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

Context can completely transform the way we think about a product.

of view on markets than you do. In the context of this exercise, a “market” needs to be something that already exists in the minds of customers (except in the very rare case where you make a conscious decision to create a new market—which we’ll discuss later in this step). We position our offering in a market to trigger a set of assumptions—about c

You aren’t claiming to be better for a certain type of customer; you’re claiming to be better for most, if not all, customers. You’re accepting the current way the market category is defined, as well as the current set of evaluation criteria. You aren’t trying to change the game; you are winning—or attempting to win—at the game the way it is curren

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.

When we started to describe ourselves as “direct-to-consumer sampling,”