1 An intro to positioning

An intro to
positioning

POSITIONING
02 An intro to positioning

Contents
03 What is positioning?
- What are the types of positioning?

05 How does it fit into product marketing?

06 Why is positioning important?

07 The six steps to a successful positioning strategy

08 How to identify what makes your product unique

- Positioning statement examples
- The four main components of a product positioning statement

13 How to learn more about positioning

03 An intro to positioning

What is positioning?
Product positioning establishes where your product or service fits in your respective market and
differentiates your offering from alternatives available to your customers.

When it comes to product marketing, positioning is considered one of the most important functions.

What are the types of positioning?

You can position your product by:

• Customer needs: Knowing your target market and how you’ll fulfill their specific needs.

• Product price: Positioning your brand/product as competitively priced.

• Product quality: Positioning your brand/product as high quality.

• Product use and application: Associating your brand/product with a specific use.

• Competitors: Positioning your brand as better than your competitors.

Check out our vetted and tested positioning template, approved by the likes of Microsoft, Klue, and Facebook.
This resource will help you streamline your processes and perform to your optimum potential.

Plus, if you’re looking to enhance your positioning credentials, even more, the Positioning Certified: Masters
course is packed with key learnings that’ll improve your knowledge.

From enrolment to certification, you’ll be armed with only essential insights, designed to define what makes
your product unique, find your product’s place in the market, and excel in one of the most strategically
impactful areas of your role.
04 An intro to positioning

By the end of this

course you’ll:
• Understand why positioning is so important

• Learn the ins and outs of strategic positioning

• Know how to position for growth

• Appreciate the role of teamwork when

positioning your product

• Understand the correlation between positioning

and cross-functional areas

Enroll today
05 An intro to positioning

How does positioning fit

into product marketing?
Product Marketing Managers should plan for how people in the market will think about their product, as truly
the only product positioning that counts is what your customers think as the product has a life of its own. If a
customer isn’t thinking about it, your product doesn’t occupy that position.

Successful positioning strategies not only focus on where the product is today but how it could potentially
progress to where you would ideally like it to be in the near future.

Businesses use marketing to communicate their market position to customers and influence their perception
of the brand’s products or services. Marketing establishes the brand identity, influencing consumer perceptions
of its position in the market relative to the alternatives available from competitors.

In her book Obviously Awesome, positioning expert April Dunford, Founder of Ambient Strategy says:

“Positioning is defining how you are the best at

something that a market cares a lot about. Great
positioning makes your strengths obvious. It provides
context and a frame of reference that makes it easy for
customers to understand why they should care about
what you do.”
06 An intro to positioning

Why is positioning
important?
The goal of positioning is to make your value undeniable. If you want your customers and
potential customers to easily differentiate between what you offer and what your competitors
offer, you need to put your unique offering at the front and center.

Positioning is at the core of everything you do as a product marketer and also what the rest of
the company does too. If you’re not positioning your product well, a copywriter can write the most
compelling copy in the world, but it won’t sell - a sales rep can give the most convincing pitch, but
it won’t work.

Marketing can send endless emails, but they won’t convert. And you can create the most amazing
messaging, but it just won’t resonate. The wrong positioning can drag everyone’s performance
down, but the right positioning can propel it - exponentially.

Product positoning molds your product marketing strategy so that potential customers see its
success. It helps you to:

• Understand the customers’ needs,

• Compare competing products against your own,

• Identify communication mediums, and

• Spot changes in the market.

“It’s all well and good knowing the why”, we hear you say. “But what about the how?”

Well, funny you ask…

07 An intro to positioning

The six steps to a successful positioning strategy

In the Positioning Certified: Masters course, we outline six steps you can take to the most effective positioning
strategy.

To learn more about them and how to successfully roll them out, you’ll need to enroll in the course. For now,
here’s a sneak peek to whet your appetite:

Step one:
Establish internal alignment on what positioning is and what it can do for your
company.

Step two:
Let go of the old, and make way for the new.

Step three:
Identify what makes your product unique.

Step four:
Identify the values of those features.

Step five:
Find out who really cares.

Step six:
Discover what market frame of reference makes you stand out.

Continue reading for further insights into step three:

identifying what makes your product unique.

Did you think you weren’t getting any freebies?!

We’re not that mean.
8 An intro to positioning

How to identify what makes

your product unique
One of the main parts of a positioning strategy - and the third step of a strong positioning strategy - is identifying
what makes your product unique from competitors. A great way to do this is by creating a positioning statement.

Positioning statement examples

One of the main parts of a positioning strategy - and the third step of a strong positioning strategy - is identifying
what makes your product unique from competitors. A great way to do this is by creating a positioning statement.

Apple
Apple provides cutting-edge technology for tech-savvy consumers who want the top of
line laptops, computers, and mobile devices. Apple promotes inclusion and accessibility
for all and takes responsibility for its employees in addition to committing itself to
sourcing the highest quality materials and products.

Disney
Disney provides unique entertainment for consumers seeking magical experiences and
memories. Disney leads the competition by providing every aspect of related products
and services to the world and appealing to people of all ages.

Starbucks
Starbucks offers the best coffee and espresso drinks for consumers who want premium
ingredients and perfection every time. Starbucks not only values every interaction,
making each one unique, but the brand commits itself to the highest quality coffee in
the world.
9 An intro to positioning

Amazon
For consumers who want to purchase a wide range of products online with quick
delivery, Amazon provides a one-stop online shopping site. Amazon sets itself apart
from other online retailers with its customer obsession, passion for innovation, and
commitment to operational excellence.

Nike
For athletes in need of high-quality, fashionable athletic wear, Nike provides customers
with top-performing sports apparel and shoes made of the highest quality materials.
Its products are the most advanced in the athletic apparel industry because of Nike’s
commitment to innovation and investment in the latest technologies.

The four main

components of a product
positioning statement
The Positioning Certified: Masters course outlines four main components of a product
positioning statement. To give you a glimpse into the rock-solid lessons you’ll learn from the
course, we’re giving you an extract that gives you an insight into this - for FREE.

A positioning statement can be split into four segments: the target, the category, the
differentiator, and the payoff.
10 An intro to positioning

The target

1. Establishing the target before you begin working on your marketing activity is important.
The target market ought to be based on essential criteria including demographics,
geography, psychographics, pains, customer needs, and so on.

Category

2. When prospective customers are evaluating a purchase, they need a frame of reference.
You need to outline the category in which your brand will be competing. For example,
technology, fashion, etc. Proving context for your customer will help establish brand
relevance. gives the brand relevance to the customer.

Differentiation
When writing a positioning statement, include a solitary point of differentiation; it’s
regarded that multiple benefits or features shouldn’t be included as differentiators for

3.
your product. This is because the unique features or benefits of your product/service will
support the main differentiator.

Remember, don’t use a bold claim that your product is the “global leader” as your point
of differentiation. Instead, explain in detail why you’re the global leader.

Also, ensure you differentiate your product from your customer’s perspective and not
from a business angle. While having a healthy market share or a large turnover may
appeal to you, this isn’t relevant to your customer.

The payoff
This part of your positioning statement is the differentiation with the needs or goals of
the target market.

4. Here, it’s essential to communicate to your target personas exactly how your
differentiator will address their user needs.

To reinforce our earlier point, a successful positioning statement hinges on an in-depth

understanding of your target market. Any understanding needs to be based on bona
fide market research - never rely on internal assumptions.
11 An intro to positioning

Lara McGaskill, Senior Product Marketing Manager at HomeLight, revealed how

she developed positioning statements, during her time at Stitch Fix:

Positioning is the simplest distillation of how your product is uniquely suited to

address a specific customer need and how they will benefit from it. The goal is
to keep it simple and concise and then bolster it with value props.

I’ve tried in vain to stuff my key value props into a positioning statement and it’s
never worked. I end up with a mouthful of marketing jargon that isn’t concise or
clearly conveys the essence of why customers should care about the product.

A framework that I like to use is What, Who, and Why:

What it is: Using very clear and even plain language, messaging that you’d likely never put in front of a
customer.

Who it’s for: Who is the customer that will benefit from this? Be specific about them. Speak to their specific
needs and motivations.

Why it matters: This is where you elaborate on what is in it for the customer, how this maps back to what your
brand and product do, and how it benefits the customer.

It’s important to get granular here, as oftentimes the initial benefit or value prop is surface level. For example,
when developing value props at Stitch Fix, we knew that the service saves people time and is convenient.

But so many products promise the allure of time savings, so we sought to think about why a customer actually
cares about saving time.

For Stitch Fix customers, this was so they can spend their time doing something else, likely more enjoyable
than the problem your product is solving for. Identify what that thing is.

Value props: What are the unique attributes that your product has and what is it solving for your customer?

What core desires does your product tap into?

Emotion / Logic / Motivation / Reward

12 An intro to positioning

Once you’ve developed the positioning, from the what and why it’s great to have options. There’s never a
clear-cut single positioning statement and set of value props for each product. Creating options that index in
various directions can help align stakeholders on the direction you want to go.

As a product marketer, you are usually the closest person to the positioning and the work that it informs.
Your stakeholders are looking to your expertise to develop this, and it’s key to enforce that positioning is not
customer-facing messaging.

I intentionally write positioning in the third person and with plain language to avoid any misinterpretation - I
don’t want to see my positioning verbatim in marketing collateral.

To help contextualize this for stakeholders, I like to include real-world examples of how each option would
manifest in a marketing campaign. I’ll mock up sample email copy or paid ads to help stakeholders visualize
how each of the options comes to life in your marketing strategy.
13 An intro to positioning

How to learn more about

positioning
If you’d like to learn more about the processes involved in creating an effective
positioning strategy, we highly recommend that you check out and enroll in the
Positioning Certified: Masters course.

This course has been designed and taught by our very own Chief Marketing Officer, Bryony
Pearce, and features 90 minutes of bonus footage from the best of the best within the industry.

These positioning experts know all there is to know about the strategy and are here to help you
become an absolute master of positioning:

April Dunford, CEO at Ambient Strategy

Marcus Andrews, Director of Product Marketing at Pendo.io

James Doman-Pipe, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Remote

And don’t just take our word for it. Tim Hinds, Co-Founder and Product Marketing Leader at
Grokspark said:

“Positioning is a tricky topic to cover well, but this course pulls it off by balancing theory
with how-to instructions and solid examples. I love the no-fluff topics, like how positioning
statements can be dangerous, how internal teams using one wrong word can tank your
positioning, and how Narrative Design works with positioning.”

So, what’re you waiting for?

Enroll today to discover what makes your product unique, find your
product’s place within the market, and excel in one of the most
strategically impactful areas of your role.

POSITIONING
Sign me up!
14 An intro to positioning

POSITIONING