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.

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

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

If you see a disconnect between how your happy customers think about your product and how prospects see it, you likely have a positioning problem.

Effective positioning makes your sales efforts more efficient by attracting customers who are a great fit and who move through a buying process quickly.

Pairing weak positioning with strong marketing and sales efforts leads to customers abandoning your product soon after they have purchased it—particularly bad news for subscription-based businesses that depend on renewals.

You can’t charge a premium for a product that seems exactly like everything else on the market, and weakly positioned products are seen to offer little beyond their competitors.

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.

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.

For people who build and sell things, the frame of reference that a potential customer chooses can make or break the business. Coke is much more than just fizzy water in the same way that a concert violinist is more than just a street performer with a fiddle.

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

With so many other offerings on the market, it’s easy for products to get lost in the noise or, worse, completely misunderstood and framed in ways that make them unappealing, redundant or merely unremarkable.

While we understand that context is important, we generally fail to deliberately choose a context because we believe that the context for our product is obvious.

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

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.

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

We decide the context within which our products operate, and in doing so we limit their reach. We don’t consider alternative contexts that could make the distinct advantages of our product more obvious to customers.

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.

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

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 ena...

Target market characteristics. The characteristics of a group of buyers that lead them to really care a l...

Market category. The market you describe yourself as being part of, to help custome...

(Bonus) Relevant trends. Trends that your target customers understand and/or are interested in that can help make you...

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

You may worry a lot about an up-and-coming startup in your space, but your customers have likely never heard of them.

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

Unique attributes are capabilities or features that your offering has that the competitive alternatives do not have.

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.

Value is the benefit you can deliver to customers because of your unique attributes.

Your value needs to be provable in an objective and demonstrable way.

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. What types of customers would you focus on and why?

Think of the market category as a frame of reference for your target customers, which helps them understand your unique value. Market categories serve as a convenient shorthand that customers use to group similar products together.

When they are presented with a new product, they will attempt to use what they know to try to figure out what it’s all about. Market categories are one way that customers organize products in their minds.

Your market category can work for you or against you.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Investors are investing in what your company will be in the future; customers are buying a solution to a problem they have right now.

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.