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

by April Dunford

positioning as “context setting” for products.

We rely on context to make sense of a world that is full of street performers and concert hall musicians, and full of millions of products of all shapes and sizes. Context allows us to make thousands of little decisions about what we should pay attention to and what we can simply ignore. Without context to guide us, we would be overwhelmed, maybe even paralyzed by choice.

the frame of reference that potential customers build around our offerings is critical to staying in business.

most products can be positioned in multiple different markets. Your dessert might be better positioned as a snack, and your email solution might make more sense if it were positioned as chat.

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 coffee-drinking grownups on the go, it’s a big improvement over your run-of-the-mill lollipop intended for kids.

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 ...

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 ...

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.

In business software, the most common competitive alternative is a combination of general-purpose business software (spreadsheets, documents, presentations) and manual processes.

The key is to make sure they are different when compared with the capabilities of the real competitive alternatives from a customer’s perspective.

If unique attributes are your secret sauce, then value is the reason why someone might care about your secret sauce.

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.

This specificity of positioning allowed us to be really targeted in our sales and marketing—instead of focusing our marketing on any company with a lot of data, we could specifically target banks.

Market categories help customers use what they know to figure out what they don’t.

trends can help customers understand why your offering is something they need to pay attention to right now.

Trends help buyers understand why this product is important to them right now. Trends can help business buyers understand how a product aligns with overall company priorities, making it a more strategic and urgent purchase. Trends are important because, as customers, we want to learn about new, interesting and potentially disruptive technologies or approaches.

Trends in technology can be applied to multiple market categories. Blockchain technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality are examples of trends that are relevant to multiple different markets. AI itself is not a market category and tells customers little about what a product is. AI-empowered CRM, however, tells us what the product is (CRM is

the market category) and gives us a clue about what makes it special right now (the use of AI).

Position your product in a market category that puts your offering’s strengths in their best context, and then look for relevant trends in your industry that can help customers understand why they should consider this product right now.

Eg CDP for ABM

We increased our growth by concentrating on our best-fit customers.

The first step in the positioning exercise is to make a short list of your best customers.

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.

Customer-facing positioning must be centered on a customer frame of reference.

In the early days of a company with a single product, positioning the product and the company as the same thing is the easiest path to establishing a brand in the minds of customers, because there are simply fewer things to remember.

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

Market confusion starts with our disconnect between understanding the product as product creators, and understanding the product as customers first perceive it.

From those answers, I could assume they viewed our database as one that can quickly execute queries. But when we asked them what they would use if our database didn’t exist, none of them named another database; instead, they suggested business intelligence tools or data warehouses.

What would our best customers do if we didn’t exist? The answer could be that they would use another product that looks like a direct competitor with you. But often that’s not the case. For many new products, the answer is “use a pen and paper” or “hire an intern to do it.”

if the product didn’t exist, they would simply “do nothing.”

Focus on the characteristics of your product or company that drives a potential benefit—ideally those features are based on objective facts and are provable.

Consideration attributes are things that customers care about when they are evaluating whether or not to make a purchase. Every product has features that you can connect directly to a goal the customer would like to accomplish right now.

Articulating value takes the benefits one step further: putting benefits into the context of a goal the customer is trying to achieve.

Table 1. Features mapped to benefit and value

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.

Now think about your best customers. Everything about doing business with them is different. They understood your product immediately and couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. They bought quickly and instead of asking for a cheaper price, they might have told you your product should be priced higher. They tell their friends about your product, and not only do they not churn, they will fight anyone who tries to take it away from them. They don’t just like your product, they loooooove it. Marketing and selling to these folks doesn’t take much effort once you’ve found them—they are “buying” as much as you are “selling.”

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.