Literature/202604031951 10 steps to develop positioning

• Source: [@dunford2019Obv!ously awesome: how to nail product positioning so customers get it, buy it, love it]
• Tags: #positioning #value-proposition #product

1: Understand the customers who love your product

Those customers who love what you do are likely the ones who hold the key to your positioning. They understood what value you deliver, and how you compare to others. Sitting down with them is fundamental to start your journey.

Note: Don't forget to define what are you positioning: your product? Your company? Your company for investors?

2: Form a positioning team

Positioning affects everyone involved with your product, and therefore it is important to have a cross-disciplinary team working on it. From marketing, to customer success and product development. Product positioning will end up informing roadmaps, messages, etc. Moreover, information can be gathered by different parts of the company.

3: Align your positioning vocabulary

It is important that you let go of the baggage that old positioning has created across the company. It is quite common that product development keeps in mind objectives that may not be the ones you are pursuing at the moment. Communicating the vocabulary is critical not only for those talking to customers, but in general.

4: List your true competitive alternatives

Sometimes an alternative is not another product or company, but rather "doing nothing". It can be a process, or a set of tools. Therefore, meaningful alternatives require careful analysis and not a rushed search.

What would customers do if your solution didn't exist?

5: Isolate your unique attributes or features

In deep tech, there's normally a patent that would be a smart initial step to identifying unique features. But there's a high likelihood there are many more, some that can be non-obvious. Keep in mind that if you have a multi-disciplinary team, features are not always seen as positive, some may be negative. In any case you need to list them all.

6: Map the attributes to value "themes"

Features, however, are only relevant if they deliver value to customers. The chain is: feature->benefit->value. For example:

15MPx sensor -> Sharper images -> You can zoom into them All metal frame -> Stronger frame resists damages -> Frames last longer, saving $50.000 in costs per year

7: Determine who cares a lot

In other words: segmenting a market. Once you can group features and benefits into "themes", you will be able to identify different subsets of the market, and hopefully, one will stand out.

8: Find a market frame of reference that puts your strengths at the center

Now that you have an overview of features and value, you can look at what other products have similar ones. If your product "looks like" something, then it's probably that.

This step is really the quid of positioning. There are 3 possibilities:

1. Head to head: Position yourself to win an entire market segment. (positioning within the market)
2. Small fish, big pond: Focus on an existing market, but on conquering a niche. (segmenting a market)
3. Create a new game: Position yourself in a market you are the first to define.

The approach you chose will depend on what you are doing, and what your strategy is. Sometimes it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to create a new game because you are doing something innovative. However, this is extremely rare. The higher likelihood is that you didn't spend enough time thinking.

9: Layer on a trend

Trends are extremely hard to navigate. Be sure you pick a trend that gives you momentum, and that it's integral to your solution within the market you are targeting. For example, imagine you use blockchain to create better accounting software. Likely in the market of accountants, using blockchain is not a trend you can leverage.

10: Capture your positioning so it can be shared

With these 10 steps, you will end up knowing a lot about your product, the market, and its relative place. Creating a document to display the source of truth is the best way to create company buy-in (not just in the commercial team).

1. Product name and one-line description
2. Market category (and sub category)
3. Competitive alternatives (what customers do without your solution)
4. Unique attributes
5. Value
6. Who cares a lot (what are the characteristics of these customers?)