Obviously Awesome: Book Overview & Key Takeaways

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Obviously Awesome" by April Dunford. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here.

In the marketing process, how important is positioning? What are the right—and wrong—ways to do it?

In Obviously Awesome, positioning consultant and speaker April Dunford explains why positioning is critical to successfully selling your product. To help you position any product well, Dunford provides a 12-step process.

Keep reading to learn what positioning is, common positioning mistakes, and the 12 steps.

Overview of Obviously Awesome

In Obviously Awesome, April Dunford introduces positioning as an often misunderstood and undervalued part of the marketing process. She contends that, without proper positioning—contextualizing the use of the product, so consumers understand why they should buy it—customers don’t understand how or why to use your product and subsequently won’t buy it.

When executed well, however, positioning gives customers context on what your product is for and how it will benefit them, thus incentivizing them to buy. Dunford outlines a 12-step process that begins with establishing a positioning team within your company and ends with tracking and modifying your successful positioning over time.

(Shortform note: In her book, Dunford presents only a 10-step positioning process. However, she includes a chapter after the tenth step, in which she describes how to implement your positioning and then track its success over time. We’ve framed the final book chapter as two additional steps because they seem as important to the process as all previous steps.)

What Is Positioning?

According to Dunford, positioning is providing the backdrop for the use of your product to your customer so they know what the product is, why it matters, and why they should buy it. You must provide this contextualizing backdrop because humans use context to make sense of the world in general—it’s how the human brain operates.

Positioning isn’t merely helpful; it’s the bedrock of successful selling and marketing, contends Dunford. If you can’t position your product properly, no amount of money thrown at marketing and sales can sell it. This is because consumers can only appreciate and value a product when it’s set in the right context.

Mistakes Companies Make in Positioning

Mistake 1: Marketers think they don’t need to position products because their positioning is clear to them and seems as though it should be clear to anyone else. Alternatively, they position the product how they, as ideators, originally conceived the product—not how consumers, who have different needs and use cases, will perceive it.

Mistake 2: Even if the product changes in development, marketers can’t see the product as anything other than what they originally intended it to be, claims Dunford. Because they’re stuck on the original idea, they don’t reposition the product based on how it’s changed, and consumers consequently don’t understand it, or they think it’s a bad product.

Mistake 3: Sometimes the market initially selected for a product changes, and marketers fail to adjust their positioning to ensure they continue appealing to consumers in that market.

How to Position Your Product in 12 Steps

Now, let’s move on to Dunford’s 12 steps that will let you avoid the above mistakes and position or reposition your product for maximum success.

Step 1: Identify your most eager customer and what they love about the product. Dunford writes that the first step of this process is to reflect on what aspects of your product make your customers happiest and what aspects of your top customers make them appreciate your product so much.

Step 2: Select a cross-company group to position your product. Next, assemble a group of employees from across the company who will define your current and new positioning.

Step 3: Develop an open mindset about the best positioning of the product. Once you have a group of people who will position your product, they must consciously set aside old conceptions of the product to have the openness to devise the best new positioning.

Step 4: Identify the alternatives to using your product. Now that you have an open-minded team, figure out together what your product’s real competition is—in other words, what alternative solutions your ideal customers would use if they didn’t have your product.

Step 5: List your product’s superior features. Now that you know what alternative solutions your customers compare you to, identify what features make your product different and better than those alternatives.

Step 6: Determine your features’ value to the customer. At this stage, you know what your product’s unique features are. Now, figure out how each feature adds value to your customer’s life.

Step 6.5: Gather like values together. Once you’ve determined the value of each feature, group these values together based on their relevance to the customer.

Step 7: Pinpoint customer segments most likely to buy your product. Once you have a good understanding of the value that your product delivers versus other alternatives, determine which customer segments care most about that value. Think about what makes some groups more excited about your product than others. Consider how to identify these groups. Make this group as specific and narrow as possible at this stage and then expand later if necessary.

Step 8: Sell your product in the right market, and dominate Ii. Now that you understand your competition, your superior features, and which customer segments to target, sell your product in a market that provides context on how to use it and that gives you the opportunity to dominate that market. You can try to dominate three types of markets, claims Dunford: an existing market, a subsegment of an existing market, and a new market.

Step 9: Optionally connect your product to a current trend. Now that you know what market to target, you might take advantage of a current trend to show that your product is relevant and useful to consumers now.

Step 10: Share the positioning across the company. Once you’ve positioned your product, communicate that position across the company through a positioning document so all departments can apply the positioning to what they do.

Step 11: Implement your positioning. Once you’ve completed the above steps, implement your positioning, says Dunford. There are two parts to this: creating a narrative about your product (this is the pitch with which your salespeople will approach prospects) and building your messaging (contained in your marketing to customers).

Step 12: Track your positioning, and adjust it if necessary. According to Dunford, the final piece of the positioning puzzle is to track the success of your positioning over time and make adjustments if needed. Assess your positioning every six months to learn if the market has changed and if you need to thus reposition your product.

Obviously Awesome: Book Overview & Key Takeaways