October 15

Positioning Your Product in the Minds of Your Customers

Whenever possible, you want your customers to have a clear idea about how your product fits in the marketplace and compares with competing products. If you don’t help them form the picture that you want them to have, they will come up with their own ideas. Here are some suggestions for helping your customers form the right idea about your product.

What is product positioning? Product positioning is the process of determining the position of a new product in the minds of consumers. It includes analyzing the market and competitors’ positions, defining the position of a new product among the existing ones, and communicating the brand’s product image. The folks from Send Pulse discuss the importance of product positioning, its benefits, several strategies, explore the steps to positioning your product, and see several examples.

(via @SendPulseCom)

A quick start guide to positioning. April Dunford wrote a high-level introduction to the product positioning ideas in her book, Obviously Awesome. If you’re wondering if the book is for you, this is a good place to start. The book gets into additional details about how to execute the methodology, how positioning changes in new versus existing markets, and how you can take advantage of trends. That said, April’s article is a pretty good summary of the main positioning concepts.

(via @aprildunford)

3 Product positioning and branding failures: What NOT to do. Shopify defines product positioning as “a form of marketing that presents the benefits of your product to a particular target audience.” In B2B SaaS, product positioning is the market fit part of finding product-market fit (the first step before ensuring product-market-price fit). There are many ways to do product positioning right, but it can be instructive to see how product position goes bad. Margaret Kelsey takes a look at three ways product positioning can go totally upside-down.

(via @OpenViewVenture)

12 Examples of positioning statements & how to craft your own.  A positioning statement is a brief description of a product or service and target market, and how the product or service fills a particular need of the target market. Positioning statements are used to describe how your product or service fills a need of your target market or persona. They’re a must-have for any positioning strategy because they create a clear vision for your brand. Meredith Hart explains how to build your own positioning statement and provides some examples to help you out.

(via @meredithlhart)

Top tips to improve your product positioning strategy.  Positioning is not simply a marketing strategy. It should provide the foundation for your overall business strategy. You need to know your target audience and position your brand in a way that both caters to and is appealing for a certain segment in the market. Positioning is a brand’s unique way of providing value to its customers and a successful product positioning strategy relies on a deep understanding of the marketplace that it wants to compete in. Makayla Bowler provides five top tips on how to develop and maintain a clear positioning strategy, which is both sustainable and recognizable to potential customers.

(via @PLEDalliance)

Kent J McDonald

About the author

Kent J McDonald writes about and practices software product management. He has product development experience in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, nonprofit, and automotive. Kent practices his craft with a variety of product teams and provides just in time resources for product people at KBP.media and Product Collective. When not writing or product managing, Kent is his family’s #ubersherpa, listens to jazz and podcasts (but not necessarily podcasts about jazz), and collects national parks.


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