What is Product Positioning?

Some key documents that my teams have implemented for competitive positioning are starting with data gathering on points such as: key value props, feature set, target customers, pricing, strengths, customer perception. Partnering with brand and demand gen teams on creative campaign insights and media spend are also helpful to coordinate on. These inputs can then be inputs into frameworks like SWOT matrixes and battlecards for Sales/AM teams or internal one sheeters that can be good alignment col ...Read More

When we do competitive positioning, we try to take a holistic approach, examining companies across numerous areas. We put together a general overview focused on their overall positioning and messaging from their website. We dive a little deeper to look at specific product features and the company’s size to better gauge their offerings and available resources. We also look at their social surfaces, pricing, top clients and existing customers. We also dive into their press, both good and bad, to g ...Read More

I think there are a couple of different docs that I would use, depending on the audience (internal, external) and the competitor (are you ahead, behind) INTERNAL resources Feature comparisons "Killer" features that set you apart Common objections Loaded discovery questions (I love these, questions your reps can use to purposefully attack a weakness) Switch stories Deal win stories (these are different than switch stories. Dive into how the rep positioned to overcome competitive objections) Prici ...Read More

It really depends on the current understanding of that competitive positioning within my sales team. I usually work with Sales Enablement or frontline Sales Managers to create a bill of materials that would help inform the team on competitive positioning.  Usually this includes but it varies on who I'm tryin to enable (Account executives, leadership, customer success, technical sales engineers, etc..) Competitive battlecards Why we win/why we lose messaging + customer stories Product differentia ...Read More

I've seen this done a number of different ways. Typically we have dedicated time with the field to train them on the positioning. You can get buy-in from the head of sales and enablement (if you have one) to schedule a standalone session that you run to help train the field on the positioning.  If your company already has a standing enablement session (e.g., a monthly sales training time slot), you can use that time, or dedicate a portion of the agenda to this in a Sales All-Hands.  I've also se ...Read More

Keep it simple and practical. We use a simple battle card format to pull together the most essential details you need at your fingertips to enable competitive conversations. We host it on Seismic so it is easy to search for keywords and find the battle cards. We also do specific training sessions for tier 1 and tier 2 competitors (described above). I’ve also used slack channels to create a conversation around competition and tackle fringe situations effectively with group input. Again, those peo ...Read More

In the traditional B2B Tech world, my experience has been that you need several ways to disseminate your competitive positioning:Sales battle cards for your field sales teams and channel partners easily reference;Training sessions to go over key competitive differentiation and review your value prop;Self-service short videos where you go over competitors and how you win;Create a dedicated competitive channel in Slack or MS Teams where field teams can come for information and ask questions;Regula ...Read More

It depends on the competitive dynamics in your market. Are you the market leader or a new emerging alternative? What are the important buying factors in your market and with your buyers? Is price a primary buying consideration (hint: it often is not unless you make it that way)? It's always important to understand how direct competitors and/or alternatives are tackling pricing. You need to determine what your differentiated value is and how you want your brand represented in your market.  Are yo ...Read More

The truth is most pricing problems aren't pricing problems. In fact, they are rarely pricing problems. They are just the causal impact of poorly understood and/or communicated positioning of a product leading to a lack of conviction and a whole host of downstream issues. Pricing cannot be set without the Positioning being clearly thought through.pricing is intimately connected to Positioning.  Knowing the positioning will help you answer the following questions: Is your product a 'tool/widget,' ...Read More

They go hand in hand. You need to keep a pulse on your competitors pricing & packaging so that you can adjust or create promos/spiffs to support your sales team when needed. That said, you don't buld your pricing & packaging process based on the competition. You should undersand the market - conjoin anaylsis, willingness to pay, price elasticity, value metrics your buyers assign your product and capabilities that are seen as table stakes versus a broad or niche value driver. You should u ...Read More

Product marketing is often defined as the people who position the products, but I think it's as equally important (especially as you grow bigger) that Product Marketing is also the most cross functional role in marketing. Creating alignment, securing buy-in, and building momentum around a launch is just as important (if not more) as any positioning work you've done. After all what good is a great narrative if no-one put it to use? If you want to ace this there are two things you need to do reall ...Read More

Ah, a tricky one! There are a few things that you can do, starting with a core team that you trust to participate in the fluidity that is message development. Typically, this is a small group that can speak to all the core concepts that you need to discuss in detail. At Okta, this was our product management and product marketing team plus a couple of ‘super AE/SEs’ to provide field input.Once a baseline message has been developed, then it’s best to iterate quickly via testing. For example, we us ...Read More

Two words: customer stories! Product Marketers need to make sure that everyone is united in telling the same story about our product and its value. I always think of it like internal selling. And just like in the field, one of the most compelling ways to convince people is to use customer proof points to validate your position. Whenever I am enabling teams on positioning, I try to incorporate a customer story that revoleves around a few key points: What challenges was the customer trying to solv ...Read More

This is arguably the hardest part of positioning. In my experience, it has to start before you really start drafting positioning and as you're doing research.  First, talk with a few folks from your sales and CS teams and get a sense of any pain points they're hearing in the market. Gaining early buy-in from Sales will pave the path to making adoption a whole lot easier once positing is written. Next, once you have positioning drafted get feedback from the same group of individuals from Sales an ...Read More

Good question and I’m sure everyone has a slightly different take on this. From my perspective:  Positioning = How you solve customers needs and sit in relation to the wider competitive market  Messaging = How you bring your positioning to life in market  I like to think of messaging as the tactical way that your positioning comes to life. Your positioning is your foundation and the messaging is the particular angle you’ll take when launching a campaign. Messaging will be used to creatively brin ...Read More

I’m so glad you asked this, because it’s actually one of my favorite topics to get on the soapbox about! :) I think April Dunford defined positioning best when she wrote, “positioning describes the specific market you intend to win and why you are uniquely qualified to win it.” I'll add my two cents which is that strong positioning means identifying and deeply understanding the most strategic target audience(s) you want to acquire, and picking out a place in their mind where you are the clear wi ...Read More

This is a big question! I’m assuming we’re talking about new product positioning vs re-positioning an existing product. If you’re working on a mature product, it will be very difficult to change the position of that product in the market. For a new product, I would research and consider the following perspectives: Company vision, narrative, and category - What is the vision for the company? What’s the narrative? Is there a category you’re trying to create or win? How does this product fit into t ...Read More

I like to keep these simple, and just use a single value proposition slide. Especially when it’s for an executive team. Here are the basic things to include: Who is our audience? (customer segment) What challenges do they face? (what is the need and the cost of not meeting that need?) What is our solution? (a description of your offering) How do we solve their problem? (Solution/benefit statement) What makes us unique? (Your top 3-5 core differentiators) Alternatively, if you want something more ...Read More

Here's what I like to put into a positioning doc:  1. What market are we in ? How big is this market (TAM)? What's our serviceable obtainable market (SOM) ? 2. What does the competitve landscape look like?  2. Who are our customers? (buyer personas) 3. What challenges do they face? (key pain points)  4. What is our solution? (description of your offering) 5. How do we solve their problems? (solution/benefit statement)  6. What makes us unique (differentiators)  From what it sounds like you'll ne ...Read More

There are a number of templates available online. My first recommendation is to confirm your CMO's expecation - it's rare for a CMO to *not* have a favorite format for this.  However, if they are truly asking you to build something up from scratch, there are a few basic elements you need: Target audience. Who you are trying to reach. This is both persona (multiple) and firmographic Problem and solution. What the customer's core problem is, and how your product/solution addresses it, uniquely Pos ...Read More

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 theme ...Read More

Congratulations on getting tapped to write a positioning doc!Before diving in, I'd do your research:-Do you already have company-wide or product-wide positioning? If so, do you have hypotheses on how this segment will differ? -Do you have customers in this segment already? If so, put together a short list of reps, CSMs, and customers you want to interview to validate or disprove these hypothesesOnce you've done this, you can start diving into a doc. I would worry less about the template versus e ...Read More

It's a good idea to start with overall product positioning and messaging ("P&M") as a foundation for general or evergreen marketing channels and campaigns. Channel owners can then leverage the guidance to craft channel-specific messaging tailored for each channel and audience that ladders up to the product P&M.  For feature launches, however, I treat new features (or bundles of features), as separate, thematic launches and develop separate P&Ms to lean into the most relevant customer ...Read More

Love this question. You want to make sure that you are always telling a story. Storybrand is a great template that I often use. It has 7 elements A hero Has a challenge They meet a guide Who gives them a plan Calls them to action Helps the avoid failure They succeed in the end Your overall product or platform should be telling this story above. Any new product launches should map back to this story, but add additional value to customers. You can use the "Three Whys" to help guide you too. Why an ...Read More

I think there's a few different aspects of this: 1. Alignment -- There needs to be alignment between your feature and overall product positioning and messaging. If you are sprinting towards a major launch of a notable feature then it should focus on how that capability naturally solves key challenges in the market for prospective buyers. That said, launch and core product positioning shouldn't be different (for the same product line). A launch is an opportunity to drive momentum -- and you can u ...Read More

Positioning is the precursor to messaging.  If you don't know who your product is for, what it's good for and how it's different from other products in its space, then it will be very hard to come up with viable messaging.  Put another way, positioning is the primitive, typically expressed as an internal statement (see question above re: Geoffrey Moore's framework), whereas messaging is a set of derivative assets, typically copy and value statements that help suit the needs of different channels ...Read More

I'd describe positioning as how we want to be perceived in the market, and messaging as the customer-facing language that proves it. But in practice, I've rarely (if ever) had this specific conversation at Momentive outside of PMM: it tends to be pretty marketing-centric. What I've learned from internal stakeholders is that what's most important to them is to be able to look at a messaging document and know what's internal framework vs. something they can use in external-facing materials, so we ...Read More

One thing I've seen work is positioning "positioning" as business strategy or a business plan versus marketing "words" we want people to think about and use. Positioning is the company's strategy — based on research and expertise — for who we're going after (e.g., sales teams) with what category of product (scheduling automation) to solve what problems or address what jobs to be done (qualify, route, and schedule meetings via the marketing website) to achieve a business outcomes (shorten the sal ...Read More

Competitive posititioning is a core element of product positioning. The primary architecture of brand and product-level positioning comes down to this: Audience: Who are you primarily building for and marketing to?  Pain/Enemy: What is their biggest pain point or problem? Solution: How do you address this problem? Differentiation: What makes your approach to solving this problem different and better? Urgency: Why is now an important right time to address this issue? Competitive positioning lives ...Read More

When your company only has one product, the product positioning is the company positioning. The next growth phase would be a portfolio of products. Say we are are the professional services cloud with one product for accountants another for consultants another for lawyers and finally one for bankers. Here the value offered by the product can differ to the value of the company or brand in other words. the idea should be 1+1+1+1=5. Finally, when you have multiple portfolios the issue becomes more o ...Read More

Ideally you are not basing your overall positioning based solely on how your competitors position themselves. That said, you (or more likely sales) will inevitably be asked for comparisons. The best approach to this is to have a solid set of unique value propositions (UVPs) for your company - these can be product related or include other things like services only you offer or industries you specialize in. Once you have these UVPs agreed on, then you can start to create some competitive positioni ...Read More

My favorite example is Adidas video which shoes that yes, a runner can sprint through the desert in Nike shoes -- but a camera man with 50 additional pounds of equipment and wearing Adidas can keep up with him. It strikes the balance between saying, we respect your product and - ours is as good or better. Really clear value, clever approach, not so dimishing as to take away from the credibility or respect associated with Adidas' brand. Companies can absolutely straddle the line. It's about solvi ...Read More

The market is littered with really bad examples of competitive messaging, unfortunately. They usually make their case on technical details that are irrelevant to the prospective customer.  The best competitive positioning doesn't mention competition. After all, why give them air time? Rather, it uses competitive insights to guide positioning strategy -- and the positioning strategy, in turn, guides salient messaging that is relevant to your customers.  Make the messaging about the problems they ...Read More

The easiest way to differentiate yourself is to have a really innovative product and solid marketing to back it up. My favorite example right now is a Klaviyo customer, Magic Spoon. They make low carb/keto diets for people on a diet but wish they weren't. On their website, they even have a tagline "Hold on to the dream." (The dream of eating sugary cereals guilt free.) They have lots of fun cereal flavors you'd associate with your childhood but they're grain free, low carb, etc. For a certain ma ...Read More