Written by Daniel Thai, Fluvio Consultant
You have a new product that you want to take to market, so it’s time to figure out what you should say about it. Building that messaging for the market is not just huddling with a bunch of copywriters and throwing together the most popular buzzwords. Even the best-written marketing and best-designed campaigns can go awry if they’re missing a foundational piece: product positioning.
What Is Product Positioning?
According to the Product Marketing Alliance, a positioning statement “identifies your product’s unique value to customers in relation to your main competitors.” This statement sets the stage for your entire marketing plan — including messaging, branding, lead generation, and sales strategy — and will become the image consumers have in their mind of your product, which means you need to make sure it stands out.
Positioning is not a one-and-done proposition. As brands, products, and markets evolve, you need to continue iterating your positioning to match. This means you need to develop a consistent process that ensures you’re looking at all the right pieces and talking to all the right stakeholders.
Building a Positioning Message
Your goal is to distill everything about your product into a single statement featuring the most important pieces. In this one sentence, you must somehow describe:
the features
the problems they solve
how you do it better
the value to the consumer
That’s a lot of pieces to assemble each time you visit a positioning statement. Building a process helps you quickly identify the necessary information and make it more successful. There are three main areas to investigate before writing your positioning: your product and company, your competitors, and the target market. Here are some steps you can take to answer those questions:
Ensure you know the product and its features and their intended benefits inside-out.
Review sales notes and sales calls to understand what challenges customers are facing.
Build a full competitive landscape analysis to see how you can differentiate against their offerings.
Conduct market research and perform customer interviews to inform consumer personas and verify what they need.
Adapting the Process
The work that goes into the positioning process not only varies product-to-product but also changes between organizations. Positioning should always be forward-looking, but its development should be dependent on established, historical data. A longstanding corporation may be able to leverage different resources and existing data than a new startup trying to figure out how to enter the market. I’ve worked in both situations, and I had to adapt my approach to positioning for each situation.
With the larger organization, we were able to target already established user personas and rely on the brand equity of the company to lift that of the new product. As a result, we mainly focused on identifying how our product compared to our competitors’ and communicating how it addressed customers’ needs. We were able to speak with current customers to get the market’s thoughts on the new features, but that also meant we needed to tailor separate positioning statements, one for existing customers and one for new customers.
On a later consulting project, I worked with a startup software company approaching its beta release. I had to expand my positioning process to incorporate information that was established in an older company. We needed to figure out where in the market the startup fit — not only currently but also in its future iterations — because this product positioning also provided direction for the entire brand’s message. Competitive analyses helped us verify the value of our product and provided a starting point on how we could compare and differentiate against other options. Beta testing was the only product feedback we really had, so we were actually developing the product and positioning in parallel.
Successful Positioning for Successful Business
Good product positioning is at the core of all product marketing. A strong positioning statement comes from working cross-functionally and can get your entire organization excited about the unique solution you’re delivering to their customers. A successful launch relies on everyone — your organization and your audience — having a clear understanding of what you do, how you do it, and how you do it better.