Road21 (aka productledgrowth.net)
← All posts

How to write positioning for a product buyers don't understand

By · · 8 min read

You explain your product. The buyer nods, then asks, “So what exactly is it for?”

That reaction often means the buyer put your product in the wrong category, or had no category for it. April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, has written a lot about this problem. This post uses her blog posts as the source, quotes a few key lines, and paraphrases the rest with credit. The working order below is my adaptation of her material, explained in a moment.

The worked example is hypothetical. I made it up for this post. It is not a client, and it is not one of Dunford’s cases. Her own examples are credited to her where they appear.

What positioning is

Dunford’s definition: “Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.”

She also separates it from things people confuse it with. In “An Introduction to Positioning” she says positioning is not messaging, a tagline, a brand story, or a vision. Messaging comes after. In “A Product Positioning Exercise” she says finished positioning becomes an input to the messaging document.

Why buyers get confused

Dunford describes positioning as context. Naming the market for your product, she writes, sets off assumptions about who it competes with, what features it should have, who it is for and what it should cost. Tell someone your product is “email” and they expect different things than if you say “chat.”

So a confused buyer has usually received one of two things: a category that points at the wrong competitors and the wrong price, or no category at all.

She gives examples of the first kind from early in her career. In one, a startup built by database experts made a fast analytics product and sold it as a database. Prospects told them they already had Oracle, and many would not take a meeting. The team repositioned the product as a business intelligence tool, which put fast analysis of large amounts of data at the center. In another, a company sold an enterprise CRM against Siebel, the market leader, and lost the comparison on almost every measure. In her account, the company then narrowed to CRM for investment banks, where its one different feature mattered most. In Dunford’s account, the company grew from under $2M to close to $80M over the next 18 months.

The order of work

Dunford lists five components of positioning: competitive alternatives, differentiated capabilities, value for customers, target customer segment, and market category. In the quickstart guide she explains that the order matters, and that she found the starting point has to be competitive alternatives.

Her separate exercise post has its own five steps: let go of where the product came from, isolate what is unique, find the value, find who cares most, and choose the market frame of reference.

I have merged these into six steps. That merge is my adaptation, not an official Dunford method. Step 1 comes from her exercise post, step 2 from the quickstart, and steps 3 to 6 follow the order both posts share.

The hypothetical product

To keep the example honest, here is everything the hypothetical product does, stated before any reasoning starts:

  • It is an invoice-reminder app for freelance designers.
  • It records invoices the freelancer has sent, with due dates.
  • It flags invoices that are overdue.
  • It drafts a reminder email for each overdue invoice. The freelancer edits and approves it before it goes out.
  • It lets the freelancer set how many days after the due date each client gets a reminder.

It does nothing else. It has no bookkeeping, tax reports or bank feeds. The founder’s original idea was “simple accounting software for freelancers,” so that is the category the app sits in today.

Step 1. Let go of where the product came from

Dunford says weak positioning is often the result of holding on to a default market position rooted in the product’s history.

For the hypothetical app, the history is accounting software. A buyer who hears that term expects bookkeeping, tax reports and bank feeds, compares the app with well-known accounting tools, and finds it thin. The founder’s first job is to stop defending that label and describe what the app does today: it helps a freelancer chase late invoices.

Step 2. Competitive alternatives

Dunford’s test question: “What would a customer do if your offering didn’t exist?”

She warns against listing every company that could compete. She calls those “phantom competitors,” meaning companies that could compete in theory but that you never meet in deals. She advises listing what your customers actually see as alternatives. Doing nothing counts. In her words, that means sticking with the current way of solving the problem, such as a spreadsheet, a manual process or an intern.

For the hypothetical app, the likely alternatives are a spreadsheet of invoices, calendar reminders, and writing each chaser email by hand. A large accounting suite goes on the list only if freelancers say they considered one when choosing.

Step 3. What is unique

Dunford says to list what you have that the alternatives do not, without yet judging whether anyone cares.

Compare the app’s five capabilities with the manual setup of a spreadsheet, calendar reminders and hand-written emails. Two things stand out. The app drafts the overdue email for the freelancer to approve, where the manual setup needs a new email written each time. And it keeps invoices, due dates, overdue flags and per-client reminder timing in one place, where the manual setup spreads them over a sheet and a calendar. A determined user can build parts of this with spreadsheet formulas or automations, so the difference is effort and convenience rather than something a sheet could never do.

Step 4. Value

Dunford writes: “Customers don’t care about your unique features, they care what those features can do for them.”

Turn each unique item into something a customer would notice. A drafted email that the freelancer approves means no blank-page moment when writing to a client who is late. One place for invoices and timing means less checking across tools to see who owes what.

Step 5. Who cares most

Dunford writes: “Many kinds of prospects care about what you deliver but only some of them REALLY care.” She suggests asking who you would focus on if your product’s future depended on selling as much as possible this month. Her reasoning is that well-suited customers understand your value, buy faster and ask for fewer discounts.

For the hypothetical app, a reasonable first guess is freelance designers who send many invoices and have regular trouble getting paid on time. Someone with one retainer client has little use for reminders. This is a guess within the example. With a real product you would check it against real sales conversations.

Step 6. Market category

Dunford calls this the hard part: which market frame makes your value obvious to your best prospects. She notes it often is not the market the idea started in.

For the hypothetical app, three candidates:

  • “Accounting software for freelancers” invites bookkeeping comparisons the app cannot win.
  • “Invoicing app” invites comparison with every tool that creates and sends invoices, which the app does not do.
  • “Invoice reminder tool for freelancers” matches what the app does and who needs it.

Dunford advises caution about inventing a brand-new category. In the quickstart guide she argues that category creators often lose in the long run to later companies, and that it is more common for startups to begin in an existing category. Her example of a good fit is “embeddable database for mobile devices”: buyers already understand “database,” and the added words narrow it.

Following that pattern, “invoice reminder tool” is an existing, understandable category narrowed by “for freelancers.” I have not tested whether it is the best choice. Only conversations with real buyers can show that.

A positioning description you could test

Putting the six steps together, here is one hypothetical description for the hypothetical app:

A reminder tool for freelance designers who often wait on late invoices. It tracks what you have sent, flags what is overdue, and drafts the reminder for you to approve, so you can follow up without writing each email from scratch or checking a spreadsheet and calendar.

It uses only capabilities defined above. It names the category, the buyer, the manual alternatives it replaces (the spreadsheet, the calendar and the hand-written email) and the value. It is a first draft to put in front of buyers.

Write it down, then change the business to match

Dunford recommends recording the result in a dated document so you can see why the positioning is what it is and when it was last reviewed.

She also warns that it is bigger than a copy change: “A change in positioning is a fundamental change in your business.” Buyer expectations about competitors, price and sales channel shift, and internally the roadmap, skills and partnerships have to follow. For the hypothetical app, moving from “accounting software” to “invoice reminder tool” would change what gets built next, with more work on reminder timing and email drafts and none on tax reports.

Test it, and expect it to age

Dunford describes the output as a best guess to test with customers. She also writes that “Great positioning often becomes weak over time,” because markets move and unique features become standard.

Skip the positioning statement

Dunford argues against the fill-in-the-blanks positioning statement. Her reasons in “A Product Positioning Exercise”: it assumes there is one way to position a product when there are several, it produces an awkward sentence nobody uses, and it gives a false sense of being finished. Her alternative is the sequence above, worked out with evidence from customers at each step.

Your turn

Take a sheet of paper and write the six headings. Ground your answers on alternatives and unique value in what customers say, not in what your team believes. If you cannot list your real alternatives, finding that out is the first job.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your answers, you can book a 30-minute call with me.

Sources

All quotes and paraphrased claims about Dunford’s views come from her own writing:

Obviously Awesome is the book these posts summarize and is not quoted directly. The invoice-reminder app is hypothetical, created for this post.