Hey everyone,
Here’s this week’s update from the The Founder’s Foyer project!
So your product is now launched and it's out for customers to try. You know it’s awesome, but do you know whether they know? How do you ensure your potential buyers understand the value you’re providing; do they care? Often we hear about go-to market strategy—but before all that, what should you do to ensure your target customers know your secret sauce? Here’s someone, the ONLY one, who has all the lessons to teach us how to position a product!
April Dunford discusses with Aishwarya what bad positioning for products could look like, why is it important to take these signals and work on them to nail that good positioning; followed by how trends are perceived, why it's important to work together as a team to reinvent the positioning of your product, target audience segmentation, and more.
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Here’s the 50-minute masterclass on product positioning and storytelling for B2B brands:
April and I chat about:
How important a role does name play for a product or brand
How do trends help the sales folks answer "why now?"
What's positioning? Good vs weak positioning examples
Cultivating good positioning and signals to find when it's working
How to measure the impact of positioning well
Why positioning should feel like a team activity
April's framework for product positioning
Pitfalls of having a bad positioning exercise within product teams
What are competitive alternatives and why it's crucial to know
How to develop the mindset to find those alternatives
Branding your product for multiple target audience segments
April's thoughts on what makes a terrible marketing strategy
On communicating the brand goals and messaging well
One of the interesting sections of our chat was when we dissected the Positioning Framework into parts and saw how each of those fed into the other.
April says,
"We should be able to take positioning and break it into its component pieces and then solve for the component pieces and put it together."
So, here are the 𝟓 𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥'𝐬 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤:
𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬: Like if we didn't exist, what would a customer do to solve the problem? This is the first thing competition.
𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬: What capabilities do you have that the competition does not, kind of unique?
𝐃𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞: People don't actually buy your stuff for features. They buy what the features can enable for their business. So we need to understand differentiated value.
𝐓𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐭 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬: We're not selling to everybody. We're selling a section of the market. That's a really good fit for our stuff.
𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐨𝐫𝐲: For example, are we a database or a data warehouse? What's the context. We're gonna position this thing in.
Listen to how these parts tie in together on our podcast:
Thank you, and keep your suggestions coming! :)
Happy weekend,
Aishwarya
The Founder's Foyer with Aishwarya: Product positioning, storytelling, marketing, team vision