The MKT1 Guide to positioning

How to differentiate your product, without getting stuck in the weeds

Jun 12, 2024

∙ Paid

We’ve all seen “positioning” docs that are 10 pages or 30 slides long. When you look at them your eyes glaze over. You finally finish reading, but it’s still not clear what the product does, why it’s better, or even who it’s for. I’ve seen one of these docs for most startups I’ve worked with. They typically all miss the point.

So while I’ve been hesitant to write a newsletter dedicated to positioning since so much has been said here (respect to the master of positioning, April Dunford), I finally know what I need to say here. We are losing the plot with positioning exercises. We aren’t seeing the forest through the trees. We are getting lost in the sauce

The result of these overworked positioning exercises is a lack of clarity on who products are for, what the products are, and how they are different.

Now this might seem paradoxical, but I’m not arguing that the positioning process and details are a waste of time. In fact I think the opposite. I’m arguing we aren’t getting to the end of the line with the right "answer” to positioning.

Think of this like long division, the research and process is the work and positioning is the answer. The problem with positioning is people focus too much on showing the work instead of producing the right answer. Maybe you’ll get some points for that, but you definitely won’t ace the test with the right work and wrong answer.

This newsletter covers:

1. Product marketing research ≠ positioning: I separate the process(es) of audience, market, and product research from the writing of positioning. The point of product marketing research is to get in the weeds, dive deep, and get a complete picture of the space your company is playing in. The point of positioning is the opposite: it’s to synthesize this information and get out of the weeds.

2. Positioning is ultimately about comparison. You’re explaining how your product solves the problem better than alternatives and fits in the market. To make this easier, I organize all of positioning strategy into 4 categories based on product type and the thing you're comparing your product to. You need to pick just one.

3. Positioning consists of filling out 3 blank spaces—for every “product” you offer: Who is it for? What is it? Why is it better? You then refine your positioning to create messaging for audience segments, funnel, stages, channels, etc.

New look, same great content

You have may noticed that MKT1 looks a bit different when you opened our newsletter today. Thanks to my good friend Jess at Goodside Studio, who collaborated with me on the updated brand.

Why? In short, MKT1 is evolving—and marketers like myself will take any opportunity to do a rebrand. Not only does the newsletter look different, but I’ll now be publishing 2 posts a month (instead of 1) around a common theme, starting this month.

How to run a positioning process that yields a clear, differentiated result

Common positioning exercise mistakes

The problem with almost all positioning frameworks: They take you way too far into the weeds. The goal of positioning is to make it abundantly clear how you’re different from the (appropriate) alternative. That’s it.

I’ve seen the same things go wrong many times. Here’s what I see most often, even for companies who follow positioning frameworks to a tee.

Why do these things happen? Landing on the wrong positioning and/or copy typically results from too many cooks in the kitchen, fear of picking the wrong direction, confusion due to too many audience segments, and/or forgetting what funnel stage, channel, or ICP you’re writing for.

Positioning hierarchy

One more thing before I get to the positioning process: Product positioning (the pink section below) is not your brand story—it’s a subset of your overall brand story. You can do product positioning before you figure out your overall brand story or vice versa, but don’t conflate the two.

This newsletter focuses on your overall product positioning, for your primary audience. If needed, re-run the positioning process for individual products. Once you start adapting positioning to each audience, funnel stage, and channel, that’s messaging.

For more on telling your overall story, check out this newsletter on marketing perceptions.

The MKT1 positioning process

To avoid getting lost in the sauce when doing positioning:

Run distinct exercises for the following: PMM research, choosing your product type & comparator, defining your positioning statement, and writing messaging.
Involve the right functional leaders during the process, and share your positioning statement with the entire company when done. Focus on the statement, not sharing all the source material and research!
When sharing, link out to research and details for people to review on their own.

A couple notes on semantics and process:

Writing a positioning statement requires doing your homework in advance. As I mentioned, I call this product marketing research.
Positioning is not the same as messaging or copy. Messaging and copywriting is the process of applying positioning to various audiences, channels, funnel stages, etc.
When you have multiple audiences, refine your messaging for each audience segment.
The entire positioning process is quarterbacked by a Product Marketer (once you have a product marketer) in collaboration with founders, head of product, and head of sales…But marketing is leading the charge.

Wondering what this looks like in practice? I have a 1-page template for sharing your positioning statement for paid subscribers.

Step 1: Do product marketing research

If you try to write a positioning statement and you haven’t done your research, you will spin your wheels forever and won’t end up in the right place.

Product marketing research is an ongoing process and it’s never done as your audience, marketing, and product are always changing—but once you’ve done a basic analysis you can start to work on positioning. Continue to refine your product marketing research in these 3 areas as you scale.

This research not only informs your positioning but also informs your entire marketing strategy–you must know your audience, what’s happening in your market, and how your product fits in for everything you do in marketing! So, don’t do this process for the sole purpose of writing positioning. Do it for the sake of building a high-impact marketing strategy and to write better positioning.

More on how positioning drives your overall marketing strategy in this newsletter.

Here are the components of product marketing research:

To do product marketing research well, you’ll understand all of the bullets in the far right column above when “done”. The good news: this research is much easier today than even a year ago due to modern tools + AI, some examples:

Use Apollo.io (our sponsor) to map your entire TAM (total addressable market), push these companies into your CRM, and understand firmographics for each target company and demographics for each contact.
To analyze competitors without having to dig around on each competitor’s website, use Ignition to create competitive battlecards with AI and/or use Clay to scrape competitors' websites.

While doing this research, don’t duplicate work across your company, get alignment instead.

Alignment with the product team is critical. At the highest level, make sure you agree on the problem(s) you are solving for your audience.
Across product and GTM, align on jobs to be done or use cases, personas that your product can serve, and how your product is actually different from alternatives—customer success and support teams are often super valuable here.

The outputs of product marketing research that are most useful for positioning include:

A prioritized list of audience segments, and a clearly defined primary audience to focus your positioning on. Don’t be afraid to get narrow. For more on going narrow with a wedge-in marketing strategy, read this newsletter.
A clear mapping of competitors, a 2x2 competitive matrix can work
A clear definition of the primary problem your product solves today.

After product marketing research is often when positioning starts to go very wrong. Companies try to fit everything they just discovered into some complicated positioning statement and then spew all of this out as copy on the homepage. Avoid this by selecting your product type and comparator next—and use that to write a focused positioning statement.

Step 2: Identify your product type and comparator for positioning

This step helps you find your focus and figure out what you’re positioning against. To do this, identify what type of product you are and then determine what you’re comparing your product to when positioning.

Here are the 4 product types, how I define them, corresponding comparators, how product and/or solution aware your audience typically is for each product type, and examples.

A few reminders and notes about the product type selection process:

When picking your product type, keep in mind the primary audience you selected in your product marketing research process.
10x better is a bit of a hyperbolic phrase. It’s difficult to beat an incumbent on everything, so narrow down to an audience or use case you are actually better for!
If you get stuck, deciding between vertical solution and new way or 10x better product types, choosing vertical solution typically leads to more effective positioning.
Similarly, if you get stuck between buy vs. build and new way, you should likely choose buy vs. build.

If you can’t find a product type that matches what your company is building, 2 things might be happening:

Your product just isn’t differentiated. If you are a “me too” product, sometimes you can narrow down your audience enough to stand out. In these cases you can try to compensate with go-to-market efforts, but it’s going to be an uphill battle! Companies that win, differentiate on both product and go-to-market.
Your audience is too broad. Narrow down your audience to a segment where your product really stands out. Focus your marketing efforts here. This doesn’t mean you need to turn away other audiences if they sign up (or even talk to sales)—but sometimes turning people not in your ICP away is helpful for overall company focus.

Your product type will likely change over time

Before you pick your product type, know that it can and likely will change over time, as your market, audience, and product change. As you evolve, other companies likely will pop up in the same space with a similar solution. So at some point everyone is trying to prove they are the best solution in an existing category.

Some examples:

A vertical product is launched as a wedge-in to a larger market, and eventually competes in that broader existing category.
- I.e. Hubspot started as a tool for marketers, and is now for all of GTM and competes against Salesforce in the CRM category.
A new way of doing things today eventually evolves into a defined category and you have to remain differentiated.
- I.e. Asana was a new way of organizing and managing work, and now it’s part of the work management category. Oddly, defining this category was a huge challenge–I guess the words were staring at us all along.
If your product is an external solution to replace an internal process, eventually the external products become so much better than the internal solutions, those external solutions become their own category.
- I.e. Segment replaced connecting the dots on internal data, and now CDP is a defined category and most established SaaS companies use a tool in that category.

Choosing your product type and corresponding comparator is the most skipped over part of the entire positioning process. Don’t skip this! If you get this wrong and/or your audience wrong, you’ll be positioning your product against the wrong thing to the wrong people, which simply doesn’t work.

The challenge of positioning a “new way” of doing something & why you probably shouldn’t define a new category

I think “new way” positioning is the most difficult of all 4 product types–by far. Most marketers (and founders) lose sight of the goal when positioning a new way of doing something. The goal is to make your specific audience problem, solution, and product aware. Instead, they waste time trying to make the perfect category name happen or become overly focused on competitors building “new ways” too.

Creating a category very rarely makes sense until you are a very established company. Rather than slapping a confusing category name on the new way, use descriptive language to provide a clear frame of reference and benefit.
Early competitors playing in the same emerging category, typically help you grow, not hurt you. These early competitors can actually help you define and establish a new way of solving an existing problem.
The solution: Position against using “nothing” or the “old way”. Messaging and copy can help you differentiate against emerging competitors, but this not the primary, top-of-homepage messaging.
Remember: The vast majority of your customers at this stage will come from people not using a solution like yours–not from the emerging competitors.
I.e. in the early days of Asana, winning against Trello wasn’t the focus of positioning. Convincing all teams they needed to manage projects and tasks in a structured way was the challenge we needed to overcome with positioning—Trello only made this easier for us.

Step 3: Determine positioning

We are finally there. We’ve researched, synthesized that info, and it’s now time to figure out how you’ll stand out— and not get bogged down trying to be everything to everyone.

I recommend you write your positioning as a separate process from product marketing research. You’ll just get way too in the weeds if you try to cover everything in one working session or doc–pull in the appropriate people at this stage and send the research docs as pre-reads. Then focus on just the positioning statement.

At this point you have most of the ingredients you need for positioning. It should be fairly straight forward. But maybe easier said than done…so here’s more details on how to do this:

Who is it for? Requires audience prioritization

During product marketing research, you should have narrowed down to a primary audience segment. This is essential–you can’t write effective positioning for a million audiences.
I know this gets tricky if your product is for many audiences. But, pick the primary audience segment you can currently serve for positioning, you can then adjust messaging for other audiences.
If you can’t clearly choose a product type and comparator, your audience is likely too broad.

In my templates for paid subscribers, I have an example of an audience “tiering” system to help here.

What is it? Depends on your product type and comparator

How you explain what your product is comes down to what level of understanding your company has about the problem you solve and the solutions available. Figure out if your primary audience is problem aware, solution aware, or both.

If your audience isn’t problem aware, you need to focus on defining the problem and the solution. This is typically the case with products that fall into the “New Way” product type.
- i.e. Leave management software that automates the complexities of compliance, claims, and payroll
If your audience is problem aware, but not solution aware, you need to briefly restate the problem and clearly explain the general solution. This is typically the case for all product types except 10x better.
- i.e. Software that automates leave management
If your audience is problem and solution aware, just to describe the product clearly. Don’t reinvent the wheel on how the product is explained! Save that for the why it’s better.
- i.e. Leave management software

Note on the examples: I modified the “what is it” statement from cocoon.com, based on how I’d change it due to audience awareness level.

Why is it better? Laser focus on your comparator.

Now this is where people get stuck writing a laundry list and unable to pick just one benefit or differentiator. Panic may set in. You might end up with something meaningless and catch all like “save time” when that’s not the primary differentiator.
You are answering why it’s better than the comparator you determined. That’s it.
Other benefits and use cases can be built out in a longer messaging doc.

How do you position if you have multiple audiences or products?

If you have multiple products, re-run the entire process from the product marketing research step, and adjust your product type, positioning statement, and messaging accordingly.
If you have multiple audiences, choose your primary audience as the focus of positioning. For the remaining segments, you typically just need to refine your messaging, not your positioning statement.
In all cases, make sure you get buy-in on the primary positioning first, this will save you lots of time down the line.

Positioning example

Here’s a meta example of positioning, written for a fake product that helps with positioning, messaging, and copywriting. This info is all you need to share with your company, plus links to supporting product marketing research docs.

For this template, plus templates for running a positioning process and sharing results, subscribe to our paid newsletter.

Step 3.5 Make sure your positioning sets you apart

I call out this half step because that’s the whole point of this newsletter! I can’t emphasize enough how often people fall into the traps at the top of this newsletter and end up with positioning that is not differentiated.

If you aren’t sure if your positioning is clear and differentiated, ask someone in your target audience. They’ll tell you.

But before you do that, watch out for these signs you’re not in the right place:

You decide your company is so special that you need fall into 2 product types, and can’t possibly pick just one comparator.
Your “who it’s for” isn’t specific at all. “For any SaaS company” is likely way too broad until you are a very late-stage company, and even then it’s likely too broad.
Your “what is it” describes every feature you’ve ever launched. You just need to make sure people know what you do overall and how they are different–that’s the point of positioning. Instead, save all the feature details for messaging and copy for product and audience pages.
Your “why it’s better” has 2-3 differentiators. Pick one please.
Your positioning is way too aspirational: You’re so excited about the future, you aren’t positioning for today. If this is happening, write a future positioning statement too—recognize you want to get to this place, but need to position for today first.
You wish you could build a 3D table in your positioning statement doc to explain positioning: It just shouldn’t be that complicated! You are filling in a few blanks, that’s really it.
You could replace your company name with another company and the positioning statement would still apply. This indicates you probably had too many cooks in the kitchen, and went with a path everyone felt fine but not great about.
Your positioning isn’t about your product and you’ve just written a “tagline”. You aren’t Nike. “Just do it” isn’t product positioning. That’s a brand statement. When nobody know what your product does and why it’s different, making catchy taglines isn’t the answer.

Step 4: Turn your positioning into messaging and copy

Stay tuned for our newsletter in 2 weeks on this topic—we’ll be reviewing real positioning examples submitted by our subscribers. Until then, more on messaging and copywriting:

I wrote about the homepage messaging here, in one of my most popular posts to date. You’ll notice my positioning framework has evolved ever so slightly, but the main points remain.
Allyson Letteri recently wrote a post for us about her messaging framework.

Want your positioning and homepage messaging reviewed in our next Newsletter? Submit your request here.

Recap:

Positioning starts with in depth product marketing research–but zoom out of research-land when you get to writing positioning.
Choosing your comparator is critical. Luckily, there are 4 buckets you’ll almost definitely fall into that makes this easier.
Focus positioning on clearly stating what your product is and why it’s better for your specific audience than the comparator.
Don’t get lost in a laundry list of features, benefits, and use cases when positioning. That can be covered in more extensive messaging and copy work—that isn’t shared with the entire company or shipped on the homepage.

Thanks again to our sponsors: Apollo.io, Ten Speed, & 42 Agency.