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

by April Dunford

Dominating a small piece of the market is generally much easier than attempting to directly take on a larger leader. From a marketing and sales perspective, smaller subsegments are easier to reach and target, and gaining traction in a market that is more homogeneous is generally easier.

List building is easier when you are targeting a subsegment, as is getting in front of groups of prospects. Your value proposition can be highly targeted to these prospects and you will generally have an easier time making your solution’s distinct advantages obvious to prospects.

Just because your initial target market is narrow doesn’t mean you will stay narrowly focused forever.

When to use the Big Fish, Small Pond style First, this style requires that the category is well defined and there’s a clear market leader—and you’re not it. People must understand what you mean when you talk about the category.

Second, there needs to be clearly definable groups of customers with unique needs that are not addressed by the market leader.

You have the ability to meet the special needs of the subsegment much better than the category leader. The need of the subsegment must be clearly identifiable, but even when it is, your ability to meet it must be strong enough to convince buyers to go with you over the safer choice of the market leader. These buyers were getting along for the most part by buying a solution that didn’t do everything but was likely “good enough” for their business. Convincing them to switch will require showing them that you have deeply understood their specific pain and have fully solved the problem.

The work of this style is first to educate the targeted subsegment about how a general-purpose solution is not meeting their needs. You need proof points that show there is a clear gap in value between the general-purpose solution offered by the market leader and your more-purpose-built solution. You need to help the subsegment understand what’s in it for them if they do have those needs met. There should ideally be a way to quantify the value to them if they choose your solution over the market leader’s more generic solution.

If your solution requires both a new way of thinking about the boundaries of an existing category and a new way of thinking about purchase criteria, then it probably makes more sense to create an entirely new category rather than attempt to stretch existing categories along more than one dimension.

Creating a new category is the most difficult style of positioning, even when the pre-existing conditions are aligned to support it, mainly because it involves the greatest amount of “teaching” the customer. In the other positioning styles, you’re leveraging what folks already know about a category and building on that to create a position in the mind of customers. In this style, you are starting with a blank canvas.

Customers need to first understand why the category deserves to exist. Why is the problem unique? Why do existing solutions in other categories fall short of solving that problem? While you are convincing the market that this category should exist, you are also teaching folks how to best evaluate solutions in that category.

To successfully create a new category, you need to have strong arguments against any competitor that tries to convince customers that what you are selling is “merely a feature” instead of a product in its own right.

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?

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.

Aligning with a trend can help make your offering look current and relevant, particularly for customers interested in that trend.

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.

Positioning needs to have company buy-in so it can be used to inform branding, marketing campaigns, sales strategy, product decisions and customer-success strategy.

The sales story goes on to introduce the product or company and position it in the relevant market category.