Obviously Awesome 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.
Want to create better marketing content? Understand your value and differentiators better.
If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales. If we fail at marketing and sales, the entire business fails.
Great positioning supercharges all of your marketing and sales efforts.
Often, you’re too close to your product to realize that the market doesn’t think about it the way you do.
Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.
Customers need to be able to easily understand what your product is, why it’s special and why it matters to them.
Weak positioning leaves a trail—the signs are there if you know where to look.
Your current customers love you, but new prospects can’t figure out what you’re selling.
Do you spend more time explaining what you’re selling rather than closing deals? 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. When you don’t own your positioning, you are putting your company at a competitive disadvantage. Talk to people—not just friends and family—who would be great prospects for your offering. Show them your product and explain what it does. Now ask them how they would describe what you do. Likewise, ask existing customers about your offering and see what they say. 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.
Do your customers seriously evaluate your product, only to drop out at the last minute? Products with a strong position make their value obvious, attract suitable customers and sell quickly.
Effective positioning makes your sales efforts more efficient by attracting customers who are a great fit and who move through a buying process quickly. Otherwise, poor-fit prospects consume your busy sales team’s valuable time, energy and attention—only to choose a competitor that was a better fit for them all along.
Do you have high customer churn shortly after purchase, and new customers who are constantly asking for features you have no plan to deliver? Customers who misunderstood your value chose you for the wrong reasons, and now they’re trying to recover sunk costs by turning your product into what they thought they were getting. In a worst-case scenario, your development team may spend time building features for these disappointed customers, trying to appease a group that is likely to quit eventually, while overlooking your happiest customers. 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.
Do customers complain that your prices are too high? 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. Clear positioning helps prospects understand that you are a leader in your market segment and that you offer considerable value, making it easier for you to charge a premium.
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.
Context can completely transform the way we think about a product.
Even a world-class product, poorly positioned, can fail.
For people who build and sell things, the frame of reference that a potential customer chooses can make or break the business.
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 artist. So the context makes the difference.
Most products are exceptional only when we understand them within their best frame of reference.
Trap 1: You are stuck on the idea of what you intended to build, and you don’t realize that your product has become something else.
As product creators, we need to understand that the choices we make in positioning and context can have a massive impact on our businesses—for better or worse.
Customers, though, are often left confused by products that don’t seem to match up with the way companies are positioning them. This disconnect leaves customers confused, or worse, they believe that the product is simply poorly conceived and therefore can be ignored and forgotten entirely.
Trap 2: 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.
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.
The worst part of a positioning statement exercise is that it assumes you know the answers.
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.
You cannot be everything to everyone. If you decide to go north, you cannot go south at the same time.
Your unique attributes are your secret sauce, the things you can do that the alternatives can’t. If unique attributes are your secret sauce, then value is the reason why someone might care about your secret sauce.
Your target market is the customers who buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts and tell their friends about your offerings.
Declaring that your product exists in a market category triggers a set of powerful assumptions.
Trends can help customers understand why a product is important right now.
A positioning exercise that is not a team effort driven by the business leader will fail.
The head of marketing is often the first to feel the pain of weak positioning and therefore often kicks off a positioning discussion inside the company. But marketing can’t “own” positioning, in the same way marketing can’t “own” the overall business strategy. It’s simply too broad and too important to live in one silo of the overall company.
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.
Your opinion of your own strengths is irrelevant without proof.
Concentrate on “consideration” rather than “retention” attributes.
Articulating value takes the benefits one step further: putting benefits into the context of a goal the customer is trying to achieve.
Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.
Use abductive reasoning. The adage “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck” also applies to new products. 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?
Examine adjacent (growing) markets. Another place to look for options is in the markets adjacent to the one in which you have been positioning yourself. Frequently, there are overlaps or blurry lines between markets. As a product shifts over time, its features and value could look more at home in a neighboring market.
Ask your customers (but be cautious). I’ve had folks ask me, “Can’t you just ask your customers what market you’re in?” My answer: “Sometimes.” If you have already positioned yourself in a given market, your customers will have at least attempted to place you there, even if that attempt confused them. They will naturally try to put you in markets that are close to that market.
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.
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.
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.
The advantage of positioning in an existing market category is that you don’t have to convince people the category needs to exist.
if you position yourself in an existing market, you don’t have to teach buyers too much about the category itself and you can rely on what they already know.
If you rely on what buyers already know, you need to fit within their existing definition if you want to win.
The future isn’t a place we are going to go, it’s a place we get to create.
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.
