebrity in your space, but you do need to know your domain, intimately. Differentiation is so important. Why join a community when one exists that already meets your need?  You need a critical mass of interested people willing to jump onboard in the first days. Content is king (or queen!). To keep people coming back you need to keep them interested, stimulated, learning.

Category creation is the biggest positioning play out there. But how do you actually do it? Frida provides a solid 5-point plan:  Get absolutely aligned on the category you want to create internally. Get external prof your category concept makes sense. Speak with your customers. Get references.  Become the thought-leader within the category you're creating. You need to be top of mind and top of search. Work together with a third-party like G2 or Gartner to get that critical industry recognition (NB. This is not easy!) Build a community around the category to help it thrive and provide a source of new ideas. GetAccept are succeeding with 1-4 and now they're considering how to approach 5. Check out the episode for a far more thorough breakdown.

"You've $100 to spend on ads. What would you do with it?" Mimmi's first reaction was to spend it on existing customers. And that pretty well encapsulates Teamtailor's core positioning: they differentiate themselves through their obsession with a great customer experience. That's the secret sauce behind the word of mouth that's helped this relatively small Stockholm startup land in 100 markets in record time, and with consistently strong reviews.

How do you position yourself effectively when your company (to say nothing of your category and market!) is changing so rapidly? I sat down with Gwen Lafage, VP Brand & Content at Sinch (who've acquired 8 companies since 2020) to discuss how acquisitions impact positioning, and (critically) how finding the right positioning is key to making the right acquisitions in the first place. 

Here it is! Episode #1 of xPositioning. I sat down with Ling Koay, Chief Brand Officer @ Oneflow for a wide-ranging (and entertaining!) discussion about positioning a modern B2B SaaS company. Ling's insights were both deep and varied, but 2 things really stuck with me:  Innovation is a key source of differentiation, which in turn is a key component of good positioning. Take Oneflow; they've moved beyond the PDF-style contracts still central to their competitors' offerings. They've developed "truly digital" contract signing, where contracts ought to simply flow, like magic, be fun, and not be full of friction. Being "fun" is central to their brand, and how they communicate. Check out their wildly successful "Tinder Swindler" post on LinkedIn to see how being fun can drive traffic and meaningful engagement (inc new leads and new candidates!)