Obviously Awesome

Obviously Awesome Plot Summary

Introduction

Have you ever developed a great product that customers just couldn't understand? You might have a positioning problem. Positioning is the critical but often overlooked foundation that determines whether your product will thrive or languish in the market. It's not just about having a superior offering—it's about making sure customers can quickly grasp why your product matters to them. Positioning is essentially about providing context for your product so customers can make sense of it. Without proper positioning, even revolutionary products can fail as customers struggle to understand their value. The author presents a practical, field-tested framework for effective positioning that goes beyond traditional marketing theory. Through a 10-step process, we learn how to identify competitive alternatives, isolate unique attributes, map features to value, choose the right market category, and implement positioning across an organization. This approach transforms positioning from a vague concept into a strategic business tool that can dramatically accelerate sales and growth.

Chapter 1: Understanding Positioning as Context Setting

Positioning is fundamentally about setting context for your product. Just as the opening scene of a movie provides viewers with essential information about the setting, characters, and tone, good positioning gives customers the contextual clues they need to quickly understand what your product is and why they should care about it. Context is so powerful that it can completely transform how people perceive value. Consider the famous experiment with Joshua Bell, a world-renowned violinist who played in a subway station during rush hour. Despite his extraordinary talent, most commuters walked past without noticing, and he earned just $32 for his performance. The same musician who regularly sells out concert halls at $300 per ticket was perceived as just another street performer because the context—playing beside a garbage can in casual clothes—failed to signal his exceptional value. Similarly, even exceptional products can be overlooked or misunderstood when positioned poorly. Product creators often fall into positioning traps that limit their success. The first trap involves being stuck on your original idea of what you intended to build, even when your product has evolved into something else. Like a baker who set out to make chocolate cake but actually created muffins, you might continue positioning your product in a way that hides its true strengths. The second trap occurs when markets change around your product. Your once-popular "diet muffin" might need to be repositioned as a "gluten-free paleo snack" as health trends evolve. We generally fail at positioning because we've never been taught that products can be positioned in multiple ways. Most product creators assume there's a "default" way to position their offerings based on what they initially set out to build. However, markets are complex and constantly shifting. The road from idea to market-ready product is rarely straight, and the product we end up with often differs from our original vision. Effective positioning requires deliberately choosing a context that makes your product's unique strengths obvious to customers who will value them most. Most importantly, positioning isn't just a marketing exercise—it's a fundamental business strategy that impacts every aspect of your company. When positioning works, it feels like you're cheating; everything becomes easier, from marketing to sales to customer retention. Weak positioning, on the other hand, creates headwinds that make every business function more difficult. This is why deliberate, strategic positioning is worth the effort and can be the difference between market success and failure.

Chapter 2: The Five Core Components of Effective Positioning

Positioning can be broken down into five essential components (plus one optional component) that together create a complete framework for how customers understand your product. Unlike traditional positioning statements that ask you to fill in blanks with assumptions you already have, these components provide a systematic approach to discovering the best way to position your product. The first component is competitive alternatives—what customers would do if your solution didn't exist. This isn't limited to direct competitors; alternatives might include spreadsheets, manual processes, or even doing nothing. Understanding true alternatives from the customer's perspective is crucial because that's the yardstick they use to define "better." The second component consists of unique attributes—the features and capabilities your offering has that alternatives lack. These are your product's secret sauce, whether they're technical features, delivery models, business models, or specific expertise. For a database that was repositioned as a data warehouse, the key unique attribute was a patented query algorithm. Value forms the third component—the benefit your unique attributes deliver to customers. If attributes are your secret sauce, value is why someone might care about that sauce. Value should be fact-based and provable, like "companies can get answers from their data in minutes rather than hours." The fourth component identifies target market characteristics—what makes certain customers care deeply about your value proposition. These are the customers who buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts, and enthusiastically recommend your product. For the repositioned database, the target became banks with time-sensitive needs to analyze data for security threats. The fifth component is market category—the frame of reference that helps customers understand your unique value. Categories trigger powerful assumptions about competitors, features, and pricing. Choosing the right category ensures these assumptions work for you rather than against you. The database product that struggled when positioned as a "database" thrived when repositioned as a "data warehouse," because this category better highlighted its analytical strengths. The optional sixth component involves relevant trends that can make your product more interesting right now. Unlike categories, trends help customers understand why they should pay attention to your product at this moment. For example, layering "direct-to-consumer" trends onto a product sampling solution helped brands understand its strategic importance to their current initiatives. Used carefully, trends can enhance your positioning, but they should complement rather than replace your market category.

Chapter 3: Identify Your Best Customers and Competitive Alternatives

The journey to effective positioning begins with understanding your happiest customers—the ones who instantly grasped your product's value, bought quickly, and became enthusiastic advocates. These customers hold the key to discovering your ideal positioning because patterns emerge when you examine who loves your product and why they love it. When examining these patterns, focus on your ecstatic fans rather than moderately happy customers. What characteristics do they share? What problems were they trying to solve? How did they understand your product's value? This approach reveals your best-fit customers—those who represent the perfect type of customer you want to attract. By concentrating on these customers, you can increase growth dramatically, as the author discovered when repositioning products throughout her career. In one case, surveying only the most enthusiastic users revealed clear patterns that weren't visible when looking at the entire customer base. After identifying your best customers, the next step is forming a positioning team with representatives from across your organization. Positioning isn't something marketing can "own"—it's intertwined with overall business strategy and impacts every department. The team should include the business leader driving the effort (typically the CEO in startups or a division head in larger companies) along with leaders from marketing, sales, customer success, and product development. Each function brings unique insights about how customers perceive and experience your product. The ideal team size ranges from three to twelve people, with outside facilitation often proving valuable to challenge entrenched assumptions. With your team assembled, you must align your positioning vocabulary and let go of positioning baggage. Team members need a common understanding of positioning concepts and definitions before they can effectively develop a new position. More importantly, everyone must consciously set aside historical assumptions about how the product should be positioned. Like Arm & Hammer, which transformed from baking soda to deodorizer when markets shifted, you must be willing to see your product through fresh eyes. The foundation of effective positioning is understanding your true competitive alternatives—what customers would actually use if your product didn't exist. This often differs from what you consider your competition. While you might worry about an emerging startup, your customers have likely never heard of them. Instead of creating an exhaustive list of every possible alternative, focus on what your best-fit customers would realistically use as substitutes. These alternatives often naturally cluster into groups, providing crucial insights for the next step in the positioning process.

Chapter 4: Map Features to Value and Target the Right Audience

Once you've identified your competitive alternatives, the next step is to isolate your unique attributes or features that differentiate your product. These are capabilities your product has that alternatives lack—patented technologies, specialized expertise, unique combinations of skills, or distinctive delivery methods. Focus on concrete, provable attributes rather than subjective claims like "outstanding customer service" or "easy to use" unless you have third-party validation to support them. After listing your unique attributes, map them to the value they deliver for customers. Features like "15-megapixel camera" or "all-metal construction" enable benefits such as "sharper images" or "stronger frame," which translate to value in customer terms—"photos that can be zoomed in without losing quality" or "frames that save $50,000 annually on replacements." This translation is essential because customers care about what your features can do for them, not just the features themselves. Look for patterns in your value points and group them into themes that naturally connect in customers' minds. With your value themes established, determine who cares deeply about this value—your best-fit customer segments. Not all customers value your unique attributes equally. For example, a QuickBooks integration feature provides more value to businesses that send many invoices than to those who send only a few. Your goal is to identify characteristics that make some prospects much more excited about your offering than others. These might include industry, location, company size, but also more specific traits like workflow patterns or technology preferences. Targeting narrowly might seem counterintuitive, but focusing on best-fit customers makes your marketing and sales efforts dramatically more efficient. These customers understand your product immediately, buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts, and become enthusiastic advocates. As the author experienced with a database product, focusing narrowly on banks with time-sensitive data analysis needs was far more effective than targeting any company with large amounts of data. The principle is simple: target as narrowly as you can to meet your near-term sales objectives, then broaden your focus later as you grow. Remember that your segmentation must be actionable—it should capture easily identifiable characteristics that make customers care deeply about your value proposition. A useful segment needs to be large enough to meet your business goals and have specific, unmet needs common to the segment. Your positioning will evolve over time as both your product and market change, so focus on resonating with your best-fit customers right now rather than trying to create positioning that will last for years.

Chapter 5: Choose Your Market Category and Apply Relevant Trends

Choosing the right market category is perhaps the most critical positioning decision you'll make. A market category serves as a frame of reference that helps customers understand your unique value by triggering a set of assumptions about competitors, features, and pricing. The right category makes your strengths obvious; the wrong one forces you to battle misaligned expectations. To find your optimal market category, start by letting go of your "default" category—the one you had in mind when you first conceived your product. Instead, use approaches like abductive reasoning (what types of products typically have your features?), examine adjacent growing markets, or carefully consider customer feedback about how they categorize your solution. The goal is to find a category that makes your unique value obvious to those who care about it most. There are three distinct styles for positioning within a market category, each suited to different competitive situations. The Head to Head style involves competing directly against established players in a well-defined market. This approach works best if you're already the market leader or if you're entering a defined category without an established leader. The Big Fish, Small Pond style focuses on dominating a subsegment of an existing market where the overall leader isn't meeting specific needs. This approach allows you to leverage what buyers know about the broader category while highlighting how you better serve a particular segment. The Create a New Game style involves establishing an entirely new market category. This is the most difficult approach but offers the greatest rewards, as you can define the market around your strengths. Once you've chosen your market category, you can optionally layer on relevant trends to make your product more compelling right now. Trends help customers understand why your product matters at this moment, making even "boring" products seem more current and strategic. For example, Redgate Software incorporated "database DevOps" trends into their positioning, aligning their established database tools with the growing DevOps movement. This resulted in a 100% increase in inbound leads and more customers buying multiple products at once. When using trends, ensure they genuinely connect to your product's strengths and your target market's interests. Avoid focusing exclusively on trends without clearly establishing your market category first—this leads to confusion, as demonstrated by companies that describe themselves as "the Uber for cats" or "the sharing economy for pets" without explaining what they actually do. Remember that trends are optional; many successful products thrive without trendiness, and it's always better to be clear than fashionable but confusing.

Chapter 6: Implementing Your Positioning Across the Organization

Once you've developed your positioning, you need to document and share it across your organization so it can inform every aspect of your business. Rather than using traditional positioning statements that are awkward and rarely referenced, create a positioning canvas that captures each component—competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, and customer segments—in a format that shows their relationships. This document serves as a reference point for everyone in the company. The next step is translating your positioning into a sales story that salespeople can use when first speaking with prospects. This story follows a common arc: defining the problem your solution addresses, describing how customers currently try to solve it, painting a picture of the "perfect world" solution, introducing your product in its market category, and detailing your unique value. This exercise helps everyone agree on how positioning translates into a customer-facing pitch. With your sales story outlined, your marketing team can develop messaging that reflects your positioning across all materials and campaigns. Create a master messaging document to serve as a baseline, preventing message drift as various teams create specific content for different purposes. Beyond marketing and sales, positioning shifts often impact product roadmaps as feature priorities shift to reinforce your market position. Pricing may also need adjustment to align with expectations in your chosen market category—for example, the author's team raised prices for their "CRM for investment banks" because banking customers expected premium pricing. Monitor your positioning regularly, checking in every six months or whenever significant market events occur. Watch for changes in the competitive landscape, such as when established players enter your market or when startups are acquired by larger companies. Be alert to shifts in government regulations, economic conditions, or technology capabilities that could change what's possible or important in your market. Even customer attitudes and preferences evolve over time—the author recalls how technical buyers who once claimed not to care about server aesthetics suddenly valued distinctive design elements. Remember that positioning is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing process that evolves as both your product and market change. By continuously refining your positioning to highlight your strengths in the context that makes them most valuable to your best customers, you create a powerful competitive advantage. When done well, positioning becomes your secret superpower, making everything from marketing to sales to customer retention dramatically more effective and efficient.

Summary

Positioning is the foundation of market success, yet many businesses fail to approach it strategically. At its core, positioning is about deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares deeply about. The 10-step process outlined in this book provides a systematic approach to positioning your product in a context that makes its value obvious to the customers who will appreciate it most. The key insight that transforms positioning from theory to practice is understanding that any product can be positioned in multiple ways. Success comes from deliberately choosing the position that highlights your unique strengths for the customers who value them most. By identifying your true competitive alternatives, isolating your unique attributes, mapping them to customer value, targeting the right audience, and choosing the optimal market category, you create a powerful foundation for every aspect of your business. Positioning isn't just a marketing exercise—it's a fundamental business strategy that impacts everything from product development to sales to customer retention. When you get it right, positioning feels like a superpower, making your product obviously awesome to the people who need it most.

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April Dunford

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