Читать книгу A Guide to the Scientific Career - Группа авторов - Страница 136

A surgeon who has been known to his mentors as an adept, meticulous, and medically knowledgeable physician wants to establish a successful community practice. He specializes in neck surgery and continues to follow advancements in underlying clinical conditions. He sees his audience as local specialists and perhaps primary care physicians. Through networking with potential target audience members, he learns that many of them fear unnecessary surgery or inappropriate surgery with outcomes worse than the initial concerns. Many local primary care physicians describe how they field patient questions about geographically distant surgeons who have a strong online presence and marketing. They are often unsure who to recommend in the local area.

Our surgeon puts a lot of energy into staying up to date with the latest techniques and warranting surgery through accurate diagnosis. He does not wish to build a practice around handling direct patient calls at this time. He builds his positioning around the specialist and primary care physicians and his ability to offer discerning and appropriate surgery, expertly performed. In this way, he sets himself apart because he determines a need or a problem in the community, thereby accepting the values of his target audience. He has appropriately positioned himself in relation not to what he himself wants, but strategically in line with the values he has assessed in his target audience.

When preparing your positioning, consider three key components: your target audience and the problems that they value solutions for, your attributes that solve their problems, and some acknowledgment of the competition (how you uniquely qualify). This is expressed as a “promise” to your audience and provides the basis for your brand. Your brand promise is how you capture this in writing. It is ideal for you to have only one or two brand positionings. Consider the case study of an academic physician who wants to advance her career and learns that her value to clinical research organizations may also be valued among her institutional administrators.