[Best of Season] AMP139: This Is How To Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It With April Dunford Author Of Obviously Awesome

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content. 

The success of your company depends on the marketing you do, how you choose to present the benefits of a product or service, and which audience to target. How you position a product or service can make or break your company. Stop right there. Forget everything you thought you knew about product positioning. Connecting your product or service with buyers is not a matter of following trends, selling harder, or trying to attract the widest customer base.

Today, my guest is April Dunford, who has launched more than a dozen products and shares some of the biggest mistakes that startups, marketers, and entrepreneurs make with product positioning. Also, she’s the author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It. April’s book describes her point of view on positioning and offers a step-by-step process to perfectly position your product or service.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Career Change: Fake it til you figure it out. How hard can it be?
• Do it right, and the company grows quickly, gets acquired; you get bored and do another startup
• Definition of Positioning: How to win at doing something that a well-defined market cares about
• Perfect marketing execution won’t save you from weak positioning; marketing execution and results are only as good as positioning that feeds into them
• Who should decide the positioning for your product? Everybody
• Siebel Story: Too small to buy out beyond a billion dollars
• Positioning Pitfalls: People don’t do positioning deliberately; and when they try to fix it, they don’t follow a process but wing it or write a “Positioning Statement”
• Positioning Statement Components:
  • Who’s your competitive alternatives?
  • What are the unique capabilities or features that your product has?
  • What’s the value that those features can enable for customers?
  • Who’s my target customer?
  • Is this a market that I’m going to win?
• Signs of weak positioning include:
  • How a customer reacts to your product/service
  • They compare you to a non-competitor; not in the right market
  • Customer knows what you do, but not the value or why they should care

Links:

• April Dunford
• Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
• CoSchedule

Quotes by April Dunford:

• “Not only is positioning a thing I should figure out, it's potentially a super powerful thing.”
• “Two years after graduating from engineering, I'm running this great big marketing team. It's global. I’ve got this giant budget...even though I was completely unqualified for it.”
• “I focus on positioning, mainly because I think people do a really terrible job at positioning. There's not many people that know how to do it right.”
• “A shift in positioning can totally result in a shift in the product roadmap, a shift in your pricing, a shift in a way you sell, a shift in your channels.”
• "You see signs of weak positioning across your entire sales marketing funnel, but often the place where it’s most obvious is looking at how a customer reacts when they first encounter your product or your offering."