How do you separate out your competitive positioning for two different plans of your product, while keeping a unified view, if the plans serve different customer segments?

I think about competitive positioning at two levels: the holistic product portfolio level and the plan or segment level. At the highest level, there should always be one overarching positioning that articulates the product’s core value — the thing that unifies your story across audiences. That’s your north star. From there, each of your plans should ladder back to that holistic, north star positioning but flex based on what matters most to its specific customer segment. Different segments value ...Read More

When plans serve different customer segments (for example, multiple tiers of a paid subscription) it can be effective to develop distinct but related positioning statements, and potentially differentiated GTM plans, for each segment. Here is a recommended approach that I've found effective: Evaluate the competitive landscape holistically, while assessing how competitors address the needs of different types of users. Segment the competitive analysis itself, surfacing differentiated insights and r ...Read More

Pricing and CI are two separate side of the same coin. Easiest way to win more business is to reduce your price. But that has consequences for revenue. Ultimately one product with different price points is aimed at a different cohort where price sensitivity, functional preferences and quality expectations get re-established. Let me keep with my electric car analogy from another question. Chassis and battery are a given as stakeholder. If now lets say you offer a service whereas you can change yo ...Read More

At Tableau we managed positioning across two very different buyer segments: IT-led enterprise deployments and line-of-business self-serve users. Same product, completely different competitive dynamics, different objections, and different win themes. Here is the architecture that worked. The answer is a two-layer positioning stack: a shared foundation that holds across all segments, and segment-specific competitive overlays that sit on top. The foundation layer captures what is durably true about ...Read More

For Shopify/Shopify Plus type scenarios (also seen in Klaviyo/Klaviyo One, or Dropbox/Dropbox Enterprise), you end up creating two sub-brands. These names aren’t just different product plans - they are sub-brands with their own unique look and feel and web presence allowing for a separate space to provide your positioning. e.g. Shopify.com no longer has to take the burden of convincing the market that it is an enterprise grade solution - they have Shopifyplus.com for that. This extends to sales/ ...Read More

The answer to this is all about segmentation and understanding what customers in that segment care about and what their unique pains are relative to other segments. Once you have that, the approach to competitive positioning is the same. You start with that customer pain/problem, then articulate how your product solves that pain, and why it’s better than the alternative.  Using your Shopify example, you would first need to analyze “customer care-abouts” for each of the respective audiences: ente ...Read More