Swallow Your Pride and Accept the Position the Market Gives You

Sometimes, a company's perception of its own strengths is inconsistent with how its customers perceive it. When the market has already granted you a positive position—even if it's not the one you wanted—it is often better to swallow your pride and build upon that existing perception.

Fighting against a positive image that customers have already assigned to you is a waste of resources.

The Divergence of Perception:

The Company's Goal: A company might want to be seen as a leader in hardware performance.
The Customer's Reality: Customers might be buying the product primarily because they perceive the company as having superior software quality and support.

The Strategic Choice:

When this divergence occurs, the company faces a choice:

Fight the Perception: Continue to spend money and effort trying to convince the market of a position it is reluctant to accept.
Embrace the Perception: Accept the position the market has already given you and make it the cornerstone of your promotional strategy.

The second path is almost always more effective. If customers already believe you have the best software people, make that the central theme of your marketing. It is far easier to reinforce an existing positive belief than to create a new one from scratch. This is a pragmatic application of Positioning is a Psychological Location in the Customer's Mind.