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.

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

it’s hard to blame the sales process when it takes several meetings for a customer to figure out what your product is,

Great positioning supercharges all of your marketing and sales efforts.

I like to describe positioning as “context setting” for products.

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.

If your prospects can’t figure out what you do—quickly—they will invent a position for you, one that potentially hides your key strengths or misrepresents your value.

You have high customer churn.

Even a world-class product, poorly positioned, can fail.

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

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.

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

“malicious compliance,” meaning you have completed something that was requested of you, simply to illustrate the stupidity of the request.)

These are the Five (Plus One) Components of Effective Positioning:

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

Value should be as fact-based as possible. Qualitative value claims, such as “people enjoy well-designed user interfaces,” are too subjective and customers won’t believe them.

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

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.

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.

Trends must be relevant to your target customers, and can be used in combination with your market category to make your product more relevant to your buyers right now.

The flow looks something like this:

The value we deliver depends on our differentiators, which depend on what alternatives we compare our product to.

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

all of our customers could look like these very happy ones if we focused our marketing and sales efforts on companies with characteristics similar to the ecstatic fans.

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.

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

In order to consider possible new ways to think about a product, we have to consciously set aside our old ways of thinking about it.

The reality is that most products can be many things to many types of buyers.

Market confusion starts with our disconnect between understanding the product as product creators, and understanding the product as customers first perceive it.

Customers don’t always see competitors the same way we do, and their opinion is the only one that matters for positioning.

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.

Understand what a customer might replace you with in order to understand how they categorize your solution.

Focus on your best customers and what they would identify as alternative solutions.

Strong positioning is centered on what a product does best. Once you have a list of competitive alternatives, the next step is to isolate what makes you different and better than those alternatives.

Your opinion of your own strengths is irrelevant without proof.

have yet to meet a company that believes they provide terrible customer service.

Ease of use is another “feature” that I believe is really a value. What is it about your product that makes it easier to use and how do you prove it?

Concentrate on “consideration” rather than “retention” attributes.

Poorly positioned products are often bought by customers who misunderstand the real value of a product; those customers often quickly abandon the product when they realize it doesn’t do what they thought it did. However, customers who don’t see enough value to consider buying the product will never stick around long enough to experience retention attributes such as your excellent customer service.

Attributes or features are a starting point, but what customers care about is what those features can do for them.

Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.

The broader your focus, the more difficult it is to connect with prospects and convince them that your solution is the best one for them above all others.

With abductive reasoning, you choose a market category by isolating your key features and their value, and asking yourself, What types of products typically have those features? What category of products typically deliver that value?

most large companies cared more about having a product that met their needs than getting a bargain.

Anyone who successfully defines a market can become its leader because the market was specifically designed that way.

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