**Karen Chiang** is a Managing Partner at Ibbaka. See her Skill Profile on Ibbaka Talent.

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Let’s explore the next strategic choice, “Where to Play.” Customers will always have a choice. For organizations to drive growth, we need to identify the best group of customers where we are well positioned to win and retain their business. As we explore the “Where to Play” choice of our strategy, we are really focusing on understanding our playing field. In reading this post, I hope that you will get a clear understanding of …

What we mean by “Where to Play”
What are the considerations that feed into this choice
What are some of the approaches to inform decision making

Where to Play - The Strategic Pricing Choices

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Essentially, it is a choice that defines where we want to compete, and it lays the foundation for where we need to win. Where to Play defines the business we are in. Because we have to be better at delivering value relative to others we need to make explicit choices on where we want to compete. Here we establish a clear mapping of prioritizing your portfolio of offers to the prioritized segments.

Considerations for Where to Play Pricing Choices

Coming to a decision on Where to Play begins with a deep understanding of our market and potentially our category. We can strengthen our view of this by looking at:

External Factors

Define and size our market and category
Trends that may be impacting the market
Understanding our market segmentation
- Values (economic, emotional, community)
- Firmographics (location, size, revenues)
Identifying our stakeholders
- Decision makers
- Key influencers
- Gatekeepers
- Buyers
- Investors
- Consumers
Who are our competitors
- How are we differentiated
- What is their business model
- What is their value proposition

Internal Factors

SWOT analysis of our current or proposed solution offering
(Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats)
- In addressing our market’s need
- In response to our customer’s requirements
- In relationship to next best competitive alternatives

We consider the above because the aim of this is to understand where we will be able to thrive. The decision on “Where to Play” is the outcome of assessing our priorities and to focus our actions on the most attractive opportunities.

Approaches to inform “Where to Play” choices

I will cover a few approaches that we can use to inform our Where to Play decisions.

Let’s start with the task of quantifying our market. We should examine our market from several perspectives. Who are our customers and users? Do we want to play locally, nationally, across regions, globally? We may be asking whether we have advantage to scale by adding geographies. What portion of the market are we able to address? For example, do we want to capture the higher-end of the market or are we looking to target more the mainstream? Perhaps it has more to do with the maturity of our market in that we are working with early adopters. What part of the market can we truly serve?

To prioritize for growth we need to identify and focus on our areas of strength. Can our strengths cater to pockets of the market that are experiencing higher levels of growth? It would be smarter for us to focus on areas where we have a stronger leadership position than our competitors.

Markets are dynamic and will shift in response to trends so we need to pay attention. We should assess whether a trend will have a positive or negative impact on us. And, we should take into account the size of the impact. Factor in the speed at which we need to embrace or respond to the trend. Can we also identify any connections between the trends. Sometimes these strong relationships can give other indications for opportunity. Scenario planning can help us to explore the ramifications of trends as we imagine the future.

Customer analysis is a huge area to tackle for our Where to Play decisions. Some of the approaches I will quickly review include: stakeholder mapping, customer segmentation, segment profiling, and buying process.

Stakeholder mapping is a summarization of the key players in the market. It is important to to understand the key roles played and the relationships between those roles. With stakeholder mapping, we are trying to get a good picture of level and sphere of influence.

The purpose of customer segmentation is to enable us to be more effective at identifying the most attractive customers (those who we can provide high value to, who recognize our value, and are willing to pay for our value). We want to be able to target and market specifically to this group of customers.

When we define our segments, we are essentially developing a profile, the key characteristics of a segment. We want to understand their goals. What are they trying to achieve? What do they value? How do they buy? How do they engage with us over time?

Indeed, understanding our customers’ buying process is critical for ensuring that our sales process supports our customers’ needs. The buying process maps the process in which our customers consider making a purchasing decision. There are usually several stages in the process and we have to also consider that there are alternate paths our buyers can take.

Competitor analysis is essential. As mentioned above, customers have a choice and just as we are trying to position and differentiate ourselves so are our customers. If we can swap out our competitors names with the value claims we make, we have failed to establish meaningful differentiation. It is an ongoing process to understand our competitor profile. We want to understand our competitors products and solutions but we also need to understand their positioning. From a pricing perspective, we want to also understand what strategies they are taking to price and where they are choosing to play.

Assessing our capabilities and portfolio of offers is an important factor in determining Where to Play. One of the first steps is to take an inventory of our products in your offering and define the job they perform. In defining your portfolio, you will and to understand how each offer performs in terms of revenue, sales, its growth factor, margins, percentage of the category it captures… Bear in mind this is not just an inward inspection; rather, you will need to apply this in relation to how your competitors are fairing. Also, consider what this looks like today versus what the vision of the future may be. Remember, products in a portfolio will have different roles and will also have different degrees of importance.

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