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.

In order to break through the noise, companies would need to take into account their own strengths and weaknesses, then contrast them with their competitors to create a unique leadership position in the minds of customers.

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

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.

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.

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

It’s important to really understand what customers compare your solution with, because that’s the yardstick they use to define “better.”

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.

Value should be as fact-based as possible.

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

Trends can help customers understand why a product is important right now.

I’ve determined that it’s critical to start with understanding what the customer sees as a competitive alternative, and then working through the rest of the components—attributes, value, characteristics, market category, relevant trends—from there. The flow looks something like this:

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

we frequently see our competitors much differently than customers see them.

keep in mind that most of your target customers have never heard of you or your rival startups—they simply want to know how your product compares to what they use today. Customer-facing positioning must be centered on a customer frame of reference.

A positioning exercise that is not a team effort driven by the business leader will fail.

The features of our product and the value they provide are only unique, interesting and valuable when a customer perceives them in relation to alternatives.

You need to create a position that highlights the unique strengths of your product as customers perceive them. To do that, you need to understand who your real competitors are in the minds of customers. Many companies have weak positioning precisely because they don’t clearly understand their true competitive alternatives in the minds of customers.

Your opinion of your own strengths is irrelevant without proof.

Features mapped to benefit and value

Clustering the Value into “Themes”

number. The goal of this step is to see the patterns and shorten the list to one to four value clusters.

“The stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.”

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.

Head to Head: Positioning to win an existing market You are aiming to be the leader in a market category that already exists in the minds of customers. If there is an established leader, your goal is to beat them at their own game by convincing customers that you are the best at delivering the solution. Big Fish, Small Pond: Positioning to win a subsegment of an existing market You are aiming to dominate a piece of an existing market category. Your goal is not to take on the overall market leaders directly, but to win in a well-defined segment of the market. You do this by targeting buyers in a subsegment of the broader market who have different requirements that are not being met by the current overall market leader. Create a New Game: Positioning to win a market you create You are aiming to create a new market category. Your goals are first to prove to customers that a new market category deserves to exist, then to define the parameters of that market in the minds of customers, and lastly, to position yourself as the leader within it.

“If you don’t like being a doormat, then get off the floor.”

Dominating a small piece of the market is generally much easier than attempting to directly take on a larger leader.

To credibly create a new category, you need a product that is demonstrably, inarguably new and different from what exists in other market categories.

Timing is also important in creating a new category. To help customers make sense of why this category hasn’t emerged sooner, there should be a very strong answer to the questions, Why now? What factors have finally made this category possible and/or necessary? These might be new technology capabilities, a shift in buyer behavior, a change in the business environment such as new government regulations or a shift in the economy.

Category creation is about selling the market on the problem first, rather than on your solution.

“The future isn’t a place we are going to go, it’s a place we get to create.”

It’s always better to be a little boring than completely baffling.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” WAYNE DYER

Trends can only be used when they have a clear link to your product. Start by making the connection between your product and the market obvious.

Table 2. Positioning canvas Product name and one-line description Market category (and subcategory) The macro market and submarket (if applicable) that you compete in Competitive alternatives What would customers use if your product did not exist? Unique attributes What features/capabilities does your product have that the alternatives do not? Value What value do those attributes enable for customers? Who cares a lot What are the characteristics of a customer that makes them care a lot about the value you deliver?

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. Knowing how to do something is not the same as understanding how to teach someone else how to do it. As leaders, we often become very good at doing things that we have a very hard time explaining to the teams that work with us. This book is my attempt to codify and teach one of the most complicated processes I’ve learned to do in my career. I