How does product and launch positioning and messaging differ?

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 pain points and benefits and to provide more granular, feature-level messaging. These feature P&Ms, however, all ladder up to the overall product P&M because they are part of the product. Since you have multiple feature-rich products, it sounds like this approach may also work well for you.

Finally, since your team is small, but your mandate is broad, I suggest creating and maintaining an easy-to-digest messaging map from the product to the feature level. We recently did a similar exercise, and it really pays off. Your team and internal partners will thank you, and this will go a long way in driving internal alignment and ensuring a consistent, compelling customer experience. 

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 anything, Why your platform, Why now. 

Your goal as a PMM is not to sell product, it's to help customers solve problems better than other solutions. The product is just the means to an end :)

That is a great question! I like to have both.

The core messaging should be for your overall company and product - this is the foundational messaging for how to talk about your product (and perhaps even different parts of your product depending on product complexity)

Then as you develop and launch new features, your launch GTM plan should also have launch-specific messaging that you align your entire GTM team around.

As you develop new messaging for each launch, make sure you go back and either interlink your core messaging doc to the different feature messaging guides OR add new sections in your core doc that link to those details, so over time you can build a messaging bible that is comprehensive.

With smaller teams, the only way to do this is to first take some time to build the core foundational messaging and get it right, so that when new launches you are not having to redo that every time and you can just focus on what you are actually launching.

You'll need to have both 1) Your core positioning and messaging doc at the overall company and product level and then 2) Your GTM plan for the new feature which includes messaging and positioning for that particular launch. 

For any launch, you'll also need to come up with a tiering structure and then let's say it's a Tier 1 product launch that changes your positioning or messaging in some way you'll need to update your core positioning and messaging doc to reflect that change if the launch is big enough that it warrants an update. 

Yes, these are definitely different, but related.

Product positioning: Durable, consistent framework for positioning a product or solution over the long run. Needs to account for current and future positioning. 

Launch positioning: Unless it's a completely new product, this is derivative of the overall product/solution positioning. Ideally, it magnifies or highlights a subset of the overarching product positioning through the new capabilities you're introducing. 

A launch is an opportunity to remind the market of why you exist, why you're an ideal solution, and what about your solution makes you worthy of their consideration. As a result, this activity should amplify and focus the market on the new differentiators you're adding. Teaching them something completely new is inefficient - it's more effective to really magnify what you're great at and showcase why you're now even better.

As an example, say you're a data pipeline or ELT company that has built product and brand positioning around three pillars: simplicity, data quality, and connector ecosystem. Any new product launch (or partnership) should amplify 1-2 of those at most. 

• A new partnership or connector should amplify the value of the connector ecosystem (and why your ecosystem is better/bigger/faster growing
• New transformation tools could focus on the simplicity of the solution. Pre-built templates, better ways to manage SFDC data, etc.
• Customer stories or customer announcements can highlight the data quality problems you're solving for them. 

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 use different messaging to do that, but the positioning should stay the same.

2. Positioning vs. Messaging -- This is talked about all the time in Product Marketing circles. I do view them as different, and positioning is an internal resource that frames the market, the buyer, and where your solution fits. Whereas messaging is the external-facing output of positioning -- it's what prospects will read in a blog post, or on your product page. 

3. Timing/Goal -- It goes without saying that we all have a limited amount of time each day, and the vast majority of PMMs I speak with have a million priorities. So timing, and what your short (and long) term goals are play a factor in this too.

While it's tangential to your question, looking at this through a hierarchy I think makes sense:

1. Company Positioning: This should be the highest level of messaging for the overall company/brand. There should be at least 3 stories that tie up to this: brand narrative, financial narrative, executive leadership narrative.

2. Platform Positioning: I use the term "Platform" here because, especially in most software or SaaS companies there are multiple product lines that tie-up to the overall platform. If this is the case for your company, there should be distinct platform positioning.

3. Product Positioning: This is for overall product lines. During my time at HubSpot, this would have been Marketing Hub, or CMS Hub, as an example. 

4. Product Launches: Again, this shouldn't change overall product positioning (unless it's an all-new product of course), but it can be a timely message in the market.

For at least the first 3, and really all of them, I recommend putting them on a central resource available to the company like Confluence/Guru/GDrive/Etc. By doing so that hierarchy is clear and all customer-facing teams have an easy way to get talk tracks, and supporting assets they need.