[MUSIC] Today we want to talk a little bit and think about competitive positioning and by this I mean understanding where you fit in the market in which you're operating. You may think as an arts organization, you don't have to compete, that it's a collaborative cooperative environment, and to some extent it is. But that doesn't obviate the need to still ask the question of where do you fit, why are you different, and how can you find a place that's unique and special for your organization. So today we're gonna focus on this question of positioning and I'll give you a tool that I think might be helpful for doing this work. Now why would positioning matter? I think there are three reasons. First is, when you start to analyze and understand the competitive environment and your position within it, you are actually taking a big step towards forming your identity, saying to the world what you do, who you are, what you're all about. So it's a catalyzing moment where identity is formed. Second, understanding the competition's actually very critical to speaking to the donor and audiences around your arts organizations. They wanna know what makes you special, what makes you different. And so to be able to communicate to that world, you need to have a clear sense of your position and your identity and be able to communicate that to this external environment. Third, you need to have a sense of what makes you special, what makes you different. Competing position is that moment where you can understand what actually separates your organization from all of the other ones. So for all three reasons, for forming identity, for relating and speaking to donors and audiences and for being able to answer the question of, what makes you special and different, this exercise I think is very useful. So let's get into it a little bit and then we'll build towards a tool that I think you can use on a very easy, daily basis. What are the key questions you wanna ask when it comes to positioning? First is, what market and I in? You want to understand who is in the kind of space, you want to define the space in which you are going to operate and say this is my market, this is my terrain that I am going to be working in. Second, you want to ask a question about who has similar programs, who is working with similar audiences and who's in the similar geography or location. Those are gonna be three critical dimensions we're gonna use to start to understand the landscape and map it out more effectively. And finally you're gonna want to ask this big question about differentiation, what really sets my organization apart. The whole exercise, I think, is about isolating those points of real difference that you can use to make the case for your organization. So you might think, well, when do you this sort of thing. You may think it has to be done way, way before anything happens, that you have to have this information before you actually launch so that you make a successful star-up. That's actually probably a good idea, it'd be great if every organization did this work before they actually engaged the process of creating the enterprise or the arts organization. But in reality there are gonna be plenty of times when you're not gonna have time to do it at the start, you're gonna only have time to do it once you get into the process. So I think competitive analysis ideally happens early on, at the start-up phase, but it can happen once you get into the enterprise, once you get into the arts vision that you want to pursue. You can then do this mapping exercise and make adjustments and get better at positioning even once you've launched. So don't think of it as something that has to be done in one particular time place, I think it's a continual exercise, something that you're gonna wanna revisit, come back to and refine over time. Because the environment around you is gonna shift, it's not gonna remain stable, and you're gonna wanna be able to make adjustments over time, as your organization changes and develops. So think about a cone, a funnel. At the top are gonna be a large number of organizations, any possible organization that's in your sphere that you think you should know about. That's gonna be an enormous unmanageable number, but beneath that, it's gonna be a smaller number of organizations that are much closer to what you want to do and those are gonna be your closest competitors. And what I'd like you to do is start thinking about the process of how you're going to build this funnel, this conceptual funnel which is going to take a large number of organizations and narrow it down to the ones that really matter. And once we have those that really matter, that are closest to you, then we're gonna figure out how we're different, and how we stand out. So, what's at stake in this kind of whole process of finding a market? I think there's a big question about asking who is in the same kind of programmatic space as you, and working with the same audience, but maybe in a different geography. Another case, there could be overlap in terms of audience but not in terms of the content of the program or the geography. In other cases, there could be overlap with geography and audience, but not with program. There are a lot of possible combinations across that Venn diagram. But the key question is, do you want to figure out where the real points of overlap, particularly over time as you understand what you do. You wanna understand where you overlap and where you don't with that smaller group of closer competitors. So that's what we wanna start to think about, is defining that market and get to a point where we understand where those points of overlap are. What really is revealed in this whole process? I think a lot of things come out as you do this competitive analysis and we'll work towards the two in just a second, but think about why you'd want to do it and I think there are a lot of good reasons. One is you're gonna unveil and understand who's out in your world. You're gonna understand much better the ecology in which you're operating. You're gonna know whether or not you're in a saturated or a very open-ended kind of free market. That's gonna be very valuable to understand both the risk and volatility of the world in which you're gonna you're gonna operate. You're gonna wanna have some sense, and I think it will come out through this competitive analysis, of how stable this market is, how many organizations are coming and going in and out of the market, and that's gonna be a valuable point for you to understand about how much change your environment actually contains. And there's gonna be some organizations that are gonna come and go and there's gonna be other cases where the market is gonna be stable and organizations are gonna be around for a long, long time. You won't know that until you do this sort of analysis, and you'll have much better sense of what you're getting into. Now thinking about markets and the place in which you're gonna position your organization, think about four critical dimensions, the number of providers, the size of the opportunity at hand, the environmental stability of the market, and the risk entailed. Across all four of these dimensions, there's gonna be a lot of possible variation and you're gonna want to understand what the exact characteristics are of the market that you're entering and the world that you're gonna try to find your place. Now, when it comes to the number of providers, there can be a very small number of organizations doing what you wanna do but there could also be a large number. When it comes to the opportunity at hand, it could be small but it could also be very, very large in terms of doing something that's gonna have a big splash and have a lot of impact. When it comes to stability, there are environments that very stable and very quiet and unchanging and there are ones that are incredibly turbulent and fast moving. And when it comes to risk, the range is enormous. I think if you understand the market in which you're operating, you start to develop this kind of picture of who's in it, who's coming, who's going, how fast this market is changing, how big is it, you're going to have a better chance of really positioning wisely within it. So where do you fit? That's where you gotta start asking this kind of next level question, what characteristics describe the organizations around you and what makes you different from them. That's the core questions you're gonna ask, and you gonna also wanna get to the deeper question of what things really matter, what things really set you apart? I like this Venn diagram that has program, geography and audience in it, that kind of gives you the sense of arts organizations are in a complex environment. But at its core, the things that I would be focusing on this question of who's got content that's similar to mine, who's working in the same neighborhood or location as I am, and who's targeting a similar audience base as I am. I'd start there, and then go deeper. Now as I said, you're gonna have a funnel it's going to at the start be very broad it's going to have a large number of organizations, but over time, as you do this work you're going to whittle down that number to a smaller group. There are going to be organizations that are similar along either the programmatic side, the audience side, or the geography dimension. But together you're going to create this list of organizations that you think are close by you and that's gonna be the starting point for the tool that I want you to develop. And here it is, it's called a competitive analysis matrix. And what you've done is you've taken that small group of organizations that you've pulled out of your analysis, you've put them on the left side of the table. And across the top, you've defined the critical competitive dimensions that you think really matter. Now, I think audience, geography, and quality of program are obvious elements, but there are other ones you could add to that in terms of outreach efforts. They can be ones about cost and ticket price, there could be a lot of other traits that you might wanna build in across the top to really give you the picture that matters. So I think the starting three are important, but I think you can add to product geography and audience other traits that might be absolutely critical in your world. And once you have this table, and you have the right traits defined across the top, and the right group of competitive organizations on the left, you can start marking off who's got what characteristic and where you fit in this picture. At the end of the day you ideally want to have a sense that your organization is better or different at least across a number of the dimensions you've defined compared to the organizations that you believe are closest to what you wanna do. If you do this sort of exercise I think you're gonna have, the start for a much deeper understanding of the competitive landscape in which you're operating. So let's sum up, I'd like you to do three things. Think about those key starting differentiators, audience, program, geography, add other ones that you think are critical across the top of that list of traits and build that matrix. You're gonna find that group of organizations that are your direct competitors. It's not gonna be enormous endless list as you're gonna narrow it down to a manageable number. And finally, you're gonna build a matrix that's gonna pull these two things together, the critical traits and the competitive organizations into that matrix. And that's gonna be the tool I'd like you to use to really map the competitive environment. Now we've sketched out the tool, in the next section let's talk about how you'd actually do it and we'll look at some examples. [MUSIC]
