Obviously Awesome
How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
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Summary
In a market bursting with noise and competition, how do you make your product the star of the show? April Dunford, the maestro of positioning, presents a masterclass in her book, *Obviously Awesome*. With a treasure trove of insights from her extensive career in tech marketing, Dunford challenges conventional wisdom by revealing the art of making your product irresistible to the right audience. Her narrative dances between sharp humor and real-world case studies, making complex strategies accessible and engaging. Discover how to unearth your product’s unique allure and present it with flair, ensuring it lands in the hands of those who truly desire it. Whether you're an innovative entrepreneur or a savvy marketer, Dunford's blueprint will empower you to shine brightly in the crowded marketplace.
Introduction
Why do some products instantly capture market attention while others, despite superior features, struggle to find their audience? The challenge extends beyond having a great product to ensuring customers can quickly grasp what makes it valuable. When prospects encounter something new, they instinctively seek context to understand whether they should care. This context-setting process, known as positioning, determines whether your innovation becomes obviously awesome or remains frustratingly misunderstood. Positioning operates as the foundational layer beneath all marketing and sales activities. It answers fundamental questions about what your product is, who it serves, and why it matters more than alternatives. Yet most companies approach positioning haphazardly, defaulting to obvious categories without considering whether those contexts highlight their unique strengths. The framework presented here transforms positioning from guesswork into systematic strategy, providing a structured methodology for making any product's value immediately apparent to its ideal customers.
Understanding Positioning as Context Setting
Positioning functions as deliberate context creation, similar to how movie opening scenes establish setting, tone, and expectations for audiences. When customers encounter unfamiliar products, they gather contextual clues from messaging, pricing, features, and competitive comparisons to construct mental frameworks for evaluation. This context-setting process happens automatically, but companies can influence it strategically. Consider how environmental context completely transforms perception. A world-class violinist performing in a subway station earned thirty-two dollars from passing commuters, while the same musician commands three-hundred-dollar tickets in concert halls. The music remained identical, but contextual cues dramatically altered perceived value. Products face similar challenges when positioned in contexts that obscure rather than illuminate their distinctive strengths. Most companies fall into positioning traps by either clinging to original product concepts despite market evolution or failing to adapt when surrounding markets shift. A bakery creating health-conscious muffins might thrive by repositioning from "diet food" to "paleo snacks" as dietary trends evolve. The product stays the same, but the contextual frame changes everything about target customers, competitive alternatives, and pricing expectations. Effective positioning requires recognizing that any product can be contextualized in multiple ways, and the default positioning is rarely optimal. Companies must deliberately choose contexts that make their unique value obvious to customers who care most about what they deliver. This strategic choice becomes the foundation for all subsequent business decisions.
The Five Components of Effective Positioning
Successful positioning consists of five interconnected components that work together to establish market context. These elements flow logically from understanding customer alternatives through defining unique attributes, value delivery, target characteristics, and market categorization. An optional sixth component involves layering relevant trends to enhance immediate relevance. Competitive alternatives represent what customers would actually do if your product disappeared, often revealing surprising insights about customer perception. Many assume their competition consists of similar products, but customers frequently view spreadsheets, manual processes, or "doing nothing" as primary alternatives. Understanding these real alternatives shapes how customers define "better" and reveals the actual comparison framework driving purchase decisions. Unique attributes comprise the specific capabilities, features, or characteristics that distinguish your offering from those alternatives. These might include patented technology, specialized expertise, delivery models, or business approaches that competitors cannot easily replicate. The key lies in identifying attributes that are genuinely unique when viewed from customer perspectives, not just internal product development viewpoints. Value translation converts unique attributes into meaningful customer benefits, answering why someone should care about your special capabilities. This requires moving beyond feature descriptions to articulate specific outcomes, efficiencies, or advantages that attributes enable. Strong value propositions connect directly to measurable customer goals and can be supported with objective evidence rather than subjective claims. Target market characteristics identify the specific customer segments that care most about your delivered value, representing your easiest sales and most loyal advocates. Market category selection provides the framework customers use to understand and evaluate your offering, triggering assumptions about competitors, features, and pricing that can work for or against your positioning success.
The 10-Step Positioning Process Framework
The positioning process begins with analyzing your most successful customers to understand what makes them love your product more than alternatives. These best-fit customers reveal patterns in why they buy quickly, pay premium prices, and recommend your solution to others. Their characteristics and motivations provide the foundation for all subsequent positioning decisions. Assembling a cross-functional positioning team ensures diverse perspectives while building organizational alignment around positioning decisions. Representatives from sales, marketing, product development, and customer success contribute unique insights about customer perception and competitive dynamics. The business leader must drive this process since positioning impacts overall strategy, not just marketing communications. The process systematically works through competitive alternatives from customer perspectives, isolates genuinely unique product attributes, and maps those attributes to specific value themes that resonate with target segments. This sequence matters because attributes are only unique relative to alternatives, and value only matters when customers care about the problems being solved. Market category selection requires evaluating multiple positioning styles. Head-to-head positioning competes directly with established leaders using current market definitions. Big fish, small pond approaches target specific market subsegments with specialized needs that overall leaders inadequately address. Creating new game positioning establishes entirely new market categories, though this requires significant resources and patient capital to educate customers about why the new category deserves to exist.
Implementing and Maintaining Your Market Position
Translating positioning into operational reality starts with developing a coherent sales story that frames customer problems, current solution limitations, and your unique approach within the chosen market context. This narrative structure helps sales teams consistently communicate positioning while providing marketing teams with messaging foundations for all customer-facing communications. Product roadmaps and pricing strategies should align with positioning decisions to reinforce market perceptions over time. Features that strengthen your unique attributes deserve prioritization, while pricing should reflect category expectations and value perceptions. Positioning shifts often reveal opportunities to adjust pricing upward when moving from commodity to specialized categories. Regular positioning reviews become essential as markets evolve through competitive changes, technological advances, regulatory shifts, and customer preference evolution. New competitors can rapidly alter market dynamics and customer expectations, requiring positioning adjustments to maintain competitive advantage. Economic conditions, technological capabilities, and customer attitudes all influence how markets develop and how products should be positioned within them. Successful positioning implementation requires treating it as business strategy rather than marketing tactics. Every department from product development to customer success should understand and support the chosen positioning. This organizational alignment ensures consistent customer experiences that reinforce rather than contradict the intended market position, creating sustainable competitive advantages that compound over time.
Summary
Great positioning transforms products from confusing offerings into obviously awesome solutions by deliberately choosing market contexts that highlight unique strengths for customers who care most about delivered value. Rather than accepting default positioning or hoping customers will eventually understand product benefits, successful companies systematically work through competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value themes, target characteristics, and market categories to craft positions that make their advantages immediately apparent. This strategic approach to positioning becomes the foundation for all marketing, sales, product development, and customer success activities, creating sustainable competitive advantages that grow stronger as companies consistently deliver on their chosen market position.
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By April Dunford
