Obviously Awesome by April Dunford is a brilliant book. If you’re impacted by the market positioning of your company, products and/or services, you need to buy it and read it.

BUT I know there’s a big likelihood that you won’t read the book. I’m not 100% confident you’ll read this whole article either.

So, I’m going to cut right to the chase and give you three things that April Dunford says about positioning that I think a lot of marketers, product teams, and business leaders either don’t know or have forgotten:

• Positioning does not belong to marketing. It doesn’t belong in any single function. A positioning team should feature one or two people from each of Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Product. In small companies it should be run by the CEO; in larger companies by the business unit head.
• Positioning should involve your customers but including all of them is not the best approach. Dunford had previously tried to build a picture of her ideal customer characteristics by including all of her existing customers. She was getting muddy results until she realised that she needed to focus only on the customers that were ecstatic with the product. The ecstatic customers had understood the proposition quickly and had bought quickly – and that was the kind of customer she needed to position for.
• Positioning can only be done effectively if you have enough ecstatic customers. If you don’t have enough of those yet, hold off on positioning and continue the work to find the customers that understand your product quickly and buy it quickly.

Having given you the three points that you MUST know, here’s a bit more detail on what you’ll get from the book:

What is positioning?

“Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.” In other words, customers need to understand what you provide, why it is special and why it matters to them.

Dunford reminds us that positioning is about context. She gives the example of a world-famous concert violinist – put them in the right venue in a tuxedo and you can charge $300 a ticket. But the same performer playing outside a subway station could be lucky to make $30 in an hour. The music is the same but the audience doesn’t have the right context for its value to be understood.

How do you know you have a positioning problem?

Indicators that you may have an issue:

1. Current customers love you but prospects don’t understand you
2. You have long sales cycles, low close rates and you’re losing to competitors
3. You have high customer churn
4. You’re under price pressure

Two traps that people fall into with positioning

• Trap 1: You are stuck on the idea of what you intended to build and you don’t realise you’ve built something else. She gives the example of someone coming up with a great chocolate cake recipe. They want to make high end chocolate cakes and sell them to restaurants. But actually their recipe is more successful as muffins, which need to be sold to coffee shops. The core product is the same but the market is very different.
• Trap 2: You designed your product for the market but the market changed. Dunford also talks about default positioning vs deliberate positioning. The example here is cake pops – the default positioning is “cake on a stick” because that’s what it is. However, the deliberate positioning is “cake pops”, which sounds more fun and engaging.

Why positioning statements are not helpful

Dunford is not a fan of positioning statements and gives some examples of bad ones. She thinks they’re unhelpful because they:

• Assume you know the answers
• Reinforce the status quo
• Don’t give ideas of what to do next
• Are hard to remember

The Five Plus 1 Components of Effective Positioning:

• Competitive Alternatives: What your customer would do if you didn’t exist. You must include everything – spreadsheets, manual etc.
• Unique Attributes (aka Differentiators): Features, delivery model, business model etc
• Value & Proof: Value is the benefit you deliver because of your unique attributes. Value is the reason customers might care. They must be fact-based and they must matter.
• Target Market Characteristics: Focus on the customers that are most likely to buy from you. How can you identify them? What sets them apart? You’re looking for people who buy quickly and don’t ask for discounts.
• Market Category: A shorthand for grouping yourself with other products. Choose carefully.
• Relevant Trends: Why is it important right now? How does it align with company priorities? For example, your category might be sofas but the Pantone for this year is pink so you choose to weave in the trend and make pink sofas.

The 10 Step Positioning Process:

1. Understand the customers that love your product
   Look for the ones who bought quickly and understood you quickly and then work out their shared characteristics. If you don’t have ecstatic customers, hold off positioning for now – keep fishing in different areas.
2. Form a positioning team
   Positioning cannot sit in a silo. The positioning exercise should be led by founder/CEO in start-ups and by business unit head in larger companies. Marketing, Product, Sales, Customer Success all take part but they don’t lead it. Bring in a facilitator if needed.
3. Align your positioning vocab and let go of positioning baggage
   Spend your first hour together deciding what positioning is and what components are needed. Then share your own histories with the product positioning so you can lose the baggage before you get underway.
4. List your true competitive alternatives
   Customers don’t see competitors as we do, and their views are the only ones that count. What would our customers use if we didn’t exist? Stay focused on best fit customers only. You’re looking for 2-5 groups of alternatives.
5. Isolate your unique attributes or features
   List everything you have that the alternatives do not have. Start with patented features and list everything. Find out what your customers think, e.g. “you’re the only company with X, Y, Z.” Each attribute or feature has to have proof – “we have great customer service” is only true if a customer has said it.
6. Map attributes to value themes
   Feature – Benefit – Value, e.g. 15 megapixel camera – sharp photo images – image can be printed
   You then need to group them as a customer would group them. You’re looking for 1-4 value clusters – sometimes you’ll only get one and that’s fine.

7. Determine who cares a lot
   Who cares about the value proposition and why? Segmentation is widely misunderstood according to Dunford. It’s usually done on consumer demographics or firmographics. What you need is an actionable segmentation. It must include easily identifiable characteristics, e.g. other products they use. At this stage you think you need to go as broad as possible but the reality is the exact opposite, provided there are enough of them to meet sales objectives. Target as narrowly as possible – you can always broaden later. Focus on sales target for the year – can you make that number with best fit? If not, then you broaden it out.

8. Find a market frame of reference that puts your strengths at the centre and determine how to position yourself in it
   This is harder than you think. Options:
   • Use abductive reasoning – if it looks a duck and walks like a duck, then it is a duck
   • Explore adjacent growing markets – are you more like those now? A growing market brings benefits (for example, of having lots of buzz around it)
   • Ask your customers but be careful as they are likely not experts on this

There are 3 types of positioning if you’re entering a new market:

1. Head-to-Head – beat the leader in an existing market
2. Big Fish, Small Pond – you choose a subset in an existing market
3. Create a New Game – this takes a lot of time and money

9. Layer on a trend
Optional but potentially useful. Your solution + market context + trends can form a strong overlap but they have to overlap. If you get too focused on the trend and lose the product, you lose.

10. Capture your positioning so you can share it
Dunford uses a positioning canvas that looks like this:

1. Product name
2. Market category
3. Competitive alternatives
4. Unique attributes
5. Value
6. Who cares a lot

How to implement positioning

1. Translate it into a sales pitch – how would the salesperson pitch it? This gives you a great opportunity for feedback.

• Definition of the problem
• How are customers trying to solve the problem
• What would happen in the perfect world
• Introduce the product or service
• What are the value themes
• Objection handling
• Customer stories

2. Marketing can then work on messaging and write a messaging document to enable other assets to be written, e.g. the website

How often should you review your positioning?

Check positioning every 6 months and be ready for change – competitors, new tech, customer attitudes, outside forces all have an impact.

Note: try and position product and company at same time if you can. If not, do product first.

Your next steps:

Buy and read Obviously Awesome. I’ve only captured some of the key points above and Dunford gives great examples that I haven’t included. She also has a useful podcast on product positioning that you can tune into.

Let me know if you’ve read the book and what you thought.