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Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
You know your product is awesome—but does anybody else? Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition or trying to attract the widest customer base.So what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech exec, will enlighten you.Her new book, Obviously Awesome, shows you how to find your product’s “secret sauce”—and then sell that sauce to those who crave it. Having spent years as a startup executive (with 16 product launches under her belt) and a consultant (who’s worked on dozens more), Dunford speaks with authority about breaking through the noise of a crowded market.Punctuated with witty anecdotes and compelling case studies, Dunford’s book is at once entertaining and illuminating. Among the invaluable lessons you’ll learn The Five Components of Effective Positioning- How to instantly connect an audience to your offering’s value- How to choose the best market for your products- How to use three distinct styles of positioning to your advantage- How to leverage market trends to help buyers understand why making a purchase is important right nowWhether you’re an entrepreneur, marketer or salesperson struggling to bring inventive products to market, Dunford’s insights will help you find your awesome, so that your customers can too.
204 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 14, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 268 reviews
June 1, 2019
This is one of the best business books I've ever read and it's changed the way I think about building a startup.
I always saw positioning as a concept that marketing people talk about but could never actually define. Early on in the book, April Dunford acknowledges as much. But then she goes where no positioning book I've previously read has gone: extracting from her own 20+ years of real-world tech marketing experience a basic positioning framework that actually works. It's the kind of thing where once you read it, it immediately makes sense.
Better yet, this is the rare business book that has zero fluff, that really does deserve to be a book and not a long blog post.
As far as the key points, here's what I picked up:
- Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about. This is the exact definition from the book.
- When customers first encounter your product they look for "signals" to try to understand what box to put your product in. These include your messaging, features, price, other customers, and most importantly, your competitive alternatives.
- When customers place you into a mental box, this is the "market category." For example, if I say "salesforce.com," you immediately think the market category of "CRM." Or a product like Tableaux is the market category of "visualization tools." Your market category is essential because customers have an implicit set of expectations around price, features, and service level and will generally choose the "best" solution in that category.
- You win at positioning by deliberately choosing a market category where you expect to win. Dunford identifies three different ways you can compete in a market category: head-to-head (you see yourself as the dominant player), dominate a subsegment (you're not the overall market leader but you serve some segment of the market (e.g. customers using AWS) better than anyone), or by creating a new market category altogether (awesome if you can make it work but comes with the burden of educating your customer base about the new category).
- Companies fall into common positioning traps: (1) They think a product can only be positioned in one way, when in reality the same product can be positioned in multiple ways for multiple different markets (though admittedly one at a time). (2) They carefully design a product for a market but that market has changed.
- One bad positioning smell is that you spend a lot of time explaining your product and why it's better than the competition. This implies that you don't compare well to the competition. Moreover, you never want to settle for not being #1 in your market category. Strategically, you should either position yourself as the #1 option in your market category, or choose a different category.
- Finally, Dunford outlines a 10-step process you can use to revitalize your own positioning that ultimately takes into account who your best customers are, your product's competitive alternatives, its strongest features, how those map to value, how that maps to benefits, and how all of that points to a market category. She also proposes weaving in a current trend if possible.
This book is honestly pure gold because the author presents a profound valuable concept, but gives it to you straight up, versus dragging you along through product upsells. Reading this, I couldn't help but thinking I was learning the language of capitalism: clarify who your product is for, its features, and the value that drives, and then double down on those positions.
Thank you, April Dunford, for such a valuable use of the few hours it took me to read your book.
I always saw positioning as a concept that marketing people talk about but could never actually define. Early on in the book, April Dunford acknowledges as much. But then she goes where no positioning book I've previously read has gone: extracting from her own 20+ years of real-world tech marketing experience a basic positioning framework that actually works. It's the kind of thing where once you read it, it immediately makes sense.
Better yet, this is the rare business book that has zero fluff, that really does deserve to be a book and not a long blog post.
As far as the key points, here's what I picked up:
- Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about. This is the exact definition from the book.
- When customers first encounter your product they look for "signals" to try to understand what box to put your product in. These include your messaging, features, price, other customers, and most importantly, your competitive alternatives.
- When customers place you into a mental box, this is the "market category." For example, if I say "salesforce.com," you immediately think the market category of "CRM." Or a product like Tableaux is the market category of "visualization tools." Your market category is essential because customers have an implicit set of expectations around price, features, and service level and will generally choose the "best" solution in that category.
- You win at positioning by deliberately choosing a market category where you expect to win. Dunford identifies three different ways you can compete in a market category: head-to-head (you see yourself as the dominant player), dominate a subsegment (you're not the overall market leader but you serve some segment of the market (e.g. customers using AWS) better than anyone), or by creating a new market category altogether (awesome if you can make it work but comes with the burden of educating your customer base about the new category).
- Companies fall into common positioning traps: (1) They think a product can only be positioned in one way, when in reality the same product can be positioned in multiple ways for multiple different markets (though admittedly one at a time). (2) They carefully design a product for a market but that market has changed.
- One bad positioning smell is that you spend a lot of time explaining your product and why it's better than the competition. This implies that you don't compare well to the competition. Moreover, you never want to settle for not being #1 in your market category. Strategically, you should either position yourself as the #1 option in your market category, or choose a different category.
- Finally, Dunford outlines a 10-step process you can use to revitalize your own positioning that ultimately takes into account who your best customers are, your product's competitive alternatives, its strongest features, how those map to value, how that maps to benefits, and how all of that points to a market category. She also proposes weaving in a current trend if possible.
This book is honestly pure gold because the author presents a profound valuable concept, but gives it to you straight up, versus dragging you along through product upsells. Reading this, I couldn't help but thinking I was learning the language of capitalism: clarify who your product is for, its features, and the value that drives, and then double down on those positions.
Thank you, April Dunford, for such a valuable use of the few hours it took me to read your book.
May 30, 2019
Tight, to-the-point book on the positioning. Really well structured and fun references throughout.
July 6, 2019
One of the best Marketing books I’ve read. It’ll be my #1 recommended book on the topic, guaranteed.
April 12, 2021
A good read for people in Marketing and especially, Product Marketing, who are concerned with bringing new products to the market and establishing a footing for those products. Some great pointers around different kinds of attributes (consideration, retention, etc), product value, ideal customer profile, target audience/ market.
Would have loved to see more questions and maybe, more than the single framework to bring more clarity on how to approach the entire positioning process.
Would have loved to see more questions and maybe, more than the single framework to bring more clarity on how to approach the entire positioning process.
February 2, 2020
The author guides us through 10 steps on positioning. It’s a short and straightforward read. But in the end I felt it a shallow experience due to the lack of actionable content (frameworks, question types, etc).
November 27, 2020
Short. Helpful. Practical.
June 19, 2023
10 obviously awesome and valuable steps
I would rather name the book "10 steps to position your product". Its a manual that allows you to analyze your customers and prospects. The analysis helps selecting the most profitable market category, state clearly your product's features, benefits and customers value.
I would rather name the book "10 steps to position your product". Its a manual that allows you to analyze your customers and prospects. The analysis helps selecting the most profitable market category, state clearly your product's features, benefits and customers value.
August 23, 2020
Highly recommended
One of the best business books of the year and a product positioning classic, especially for technology or digital products.
One of the best business books of the year and a product positioning classic, especially for technology or digital products.
January 15, 2020
A useful, step-by-step guide to positioning. Whereas most marketing books have hand-wavy definitions of positioning, and perhaps give a few examples, this book tries to give you a concrete recipe for how to position your own products. For that, it's definitely worth reading.
The biggest downside is that the book is really, really short and light on detail. The version I have is ~180 pages, but it's a small paperback, uses a large font, and includes lots of whitespace, quotes that take up an entire page because they are in font-size 100 (seriously), title pages, and blank pages around the title pages, so it's probably closer to 100 real pages. As a result, the book is missing a lot of important nuance, details, and examples. The 10-step positioning process in the book is enough to get you started and interested, and it truly does get you asking the right questions, but you may find that you lack the knowledge to come up with good answers to those questions.
Below, I've captured my notes from the book, as well as examples of the kind of information I felt I was missing as I went through the 10-step positioning exercises. While some of the information is specific to my particular case, a lot of the information is fairly generic, and probably could've been covered in the book, but was entirely absent. And that means your options are either to (a) flail around for a loooong time and try to figure it out yourself or (b) hire April Dunford's consulting company. I suspect (b) was one of the main reasons this book was written. I guess you can't say she isn't good at what she does!
Here are my notes from the book, capturing what I felt were the key takeaways:
1. Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a market cares a lot about.
- A big part of positioning is identifying what market category you're in.
- You can either identify the category explicitly, or customers will fill one in implicitly, but either way, in the prospect's mind, you'll be in some category.
- Any product can potentially be in many different market categories. Example: the same baked good could be in the "dietary muffin" or "gluten-free paleo snack" category; the same data store can be in the "database" or "data warehouse" category.
- Each category comes with specific expectations about what your product does, how it works, what it should cost, how you do marketing, how you do sales, and so on. For example, as soon as you hear "database", you probably expect something that supports transactions, ACID, reads, writes, replication, and is open source and either free or cheap (but perhaps with some paid add-on for enterprise use cases). However, when you hear "data warehouse", you probably think about huge amounts of data, schemas that efficiently can handle complicated queries, proprietary software, salesmen in suits, and a high price point.
- Positioning is all about picking a marketing category where those expectations match your product far better than any alternative.
2. Most products end up in a "default positioning" by accident, but you can do better by determining your positioning deliberately. The book defines a 10-step process for doing this. The highlights of that process are:
- Identify who your "best fit" customers are. These are supposed to be the customers who are happiest with your product and tell all their friends about it.
Note: Some nuances that are missing in the book are (a) how you know who these customers are, as depending on the type of business you're in, it may not be visible/obvious and (b) if these are really the best customers to be targeting? That is, what if your happiest customers right now are not particularly profitable, and if you only knew to target some other customers, they'd be just as happy, but far more profitable for you?
- Find out what alternatives your customers are using to your product. This may be a competitor's product, or DIY, or in some cases, they may not be doing anything at all.
- List the unique features your product has that those alternatives don’t.
- Identify the key value "themes" the customer gets from your unique features. This requires going from feature to benefit to value.
Note: This is another place the book is missing nuance. Knowing how to go from feature to value and figuring out what the most important values are is incredibly hard. The book makes it sound like this step takes minutes, but there are many business out there that succeed for years without ever truly understanding what their customers actually find valuable (and then fail spectacularly when they unwittingly change something). What's a feature in one context may be a benefit or value in another. Also, how do you factor in the magnitude of the value? Some features undoubtedly bring way more value than others, but how do you take that into account?
- Figure out which customers care the most about those value themes. Shift your sales and marketing to target as narrow of a customer segment as you can while still making your sales targets, as more narrow marketing is more effective.
Note: Again, lots of nuance is missing here. For example, when I identified the core value themes for my product and asked, "what customers care the most about these themes?", the answer I came up with was, "all of them." Again, this one step is described as something that can be done quickly, but this could be a multi-month research project.
- Pick a market category where the assumptions match your value themes better than any alternative.
Note: Again, so much context missing. How do I get the list of existing market categories? There could be countless such categories (e.g., "dietary muffin" and "gluten-free paleo snack" are probably one of thousands of food / health categories) and figuring out the best one for my company could take months or years. I could also create a new category, and to be fair, the book does go over the trade-offs with creating a new category vs using an existing one, but the nuance on how to create a category and what makes for a good category is missing.
The biggest downside is that the book is really, really short and light on detail. The version I have is ~180 pages, but it's a small paperback, uses a large font, and includes lots of whitespace, quotes that take up an entire page because they are in font-size 100 (seriously), title pages, and blank pages around the title pages, so it's probably closer to 100 real pages. As a result, the book is missing a lot of important nuance, details, and examples. The 10-step positioning process in the book is enough to get you started and interested, and it truly does get you asking the right questions, but you may find that you lack the knowledge to come up with good answers to those questions.
Below, I've captured my notes from the book, as well as examples of the kind of information I felt I was missing as I went through the 10-step positioning exercises. While some of the information is specific to my particular case, a lot of the information is fairly generic, and probably could've been covered in the book, but was entirely absent. And that means your options are either to (a) flail around for a loooong time and try to figure it out yourself or (b) hire April Dunford's consulting company. I suspect (b) was one of the main reasons this book was written. I guess you can't say she isn't good at what she does!
Here are my notes from the book, capturing what I felt were the key takeaways:
1. Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a market cares a lot about.
- A big part of positioning is identifying what market category you're in.
- You can either identify the category explicitly, or customers will fill one in implicitly, but either way, in the prospect's mind, you'll be in some category.
- Any product can potentially be in many different market categories. Example: the same baked good could be in the "dietary muffin" or "gluten-free paleo snack" category; the same data store can be in the "database" or "data warehouse" category.
- Each category comes with specific expectations about what your product does, how it works, what it should cost, how you do marketing, how you do sales, and so on. For example, as soon as you hear "database", you probably expect something that supports transactions, ACID, reads, writes, replication, and is open source and either free or cheap (but perhaps with some paid add-on for enterprise use cases). However, when you hear "data warehouse", you probably think about huge amounts of data, schemas that efficiently can handle complicated queries, proprietary software, salesmen in suits, and a high price point.
- Positioning is all about picking a marketing category where those expectations match your product far better than any alternative.
2. Most products end up in a "default positioning" by accident, but you can do better by determining your positioning deliberately. The book defines a 10-step process for doing this. The highlights of that process are:
- Identify who your "best fit" customers are. These are supposed to be the customers who are happiest with your product and tell all their friends about it.
Note: Some nuances that are missing in the book are (a) how you know who these customers are, as depending on the type of business you're in, it may not be visible/obvious and (b) if these are really the best customers to be targeting? That is, what if your happiest customers right now are not particularly profitable, and if you only knew to target some other customers, they'd be just as happy, but far more profitable for you?
- Find out what alternatives your customers are using to your product. This may be a competitor's product, or DIY, or in some cases, they may not be doing anything at all.
- List the unique features your product has that those alternatives don’t.
- Identify the key value "themes" the customer gets from your unique features. This requires going from feature to benefit to value.
Note: This is another place the book is missing nuance. Knowing how to go from feature to value and figuring out what the most important values are is incredibly hard. The book makes it sound like this step takes minutes, but there are many business out there that succeed for years without ever truly understanding what their customers actually find valuable (and then fail spectacularly when they unwittingly change something). What's a feature in one context may be a benefit or value in another. Also, how do you factor in the magnitude of the value? Some features undoubtedly bring way more value than others, but how do you take that into account?
- Figure out which customers care the most about those value themes. Shift your sales and marketing to target as narrow of a customer segment as you can while still making your sales targets, as more narrow marketing is more effective.
Note: Again, lots of nuance is missing here. For example, when I identified the core value themes for my product and asked, "what customers care the most about these themes?", the answer I came up with was, "all of them." Again, this one step is described as something that can be done quickly, but this could be a multi-month research project.
- Pick a market category where the assumptions match your value themes better than any alternative.
Note: Again, so much context missing. How do I get the list of existing market categories? There could be countless such categories (e.g., "dietary muffin" and "gluten-free paleo snack" are probably one of thousands of food / health categories) and figuring out the best one for my company could take months or years. I could also create a new category, and to be fair, the book does go over the trade-offs with creating a new category vs using an existing one, but the nuance on how to create a category and what makes for a good category is missing.
July 17, 2020
I’ve been in marketing for almost half my life now. Yet, I never completely understood what brand positioning is.
To me, positioning has always seemed like a theoretical exercise with a place in executive boardrooms but little applicability to real life. And out of my informal research among peers, it seems that I’m actually not a minority.
But things are changing thanks to April Dunford. Her book Obviously Awesome finally helped me – and thousands of marketers and business leaders – understand the crucial role positioning can play in your success.
The book covers the key elements of positioning, their impact on your overall business strategy, and the key steps you need to take in order to create your own positioning. It goes straight to the point, with actionable advice and concrete examples.
Check out my full review and my notes from the book in this blog post: https://bit.ly/2B5d6Zk
To me, positioning has always seemed like a theoretical exercise with a place in executive boardrooms but little applicability to real life. And out of my informal research among peers, it seems that I’m actually not a minority.
But things are changing thanks to April Dunford. Her book Obviously Awesome finally helped me – and thousands of marketers and business leaders – understand the crucial role positioning can play in your success.
The book covers the key elements of positioning, their impact on your overall business strategy, and the key steps you need to take in order to create your own positioning. It goes straight to the point, with actionable advice and concrete examples.
Check out my full review and my notes from the book in this blog post: https://bit.ly/2B5d6Zk
July 20, 2022
Since I had a chance to take part in a positioning workshop ran by the author in 2021 I kinda knew what to expect; a nice refresher and honestly it’s an awesome book.
August 27, 2020
Best marketing book out there, especially for marketers working in B2B.
December 23, 2020
Work reading. Excellent book on positioning. Should be required reading for marketers, along with Seth Godin's This is Marketing, and Rory Sutherland's Alchemy.
May 16, 2023
Bastante bueno e incluso mejor que Trout y Ries, en tanto es más práctico y te da literalmente una guía en vez de decirte qué no hacer o qué hicieron otros en una situación en particular. Le faltaría incluir data para unas 5 estrellas, no solo tirar de "I am an expert".
February 7, 2023
Pragmatic, to the point, actionable. Highly valuable for the founder of a seed startup like me.
September 17, 2021
This was just phenomenal. The author lays out why so companies struggle with positioning, and recommends a structured approach to help them position better.
Her first sign of poor positioning – "your current customers love you, but new prospects can’t figure out what you’re selling" – struck a chord with me. I have never lost a customer, but have often struggled in the past to get new customers. And reading the book helped me understand why.
The author breaks down positioning into five components:
- competitive alternatives that exist for your product
- the unique attributes of your products
- the value your product brings to your customers
- the characteristics of your target market
- the market category you are a part of
- the tailwinds you are riding
She then gives a framework for bringing these together into a positioning plan that could work for your product.
Would strongly recommend if you are a startup founder or a product/marketing manager. This was great!
Her first sign of poor positioning – "your current customers love you, but new prospects can’t figure out what you’re selling" – struck a chord with me. I have never lost a customer, but have often struggled in the past to get new customers. And reading the book helped me understand why.
The author breaks down positioning into five components:
- competitive alternatives that exist for your product
- the unique attributes of your products
- the value your product brings to your customers
- the characteristics of your target market
- the market category you are a part of
- the tailwinds you are riding
She then gives a framework for bringing these together into a positioning plan that could work for your product.
Would strongly recommend if you are a startup founder or a product/marketing manager. This was great!
April 15, 2020
A nice short book which serves as a good intro to positioning B2B products very well. Highly relevant to me and it's left me with some good insights on how to position products. A quick summary would be to:
1. Understand the alternatives for your product
2. Find a best-fit market
3. Find best-fit customers
4. Make sure that sales, marketing and product are aligned to this
For more information, please read the book!
1. Understand the alternatives for your product
2. Find a best-fit market
3. Find best-fit customers
4. Make sure that sales, marketing and product are aligned to this
For more information, please read the book!
July 5, 2020
As a product marketer, I'm tasked with many responsibilities and am always looking for resources to help sharpen my skillsets for my career. I'm thrilled my counterpart mentioned this quick and easy guide to help master product positioning that's chocked full with great stories from the author's career. I'm definitely taking a lot of tips and tricks away from this short read and I think it should be added to the required reading for any product marketer or brand strategist.
August 1, 2021
An amazing perspective of how to think about the relevance of a product in the market, and steps to well put this product in the eyes of the potential customers. This is very well explained and easy to read even for non-marketers as myself
September 4, 2020
A crisp and actionable work on positioning. I have always heard people talk about Al Ries and Jack Trout whose wrote about this topic three decades ago in a different era. It’s refreshing to see an update on this topic. This book is a solid starting point for anyone building and selling products.
April 24, 2020
Full of fluff and common sense.
February 28, 2023
April Dunford knows her audience well. Apt for a book on positioning! It's not just the nods to common startup tropes—MacBooks and exposed-brick open-plan offices—but also the problems and conversations that happen within a startup. It's pitch perfect prose throughout, relatable and clear.
The book has a simple structure, making it a quick read filled with actionable ideas:
1. Why should I care about positioning?
2. What's wrong with the standard approach?
3. How do I do it better?
4. How do I use my positioning statement?
Dunford's argument for why you should care about positioning is strongly stated. I was skeptical at first. By the end of the book though, I found myself agreeing with it.
> Strong positioning feels like we're cheating. It lets us draft along with the forces of the markets we operate in, making everything we do in marketing and sales easier. No matter what direction we face, the wind is blowing at our back.
After providing motivation, the book gives us a few reasons why what we might normally think of as positioning—the classic "positioning statement"—is an inadequate tool. The main issue is that the positioning statement is a template—more an artifact than a process. As commonly practiced, positioning exercises carry the implicit assumption that you already know your positioning, you just need to write it down. It reinforces the status quo rather than helping you discover new tailwinds.
Dunford's 10-step process is an exploratory exercise instead. Each step is its own chapter. Some are very short—each is only as long as it needs to be to explain the concept. The book provides a number of examples throughout to make the more abstract concepts concrete and keep everything actionable.
All in all a great book on an important topic. I finished it convinced that well-executed positioning is a huge multiplier on a business's prospects.
The book has a simple structure, making it a quick read filled with actionable ideas:
1. Why should I care about positioning?
2. What's wrong with the standard approach?
3. How do I do it better?
4. How do I use my positioning statement?
Dunford's argument for why you should care about positioning is strongly stated. I was skeptical at first. By the end of the book though, I found myself agreeing with it.
> Strong positioning feels like we're cheating. It lets us draft along with the forces of the markets we operate in, making everything we do in marketing and sales easier. No matter what direction we face, the wind is blowing at our back.
After providing motivation, the book gives us a few reasons why what we might normally think of as positioning—the classic "positioning statement"—is an inadequate tool. The main issue is that the positioning statement is a template—more an artifact than a process. As commonly practiced, positioning exercises carry the implicit assumption that you already know your positioning, you just need to write it down. It reinforces the status quo rather than helping you discover new tailwinds.
Dunford's 10-step process is an exploratory exercise instead. Each step is its own chapter. Some are very short—each is only as long as it needs to be to explain the concept. The book provides a number of examples throughout to make the more abstract concepts concrete and keep everything actionable.
All in all a great book on an important topic. I finished it convinced that well-executed positioning is a huge multiplier on a business's prospects.
October 9, 2019
Practical and valuable positioning insights
Some very practical and valuable insights into product positioning. Valuable for startups to mature products alike. Definitively worth a read.
Some very practical and valuable insights into product positioning. Valuable for startups to mature products alike. Definitively worth a read.
February 9, 2020
Clear and simple framework how to talk about products and companies. Highly recommended!
January 2, 2021
Must read for any startup.
June 22, 2022
Super helpful and to the point.
November 3, 2022
I wish I had discovered this book sooner. Practical, applied examples and a repeatable process for developing your product’s positioning. Product marketers, this is a must read.
December 24, 2023
The most practical 'business' book I've ever read. Extremely useful and I'll keep coming back to it.
September 20, 2022
Livro bem simples e direto sobre o poder do posicionamento e impacto na percepção do cliente
April 18, 2021
Practical step by step guide to introduce positioning to a person or a team.
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