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

by April Dunford

You’re a marketer who wants to make it easier for your target customers to understand the strengths of your offerings so you can generate more leads.

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.

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.

When we lack context for a product, the easiest way to create one is by starting with something we already know.

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“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

But because we never thought about positioning our product deliberately, we continue to believe there is only one way to think about

We stick with a “default” positioning, even when the product changes or the market changes. I believe this happens because we haven’t been taught that

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.

messaging? No. Did the product team use it to inform what features they should build? Nope. Did sales use it to figure out what types of customers they should sell to? Never. What do you call an exercise that produces something that never gets used? A big waste of time, that’s what you call it.

Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand and/or are interested in that can help make your product more relevant right now.

Alternatives to your product can be “hire an intern to do it,” “use a spreadsheet” or even “suffer along with the problem and do nothing.”

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

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, you can’t say your product is easier to use unless it is easier to use than a spreadsheet.

For technology companies, these are often technical features, but unique attributes could also be things like your delivery model (such as installed on-premise vs. software as a service),

the opinion of customers, reviewers and experts does. Data or third-party opinions are difficult to refute.

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

but the ones that send a significant number of invoices every month will love you the most.

Finance companies care a lot about security. Oncr you've acquired 100-200 finance customers , you can claim an expertise in that sector. And if you are good for financial security and that's established , everyone can definitely use you.

One group was banks that had a very time-sensitive need to analyze data to quickly identify a potential security threat.

Market categories serve as a convenient shorthand that customers use to group similar products together.

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

Market categories are one way that customers organize products in their minds.

Declaring that your product exists in a certain market category will set off a powerful set of assumptions in customers’ minds about who your competitors are, what the functionality of the product should be and what the pricing is like.

For example, if I describe my product as “a customer relationship management (CRM) tool,” you will assume my competition is Salesforce, because they are the leader in that market. You would assume the features include basic CRM functionality...

Your market category can work for you or against you. If you choose your category wisely, all the assumptions are working for you. You don’t have to tell customers who your competitors are. It’s assumed! You don’t have to list every feature, because it’s assumed that all products in the category have basic category functions.

However, a poor category choice can turn that power against a product. If the market category we select triggers assumptions that do not apply to our product, then a good portion of our marketing and sales efforts are going to be spent battling those assumptions.

Positioning a product within an established market category will help customers quickly understand your product and whether or not they should consider buying

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.

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.

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).

We needed a way to position ourselves that would tie closely to what they already understood, while at the same time make our differentiated value very clear.”

while brands need to sell through Amazon because of its reach with consumers, Amazon also poses a huge threat to them, because it has the power to move into a category armed with its consumer behavior data and quickly dominate it. In

I’ve seen teams start with defining key features, without looking at competitive alternatives, and the resulting positioning doesn’t connect with how customers really evaluate a solution.

What marketing campaigns brought in the most leads? Which pieces of content were consumed the most? What events had the most attendees?

What was it about our offering that made them so happy with it, and what was it about those customers that made them such a good fit for us?

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

They understood your product quickly and bought from

you quickly. They became raving fans, referred you to other companies and acted as a reference for you. They represent the perfect type of customer you want to buy from you (at least in the short term). Make a list of them. You will use this list as a reference point for the rest of the exercise.

Do bigger businesses love your product more than smaller ones? Are businesses in a certain industry more drawn to your product than those in other industries? Are your happiest customers more likely to have certain characteristics?

But I want to start with my product, not my customers! Your first instinct might be to consider your product and its special features and position around them. Understandable! That’s the part you understand—and possibly enjoy—the most. But that’s a trap.

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

Shouldn’t we position our product for customers the same way we position it for investors? Absolutely not! Investors are investing in what

company will be in the future; customers are buying a solution to a probl...

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.

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.

Companies that have multiple products in the market need to think about product positioning and company positioning as separate but highly linked things. If sold individually, each product will have its own positioning that helps customers understand why they might consider buying it. Company positioning is a broader umbrella that helps customers understand why they should consider multiple offerings from the company.

If most customers first encounter your company through the purchase of a particular product, I would position that single product first.