AMA: Adobe Sr Director Product Marketing, Katie Gregorio on Positioning

Positioning is what your company uniquely provides a specific audience in a particular market. As market dynamics change, it needs to be updated, but it should be durable enough to stand some test of time. If you’re finding your positioning is constantly out of date because competitors are shipping new products and features that you likely have not dug deep enough to truly understand your differentiation.

Positioning reflects what your company uniquely provides a specific audience in a particular market. It shouldn’t require multiple facets like general and competitive positioning. That said if you are finding that your audience is comparing you against one competitor in particular you can find ways to do comparisons on value, features, pricing, ROI, time to value, and other metrics in a direct comparison chart, through case studies or calculators, or with enablement to your sales team. But you could be doing more harm than good in pursuing this as you’re giving competitors air time.

Generally there are two elements to this answer. First is that the sales team had qualified the lead with the appropriate discovery questions to ensure that the target for the deal is a good fit for your company’s solution. Assuming that is the case, then spending time with the sales team in training and creating cheat sheets for them on typical faqs that come up in conversation about specific use cases or features can be helpful.

Positioning is an internal artifact. Messaging is externally facing and brings this positioning to life in various contexts. I have usually found it very helpful to have a positioning and messaging evergreen document that is dated and encapsulates the following: 1) the positioning for the company/product 2) how to talk about the positioning for the company/product in 25, 50 and 100 words as it might appear at the bottom of a press release for examples 3) any relevant messaging pillars and themes that help enable other stakeholders and agencies on how to bring the messaging to different contexts (web page copy, social copy etc). But from what you’re asking about “how to go to market with a particular segment” that sounds more like a GTM strategy that typically I organize by Goal, Strategy, Tactics, Dependencies, Timelines in a Google Doc and then translate the tactics to a spreadsheet of activities, owners, links to artifacts and dependencies to track progress against execution.

The short answer is it depends. I tend to be pretty anti personas as it often ends up being a fancy exercise no one really uses. What I prefer is to have a matrix that can flex to multiple audiences as necessary of what the key messages are that I’m trying to land. Keeping the audience in mind for this - eg who in the company needs to digest this messaging - execs for approval, an agency turning this into a video, etc - informs how to package this information out. As far as mentioning the competition, it’s a slippery slope. I try not to name competition in messaging and use other tools like side by side competition pages (this also often helps for SEO) or assets for sales to help them handle questions.

Positioning is what your company uniquely provides a specific audience in a particular market. Pricing and packaging are an output of go to market strategy. If price is a differentiator, which is always tricky in my experience, I would encourage you to look for other differentiators or you and the competition will end up in a race to the bottom. Even commodities differentiate with services.

The BIGGEST mistake companies make with positioning is not including the entire company in the exercise and making it just a marketing exercise. The next mistake I’ve seen is not talking to customers and keeping the positioning discussion internal.

The way to get people bought into positioning is to make sure that positioning is a cross functional exercise in the beginning. Positioning is not just a marketing or product marketing activity and when it is the output often fails.