how do you think about the relationship between product positioning and pricing?

Question

Christy Roach · Accepted Answer

This is a GREAT question and one that I don’t think a lot of PMMs are asking. My take: Your overall product positioning is about so much more than your specific features or your price. It’s about what your product does. What problems it solves. What value it provides to the business and the buyer. It’s a higher level narrative. That said, your positioning needs to understand and reflect the “why” behind your pricing. You need to be clear how your overall positioning works for each plan and what the translation of that overall message for users on a specific plan, as well as what value they’d get (pulled from overall positioning) when moving to the next plan.

Jackie Palmer · Answer

You may not think that product positioning and pricing are necessarily related. However, something you should definitely consider as you look at pricing a product is how you are going to position it. If you are targeting different segments with the same product, either enterprise/mid-market, different industries, different locations etc, you need to assess how that will affect your pricing. You may need to have different packaging for those different segments and that different packaging could be worked into your positioning and messaging. You need to understand whether your competitors have different packages like a freemium model, edition-based pricing or different discount levels for different segments, that could also affect how you position your products. So in general, while you don't have to, and you probably shouldn't, lead with pricing as part of your messaging/positioning, it is definitely an input you should consider

Jonathan Brandon · Answer

They are absolutely linked, and I'd argue that positioning drives both pricing and packaging What features are needed by which buyer personas? What do you call them? How do you describe plans? How do you convey that it's super valueable? What are customers anchoring on? That's all positioning. Your pricing page and structure should map to how your marketing and sales team are talking about and positioning the value of your product.

Pricing is the exchange rate on that value you're providing, as Patrick Campbell says often. I'm of the philosophy that willingness-to-pay (""WTP"") is not a static, fixed constant you are forced to receive, but rather something you can influence via positioning and strong product marketing. You can position an identical product to buyers with dramatically different WTP, and ideally your price will find the optimal blend of ACV and volume.

(another plug for why PMM should drive pricing!)

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