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

by April Dunford

You’ve got a cool product, but nobody understands it. You think it’s simple, but customers don’t. They compare your products with those that are nothing like it. At first you think this is a sales or marketing problem. If prospects don’t understand what your product is all about, it must be because they haven’t really heard you, or you’re not saying it clearly enough. But if that were true, then you would see additional marketing result in more sales, and your sales reps wouldn’t have to work so hard explaining what your product is and why anyone should care.

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

Positioning is a fundamental input into every tactic we execute, every campaign we launch, every piece of content we create, every sales pitch we make.

If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales. If we fail at marketing and sales, the entire business fails.

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

Without that context, products are very difficult to understand, and the whole company suffers—not just the marketing and sales teams.

Often, you’re too close to your product to realize that the market doesn’t think about it the way you do.

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.

“Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” MICHAEL PORTER

Customers need to be able to easily understand what your product is, why it’s special and why it matters to them.

Your current customers love you, but new prospects can’t figure out what you’re selling.

Your company has long sales cycles and low close rates, and you’re losing out to the competition.

You have high customer churn.

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.

Even a world-class product, poorly positioned, can fail. In the context of a concert hall, Bell is perceived as producing something that is very valuable. He’s dressed to perform. He’s surrounded by an orchestra on a beautiful stage. The program tells people what awards he has won. Whereas, when he’s playing outside a subway station, everything around him has changed. He’s dressed like a street performer and standing beside a garbage can, playing for tips. His product—the music—hasn’t changed, but in this context, few people recognize its value.

“If you’re a baker, making bread, you’re a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you’re not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you’re an artist. So the context makes the difference.” MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

Most products are exceptional only when we understand them within their best frame of reference.

Without meaning to, we trap ourselves within our own context. We don’t know how to shift the framework to best communicate what our product actually is or what it does. These traps usually take one of two forms.

Trap 1: You are stuck on the idea of what you intended to build, and you don’t realize that your product has become something else.

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.

Trap 2: You carefully designed your product for a market, but that market has changed.

Sometimes a product that was well positioned in a market suddenly becomes poorly positioned, not because the product itself has changed, but because markets around the product have shifted.

The common failure in both of these traps is not deliberately positioning the product. We stick with a “default” positioning, even when the product changes or the market changes.

We generally fail to consider other—potentially better—ways to position our products because we simply aren’t positioning them deliberately.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” DOLLY PARTON

Like Joshua Bell delivering a world-class performance in a context that didn’t ascribe value, lousy positioning makes your prospects work harder to figure out if you are worth paying attention to. Even if you do manage to capture their attention, ineffective positioning makes it hard for them to understand why they might want to buy what you’re selling. How you position your offerings is the underpinning of your entire business strategy and can mean the difference between success and failure.

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.

I.portante

The worst part of a positioning statement exercise is that it assumes you know the answers.

What do you call an exercise that produces something that never gets used? A big waste of time, that’s what you call it.

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.

“You cannot be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north, you cannot go south at the same time.” JEROEN DE FLANDER

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

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

2. Unique attributes Unique attributes are capabilities or features that your offering has that the competitive alternatives do not have. Your unique attributes are your secret sauce, the things you can do that the alternatives can’t.

In general, you will have many differentiators. 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.

Your opinion of your value does not count as proof; the opinion of customers, reviewers and experts does. Data or third-party opinions are difficult to refute. Your value needs to be provable in an objective and demonstrable way.

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.

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

You might sell a solution for small business that greatly reduces the time and complexity of invoicing. Any small business could use your product, but the ones that send a significant number of invoices every month will love you the most.

Declaring that your product exists in a market category triggers a set of powerful assumptions.

Your market category can work for you or against you.

Market categories help customers use what they know to figure out what they don’t. A well-chosen market category will help make your unique value more obvious to your target customers.

It’s easy to confuse market categories and trends, but they are not the same thing. Market categories are a collection of products with similar characteristics. Trends are more like a characteristic itself, but one that happens to be very new and noteworthy at a given point in time.

Market categories help customers understand what your offering is all about and why they should care. 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.

“Sit, walk or run, but don’t wobble.” Zen proverb

In technology, we can think of market categories as groups of solutions that are similar and compete with each other. Accounting software, group chat, security systems, networking solutions—these are all market categories. 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).

Using a trend in positioning is optional (but often desirable). 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.