MarketingPricing
Obviously Awesome
April Dunford
2019
Summary
Positioning is the foundation of all marketing and sales, yet most companies do it badly. April Dunford, a veteran startup executive, breaks positioning into five components: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value for those attributes, the best target customer, and the market category. She argues that weak positioning is the root cause of most marketing failures, and gives a step-by-step process any team can use to reposition their product for maximum impact.
Key Takeaways
- 1Positioning is the context in which customers understand your product — it shapes everything else
- 2Five components: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target customer, market category
- 3Choosing the right market category changes how customers evaluate and price your product
- 4Most positioning is made by default, not design — it's worth deliberately revisiting
- 5Your best customers are the signal: study why they love you, then go find more like them
- 6Positioning is not a tagline — it is the internal foundation that marketing and sales build on