There’s a positioning approach in brand strategy that’s rarely used but incredibly powerful. That separates the disruptors from the disrupted. This approach is not about innovation or better service. It’s a strategic approach called de-positioning, which at its core, puts the customer first. It’s about redefining a brand’s position in a market. It’s about making competitors look less capable of meeting customers’ needs while your brand emerges as the ultimate solution they’ve been searching for.
Consider these six B2B giants—Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Slack, ServiceNow, Workday, and Okta—who’ve harnessed de-positioning to not only outperform competitors, but to reshape their entire industry by creating radically relevant businesses.
Salesforce: De-Positioning the Competition by Listening to Customer Frustrations
Two decades ago, CRM was synonymous with clunky, on-premises systems from the likes of Oracle’s Siebel. These systems were a nightmare for customers – expensive, inflexible and difficult to use. Enter Salesforce, a company that not only built a better mousetrap, they questioned why customers should have to deal with mice at all. Marc Benioff and his team completely changed the narrative by listening carefully to customer frustration and delivering solutions.
Salesforce’s “No Software” movement was not just cheeky marketing, it was a direct response to customers’ pain around traditional software models. By highlighting those problems – expensive installations, endless updates, lack of flexibility – Salesforce championed the cloud as the customer-focused alternative, and disrupted the market by making on-premises CRM feel like dial-up internet in a fibre-optic world. All this simply by being hyper-focused on what the customer really needed.
AWS: Turning Servers into Dinosaurs by Solving Customer Scalability Issues
Remember when scaling your business meant investing heavily in buying more servers, finding space to store them, and hiring people to maintain them? Yeah, well, AWS remembers—and they saw how this model was holding customers back. So instead of directly attacking hardware providers, AWS changed the conversation. They spoke directly to customers, empathized with their challenges, and built a better solution.
They exposed the financial and operational burdens that customers faced in maintaining physical servers. By introducing a new paradigm where cloud computing wasn’t just viable but superior, they built scalability and flexibility unheard of in old-traditional models. And AWS didn’t just tip-toe into the market. AWS became the market. They freed customers from the constraints of outdated infrastructure and enabling them to focus on being innovative with their own businesses, which is exactly what they were looking for.
Slack: Email’s Executioner by Enhancing Customer Collaboration
Email is literally the cockroach of communication. It’s annoying. It’s resilient. It’s hard to kill. Emailers have existed in frustration, especially at work, with endless threads, lost attachments, and the dreaded “Reply All” fiasco. Slack set out on a mission to change that. But not by improving email, instead by building a platform that addressed the core communication issues people had to deal with.
Real-time messaging. Organized channels. Seamless integrations. All designed to improve collaboration and productivity. Slack didn’t just become a new tool, it became a new way of working. Companies didn’t just adopt it, they evangelized it. Project managers, in particular, became grateful because it made their lives a thousand times easier. And with a simple interface and modern brand identity, Slack became the cool kid on the block.
Real-time messaging. Organized channels. Seamless integrations. All designed to improve collaboration and productivity. Slack didn’t just become a new tool, it became a new way of working.
ServiceNow: Making Legacy IT Obsolete by Streamlining Customer Workflows
IT departments were once the basement dwellers dealing with clunky systems that everyone hated but thought they needed. ServiceNow saw this as an opportunity to improve the daily lives of these customers. They highlighted how traditional IT service management was a quagmire of inefficiency, causing headaches for all IT professionals.
By building a streamlined, cloud-based solution, ServiceNow addressed the specific pain points customers faced and made legacy systems look like Rube Goldberg machines. Moving beyond IT, they applied their cloud-based model to HR and customer service, recognizing that customers in these areas also craved maximum efficiency and simplicity. ServiceNow built the better product, but they also redefined what businesses should expect from their service platforms by putting customer demands at the forefront.
Workday: Outmaneuvering the Behemoths by Prioritizing Customer Usability
Taking on Oracle and SAP is like trying to beat the Yankees when you’re a middle school baseball team. Workday chose a different approach by focusing on customer pain. They shifted the narrative. Questioned the status quo. Pointed out the bloated, inflexible nature of traditional ERP and HCM systems that were incredibly frustrating to users, and de-positioned the bigs.
Their created a cloud-based, user-friendly platform that made the old systems seem like flip phones in a smartphone era. They prioritized usability and made their software intuitive. They appealed to a workforce that was tired of battling cumbersome interfaces. Workday outmuscled the giants and won over customers by delivering a solution that made their jobs more accessible, more efficient, and just more fun.
Okta: Securing the Future by Addressing Customer Security Concerns
As the world moved to the cloud, Okta recognized too that customers struggled with traditional identity and access management systems that were like locking the front door while the back door was wide open. They stressed the security risks inherent in outdated IAM systems, a fact that resonated deeply the customer fear about data breaches and cyber threats.
By embracing a zero-trust model better suited for modern challenges, Okta directly addressed those customer concerns. They simplified integration and working seamlessly with various applications made security both stronger and more user-friendly. Okta didn’t just sell security solutions, they became trusted advisors, synonymous with intelligent, customer-centric protection. People advising plus a smart technology platform = a winning equation.
Winning Through Radical Customer-Centricity
What’s the thread connecting these B2B powerhouses? They didn’t just outperform the competition—they made them irrelevant by obsessively focusing on customers. No mudslinging, no cheap shots. Just zeroing in on solving real problems and positioning their products and brands around primary solutions.
Success comes from becoming indispensable. De-Positioning done right showcases how you meet customer needs better than anyone else. How do you pull this off? Shift your focus from selling to truly listening and communicating.
Success comes from becoming indispensable. De-Positioning done right showcases how you meet customer needs better than anyone else. How do you pull this off? Shift your focus from selling to truly listening and communicating. Identify where competitors fall short. Tune into customer frustrations. Craft solutions and narratives that not only answers needs but anticipates them. Make lives easier. Make operations smoother. Make futures brighter. Stop selling, start connecting.
Putting the customer first redefines the game. By embracing customer-centric de-positioning as an approach, you build deep, lasting relationships. Are you just another company or the partner your customers can’t imagine doing without? The smartest strategy is to become so aligned that you become indispensable. When you do, you become radically relevant. You won’t just win, you’ll make the competition look like an afterthought.
