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

by April Dunford

Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.

If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales. If we fail at marketing and sales, the entire business fails. Like speaking Japanese slowly and loudly to a person who speaks only English, putting a bigger marketing budget behind confusing and unclear positioning doesn’t work. And it’s hard to blame the sales process when it takes several meetings for a customer to figure out what your product is, let alone whether or not they want to purchase it.

“How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess.” WARREN BUFFETT

Positioning is a secret superpower that, when harnessed correctly, can change

the way the world thinks about a problem, a technology or even an entire market.

Above all, you recognize that your business will not succeed if you can’t connect product and prospect. Customers need to be able to easily understand what your product is, why it’s special and why it matters to them. When positioning is not working, it often looks like a marketing or sales problem; dig a bit below the surface and you can see that something else is going on.

When you don’t own your positioning, you are putting your company at a competitive disadvantage. Talk to people—not just friends and family—who would be great prospects for your offering. Show them your product and explain what it does. Now ask them how they would describe what you do. Likewise, ask existing customers about your offering and see what they say. If you see a disconnect between how your happy customers think about your product and how prospects see it, you likely have a positioning problem.

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. Context can completely transform the way we think about a product.

Even a world-class product, poorly positioned, can fail.

As product creators, we need to understand that the choices we make in positioning and context

can have a massive impact on our businesses—for better or worse.

the road from an idea to a market-ready product is rarely a straight line.

Frequently, the product we end up with is not what we started out to build.

You were trapped in your original positioning, even though the market had moved on. For startups and tech companies, this problem is very common. Our markets are complex, overlapping and shifting rapidly. Our customers operate in a context that is often quite different from our startup or tech bubble.

every product can be positioned in multiple ways and often the best position for a product is not the default.

You need to highlight the aspects of this product that make it really special and in a way that puts those features at the very center of how you position

Yes, your product contains cake, but it’s the stick and the shape that make it amazing. You need to position your product so that the stick and the shape make

sense. If you position your product as a lollipop, suddenly the stick and the ball belong. Of course it has a stick. Of course it has a ball. Of course it’s a snack and not a dessert. But this isn’t just any lollipop, it’s a lollipop for grownups, so we made it out of cake. A cake pop is easy to understand and, for ...

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.

“malicious compliance,” meaning you have completed something that was requested of you, simply to illustrate the stupidity of the request.)

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.

The competitive alternative is what your target customers would “use” or “do” if your product didn’t exist.

Our customers often do not know nearly as much about the universe of potential solutions to a problem as we do. As product creators, we need to be experts in the different solutions that exist in a market, including the advantages and disadvantages of choosing them. Customers, however, have often never purchased a solution like yours before. They are approaching the solution to their problem with a clean slate and little knowledge of what “state of the art” in your domain looks like. You may worry a lot about an up-and-coming startup in your space, but your customers have likely never heard of them. In business software, the most common competitive alternative is a combination of general-purpose business software (spreadsheets, documents,

presentations) and manual processes. It’s important to really understand what customers compare your solution with, because that’s the yardstick they use to define “better.” For example, your solution might be much easier to use than the product that other startups are selling, but if the real alternative in the mind of a customer is Excel, ...

Your unique attributes are your secret sauce, the things you can do that the alternatives can’t.

Value is the benefit you can deliver to customers because of your unique attributes.

Your sales and marketing efforts have to be focused on the customers who are most likely to buy from you. Your positioning needs to clearly identify who those folks are. And simply put, they are the customers who care the most about the value your product delivers. You need to identify what sets these folks apart. What is it about these customers that makes them love your product more than others? How can we identify them?

Your target market is the customers who buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts and tell their friends about your offerings.

Suppose your company was running out of cash and if the team didn’t close a certain amount of business by the end of the month, very bad things were going to happen. What types of customers would you focus on and why? What are the characteristics of those customers that make them more likely to buy?

Until we have more experience with real customers, it’s better to keep our minds open and our positioning loose, and see what happens. Think of your product as a fishing net. You have a theory that your net is good for catching grouper, but you haven’t fished with it yet so you aren’t certain what you might catch. At first, you’ll want to go where there are lots of different fish and see what you pull up. If you notice over time you’re pulling in a lot of tuna, not grouper, you can move to the tuna spot and do the same amount of work to get a lot more fish. If you had positioned your tuna net as a grouper net in the beginning, you might never have figured out your best positioning. Positioning your net broadly as a “fish net” when you have little market experience

is the best way to keep your options open until you have enough customer experience to start seeing patterns.

In general, your website, your sales and marketing materials, your pricing and even your immediate product roadmap will be designed to serve customers, and therefore should reflect your customer positioning not your investor positioning. Investors will understand that and will also understand that the story in your investor pitch deck may look dramatically different from the story in your sales deck.

In the workshops I run, I set aside the first hour to go over positioning concepts and definitions with the team. At a minimum, the team needs to be on the same page regarding: What positioning means and why it is important Which components make up a position and how we define each of those How market maturity and competitive landscape impact the style of positioning you choose for a product

The goal of the 10- Step Positioning Process is to find the best position for a product, one that puts the product in the context of a market where it can easily win because the product has obvious benefits over alternatives.

Customers don’t always see competitors the same way we do, and their opinion is the only one that matters for positioning.

Strong positioning is centered on what a product does best. Once you have a list of competitive alternatives, the next step is to isolate what makes you different and better than those alternatives.

It’s OK to list things here that some folks on the team might think of as negative. A software company in one of my workshops talked about how they were the only company on the market that required a professional services team to come onsite to install the software. The head of sales felt that was a negative, because it took longer for a company to get up and running with the software. The head of customer service saw it as a uniquely positive attribute, because certain customers wanted that type of customization and high-touch service. Your opinion of your own strengths is irrelevant without proof.

Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.

In general, the segment needs to meet at least two criteria to be worthy of focus: (1) it needs to be big enough that it’s possible to meet the goals of your business, and (2) it needs to have important, specific, unmet needs that are common to the segment.

Category creation is about selling the market on the problem first, rather than on your solution. If the category doesn’t already exist, it means customers aren’t currently aware that they have a problem. They don’t understand the cost of not solving that problem, nor do they understand the potential value they can unlock by solving that problem. Customers need to be aware of those things before you can successfully convince them to purchase any solution (including yours). This style is very, very difficult to execute, but if you manage to pull it off, the rewards are massive.

Unlike the other positioning styles, Create a New Game allows you to create a market that is perfectly tailored to your strengths and weaknesses. It allows you to set the boundaries of the market exactly where you want them and to define purchase criteria so they map exactly to the things you do best. Anyone who successfully defines a market can become its leader because the market was specifically designed that way. Once the market is created, it takes serious work to change it in the minds of customers. Companies that successfully create a category in the customers’ minds are well set up to lead it, not only in the short term but also in the future.

write a messaging document. Every campaign you create or new piece of material you build is going to have a slightly different purpose and slightly different messaging. If there isn’t one master messaging document that is used as the starting point, your messaging (and often your positioning) will start to creep as messages are built on modified messages in a chain.

I want to leave you with some key takeaways: 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 you to your differentiators. 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. Don’t layer on a trend just for the sake of being trendy—it’s better to be successful and boring, rather than fashionable and bewildering.