Obviously Awesome: Effective Product Positioning (Book Digest)

Obviously Awesome provides a systematic approach to product positioning, which is the art of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares about. Author April Dunford argues that positioning is the foundation for all marketing and sales efforts, yet most companies struggle with it because they've never been taught a practical method for doing it well.

Positioning is context setting for products. When customers encounter something new, they gather clues to figure out what it is, who it's for, and why they should care. Messaging, pricing, features, and branding all combine to create this context.

Good positioning is essential. Without it, sales cycles drag on because customers don't understand the product, customers churn because they bought for the wrong reasons, and you face constant price pressure because they don't see the value. But creating good positioning is hard because most products can be positioned in multiple markets and because standard positioning techniques (like writing a positioning statement) aren't effective.

Dunford argues that good positioning requires following a stepwise process to understand your best-fit customers, their competing alternatives, your unique strengths, your target market, and your market category. This book is about how to execute that process.

The Five (Plus One) Components of Positioning

Effective positioning consists of five (plus one) interconnected components:

Competitive Alternatives: What customers would do if your solution didn't exist. This is often not a direct competitor; it might be spreadsheets, manual processes, or "hire an intern to do it." The competitive alternative is what customers use as their frame of reference. Understanding this allows you to identify what makes you truly different.

Unique Attributes: The capabilities or features you have that alternatives lack. These must be provable and focused on "consideration" attributes that customers care about when evaluating a purchase rather than "retention" attributes that customers use to decide whether to renew a product.

Value: The benefit those unique attributes enable for customers. Align your features to the goals your customers want to achieve by following a chain: Feature (what your product does) → Benefit (what it enables) → Value (how it maps to customer goals). Most products have one to four core value themes.

Target Market Characteristics: The easily identifiable characteristics that define your best fit customers. Best-fit customer buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts, and tell others about your product.

Market Category: The market you describe yourself as part of, which triggers powerful assumptions about competitors, features, and pricing. Declaring you're in a certain category sets off associations in customers' minds that either work for or against you.

Relevant Trends (Optional but Powerful): Trends that make your product important right now. When Sampler repositioned from "online product sampling" to "direct-to-consumer sampling," they aligned with the trend of brands like Dollar Shave Club bypassing traditional retail, making their offering suddenly urgent and strategic. That said, trends only work if they're genuinely relevant and many companies have effective positioning that's not related to a trend.

The Ten Steps of Positioning

Step 1: Understand Customers Who Love Your Product

Make a short list of your best customers: those who buy quickly, renew easily, and advocate for you. These customers hold the key to understanding what your product really is. Look for patterns in why they're satisfied while others aren't.

Step 2: Form a Positioning Team

The business leader for the product must drive the effort, with representatives from marketing, sales, customer success, and product. Each function brings unique perspectives on competitive alternatives and customer characteristics. Everyone needs to be in the room because positioning impacts everything: messaging, sales strategy, roadmaps, and pricing.

Step 3: Align Vocabulary and Let Go of Baggage

Products can mean different things to different buyers. You need to consciously set aside old ways of thinking to consider new positioning. Arm & Hammer succeeded by letting go of their identity as a baking ingredient and embracing their role as a deodorizer, which led to products for everything from cat litter to underarms.

Step 4: List True Competitive Alternatives

Focus on what your best customers would do if you didn't exist. Customers often see competition differently than you do. One database company discovered that they asked their customers what they'd use as an alternative. None mentioned other databases; they mentioned business intelligence tools and data warehouses instead.

Step 5: Isolate Your Unique Features

Only after understanding competitive alternatives can you identify what makes you different. List all capabilities you have that alternatives don't, but stay focused on provable attributes rather than subjective claims. Concentrate on features that matter during purchase consideration, not just retention.

Step 6: Map Attributes to Value Themes

Translate features into value by following the chain: what your product does → what that enables for customers → how it maps to their goals. For example, a 15-megapixel camera (feature) creates sharp images (benefit) that can be zoomed or printed large while staying crisp (value). Look for patterns and consolidate into one to four value clusters.

Step 7: Determine Who Cares a Lot

Identify characteristics that make customers really care about your value. Target as narrowly as possible to meet near-term sales goals; you can broaden later.

Step 8: Find a Market Frame of Reference

Choose a market category that puts your strengths at the center. There are three approaches:

Head to Head: Positioning to Win an Existing Market

You aim to be the leader in a well-defined category. Customers understand the market and purchase criteria. This only makes sense if you're already the leader, if you're a large company mounting a challenge in the market and market conditions are shifting in your favor, or if the category exists but no strong leader has emerged yet.

Big Fish, Small Pond: Positioning to Win a Subsegment

You dominate a piece of an existing market by focusing on a subsegment with specific unmet needs. This is easier than taking on a market leader and allows you to benefit from word of mouth, which spreads more easily in small markets.

Here's an example: A CRM company struggled until they discovered investment banks valued their unique ability to model relationships between people. This was critical for relationship-driven businesses and other CRMs didn't address it. By repositioning as "CRM for investment banks," they eliminated Siebel (the market leader) as a competitor and grew revenue from $2 million to over $70 million in eighteen months.

Create a New Game: Positioning to Win a Market You Create

You create an entirely new category that you own. This is extremely difficult and should only be attempted when existing categories fail to highlight your differentiators. It requires teaching customers why the category deserves to exist and demands deep-pocketed, patient investors.

Here's an example: Eloqua created the marketing automation category by first focusing narrowly on "demand generation automation" for demand generators obsessed with funnel metrics. Around 2005, as this role proliferated, they broadened to "marketing automation" to capture a larger market.

Step 9: Layer on a Trend (But Be Careful)

If a trend reinforces your positioning and value, use it to make your offering feel urgent and relevant. Redgate Software, leader in database tools, leveraged the DevOps trend by positioning themselves around "database DevOps," making their products suddenly strategic rather than just useful.

However, trends without clear links to your product and market create confusion. Describing yourself only as a trend ("we're the Uber for cats") makes you cool but baffling. Start with clear market positioning, then add the trend if it strengthens your story. It's perfectly fine to operate in markets without sizzle.

Step 10: Capture Your Positioning

Document your positioning in enough detail for marketing, sales, and product teams to use it. Create a positioning canvas that includes:

• Product name and description

• Market category and subcategory

• A table mapping competitive alternatives to your product's unique attributes to the value you deliver for your target customers

After Positioning: What Happens Next

Turn positioning into a sales story. Sales stories often follow a common arc: define the problem your solution solves, describe how customers solve it today and where current solutions fall short, paint a picture of what a perfect solution would look like, then show how your product delivers that solution and creates value.

Positioning will likely impact your product roadmap: Features get prioritized differently when you think about your product in a new way. Pricing may also need adjustment since each market category has price expectations.

Check positioning every six months or when major events occur. If these changes affect how customers perceive and evaluate solutions, your positioning may need to adapt.

Conclusion

"Obviously Awesome" reframes positioning away from writing a statement to making strategic choices. The key is following a systematic process that starts with understanding your best customers, carefully choosing your market frame of reference, and ensuring the entire company aligns around the position.

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If you liked this article, have a look at our other book digests in our series Required Reading for Salespeople. You can also check out the P.S.I. Selling Content Page for more insights on sales communication, strategy, and leadership.

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