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

it’s critical to start with understanding what the customer sees as a competitive alternative, and then working through the rest of the components—attributes, value, characteristics, market category, relevant trends—from there.

Your target market is the customers who buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts and tell their friends about your offerings.

What would our best customers do if we didn’t exist? The answer could be that they would use another product that looks like a direct competitor with you. But often that’s not the case. For many new products, the answer is “use a pen and paper” or “hire an intern to do 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).

Big Fish, Small Pond: Positioning to win a subsegment of an existing market

Think of your product’s strengths, your market context and a trend that is relevant to your customer base as three overlapping circles. You are aiming for the center, where all three intersect.

Your first instinct might be to consider your product and its special features and position around them. Understandable! That’s the part you understand—and possibly enjoy—the most. But that’s a trap.

Context enables people to figure out what’s important. Positioning products is a lot like context setting in the opening of a movie.

Even a world-class product, poorly positioned, can fail.