The goal of the Big Fish, Small Pond style of positioning is to carve off a piece of the market where the rules are a little bit different-just enough to give your product an edge over the category leader.

Create a New Game: Positioning to win a market you create Sometimes new technology or circumstances pave the way for a completely new market. Other times a market can be created by combining one or more existing markets to form one with different buying criteria. Developing a new market comes with its own distinct set of opportunities and challenges.

The best way to determine if your chosen subsegment is big enough is to determine how many sales you need to make in the next year to meet your revenue goals. If you need to close thirty deals to make your number this year and your target segment has only one hundred businesses in it, you are going to have to look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you need to close thirty deals and there are thousands of businesses in your subsegment, it's likely big enough for now.

Companies tend to shy away from this style because they are worried that moving from targeting the entire market to just a small piece of it will mean less oppor-tunity. In reality the opposite is frequently true: you are simply unselecting the part of the market that was never going to buy your product anyway in order to focus only on customers where you have a distinct advantage.

In Head to Head you are attempting to beat Coke in the cola market; in Big Fish, Small Pond, you're selling Coke for dogs. While your product is a lot like Coke (brown and fizzy), it does something that Coke doesn't do and that dogs really, really want (it tastes like bones).

If you choose to enter a market without a strong leader, you will have to commit to moving quickly to establish yourself as the leader before someone else does. For technology companies, this often means committing to growing your customer base as quickly as you can, which can require outside funding (and the risks and potential headaches that come with that).

The advantage of positioning in an existing market category is that you don't have to convince people the category needs to exist. You also benefit from the assumptions that the category brings to mind for prospects. The bonus is you get all of that without having to fight directly with an established leader.