Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

In Head to Head you are attempting to beat Coke in the cola market; in Big Fish, Small Pond, you’re selling Coke for dogs. While your product is a lot like Coke (brown and fizzy), it does something that Coke doesn’t do and that dogs really, really want (it tastes like bones).

You’re the founder, CEO or an executive at a startup that needs prospects to quickly understand why your product is unique and important to shorten your sales cycles and grow revenue. You’re a marketer who wants to make it easier for your target customers to understand the strengths of your offerings so you can generate more leads. You’re a salespe

Pricing and margin

They are approaching the solution to their problem with a clean slate and little knowledge of what “state of the art” in your domain looks like.

Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.

The best way to understand competitive alternatives is to answer the question, What would our best customers do if we didn’t exist?

Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.

If you are fighting to unseat a leader in an existing category using the currently established criteria, you’re in a battle to prove that you can beat the leader at their own game. You have to clearly demonstrate to the market that you have a superior ability to deliver, and you need to support that claim with hard evidence and undeniable facts.

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.