Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

by April Dunford

Context enables people to figure out what’s important. Positioning products is a lot like context setting in the opening of a movie.

When customers encounter a product they have never seen before, they will look for contextual clues to help them figure out what it is, who it’s for and why they should care. Taken together, the messaging, pricing, features, branding, partners and customers create context and set the scene for the product.

Great positioning takes into account all of the following: The customer’s point of view on the problem you solve and the alternative ways of solving that problem. The ways you are uniquely different from those alternatives and why that’s meaningful for customers. The characteristics of a potential customer that really values what you can uniquely deliver. The best market context for your product that makes your unique value obvious to those customers who are best suited to your product.

These are the Five (Plus One) Components of Effective Positioning: Competitive alternatives. What customers would do if your solution didn’t exist. Unique attributes. The features and capabilities that you have and the alternatives lack. Value (and proof). The benefit that those features enable for customers. Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to really care a lot about the value you deliver. Market category. The market you describe yourself as being part of, to help customers understand your value. (Bonus) Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand and/or are interested in that can help make your product more relevant right now.

Your best-fit customers hold the key to understanding what your product is.

Positioning impacts every group in the organization. Consider these outputs that all flow from positioning: Marketing: messaging, audience targeting and campaign development Sales and business development: target customer segmentation and account strategy Customer success: onboarding and account expansion strategy Product and development: roadmaps and prioritization

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.” John Culkin

In my experience, if there’s a marketing concept more widely misunderstood than positioning, it’s segmentation.

An actionable segmentation captures a list of a person’s or company’s easily identifiable characteristics that make them really care about what you do.

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.

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).

Category creation is hard, slow work, but if you are successful the rewards are huge.”

Any product can be positioned in multiple markets. Your product is not doomed to languish in a market where nobody understands how awesome it is.

Great positioning rarely comes by default. If you want to succeed, you have to determine the best way to position your product. Deliberate, try, fail, test and try again.

Understanding what your best customers see as true alternatives to your solution will lead y...

Position yourself in a market that makes your strengths obvious to the folks you want to sell to.

Use trends to make your product more interesting to customers right now, but be very cautious.