April Dunford’s five steps of product positioning

August 17, 2023

April Dunford is the author of Obviously Awesome, an awesome guide to product positioning.

You can think of positioning as “context setting” for products. When we encounter something new, we will attempt to make sense of it by gathering together all of the little clues we can quickly find to determine how we should think about this new thing. Context helps people figure out what’s important. Without that context, products are very difficult to understand, and the whole company suffers.

In the clip below, April walks through the essential five steps to figuring out your product’s positioning:

  1. List your competitive alternatives. What would your best customers do if your product didn’t exist?

  2. Isolate your unique attributes or features. Strong positioning is centered on what a product does best. Once you have a list of competitive alternatives, the next step is to isolate what makes you different and better than those alternatives.

  3. Map the attributes to value themes. Attributes or features are a starting point, but what customers care about is what those features can do for them. In your attributes list, you should see a handful of themes start to emerge and the value those features deliver to customers. Group attributes that provide similar value so you can get down to a more reasonable number. The goal of this step is to see the patterns and shorten the list to 1-4 value clusters. It’s not uncommon for this exercise to produce just a single value point.

  4. Determine who cares a lot. Once you have a good understanding of the value that your product delivers versus other alternatives, you can look at which customers really care a lot about that value. If you have limited marketing and sales resources (almost all of us do), it makes sense to spend them on prospects that are most like your best-fit customers. You want to target as narrowly as you can to meet your near-term sales objectives, and then you can broaden targets later.

  5. Find a market frame of reference that puts your strengths at the center. You now have a good handle on your ideal prospects, your product’s unique attributes and the value those attributes can deliver. The next step is to pick a market frame of reference that makes your value obvious to the segments who care the most about that value. At a high level we can either choose to enter an existing market or create a new market. If we choose to enter an existing market, we can either compete to win the entire market or position our product to win a slice of it. The “style” of positioning you choose will depend on a set of factors including the competitive landscape and your business goals.