What do you do if your product positioning and messaging aren't resonating with customers?

Identify desired outcomes: Precisely articulate what you want to achieve by realigning your positioning and messaging. Do you aim to increase conversions, improve brand perception, or target a new customer segment? Prioritize goals: If you have multiple objectives, rank them in order of importance. This will guide your analysis and decision-making.

If positioning and messaging are not resonating with the audience, the first step is to conduct a thorough evaluation of the objectives. It's important to revisit the fundamental questions: What do we want to achieve? Do we want to raise awareness or do we aim for more loyal customers? Once we have clear objectives, we can analyze the reasons.

Refine your goals and objectives by leveraging insights gathered from customer research and competitive analysis. Understand how your competitors are addressing similar customer needs, identifying opportunities to position your product uniquely. Foster close collaboration among cross-functional teams, including marketing, sales, and customer support, to ensure cohesive strategies and actions across all areas of the business. Also, consider engaging customers directly in the goal-setting process. This allows them to provide inputs, share perspective and collaborate with your team to develop more effective solutions.

Assuming you are solving a significant problem for a well-defined audience and your product's positioning and messaging aren't resonating with customers, arrange meetings with friendly existing customers. Ask them to explain why they like your product, encouraging them to use their own jargon. List down the terminology they use, and rephrase your messaging accordingly. Reflect back and, if they understand, reach out to potential customers and conduct A/B testing.

Here you need to appropriately define your goals by considering your customers. You need to realise at what stage your customers are in customer journey mapping. For example - if we take AIDA (Awareness, interest, desire and action). You need to check at what stage your customer is and then define your goals in alignment with that

Diverse sources: Tap into a variety of feedback channels, including direct customer surveys, social media listening, sales team conversations, website analytics, and customer reviews. Qualitative and quantitative: Collect both qualitative data (thoughts, opinions) and quantitative data (numerical metrics) to understand the 'why' behind customer sentiment alongside usage trends. Target the right audience: Make sure your feedback collection targets your desired customer segments.

There are various sources to gather customer feedback and you need to keep your resources vast and diverse to get the actual feedback. It should be both qualitative and quantitative. You can go for open as well as closed questions plus you can go for likert scale system (1 to 5) to get a range. You can go for user testing A/B testing to check the performance of the product

Get straight to the source: your customers. Collect feedback through surveys, interviews, social media, and customer support interactions. ??? Understanding why your message isn't resonating provides the insights needed for effective adjustments.

It's important to conduct a thorough evaluation to identify the problem and make the necessary adjustments, for which we must gather as much information as possible. Surveys, interviews, or focus groups with current and potential customers should be conducted to understand their needs, perceptions, and how they perceive your product and message. It's also important to analyze the competition; we need to observe how they are positioning and communicating their products.

Identify themes: Look for recurring patterns in customer feedback. What are the common complaints, points of praise, or areas of confusion? Segment by customer type: Group feedback by customer segments (e.g., demographics, use cases, purchase behavior) to understand if different audiences have disparate reactions to your positioning and messaging. Analyze alongside business data: Cross-reference feedback with KPIs like lead generation, website traffic, or churn rates to identify tangible effects on your bottom line.

Once all the information is gathered, it's important to make room for analysis and search for patterns of behavior according to your audience. There are different ways to segment the information, but the most important thing is to be able to extract trends or relationships according to the communication channels with the customer. It's necessary to evaluate whether you're reaching the right audience, delivering the message effectively, and using the appropriate channel.

You can now do the segmentation of the feedback like demographic(age and gender) social, psychological segmentation, values, attitudes and opinions. Then, you can decide how to go for which segment. Try to visualise it either by graphs, charts and spreadsheets to get the better understanding for future purpose also

Not all feedback will point in the same direction. Break it down and segment by demographics, customer behavior, or product usage patterns. ?? This segmentation can reveal specific areas where your messaging falls flat and identify customer personas that aren’t fully engaged.

- Thoroughly analyze the collected feedback, identifying common themes and patterns. - Segment the feedback based on customer demographics, preferences, and behaviors to tailor your adjustments to specific target audiences.

Positioning is the gut feeling of the customer. It’s like what’s the value of your brand in eyes of the customer,You can choose techniques like perceptual mapping where you can take two or more factors to show the positioning of your product VS other products. You can also define the POP and POD for the product and set the unique points of your product . Here POP is points of parity and points of differentiation.

There are many ways to redefine the value proposition of a service or product, through the Value Proposition Canvas, Empathy Map, Customer Experience Map, among others. But in my experience, the most important thing is to simplify and clarify your message so that it's easy to understand and resonates with your target audience. It's important to highlight the key benefits that the product offers.

You can use thé commonly use method of A/B testing and then compare the different versions of the product. Ultimately, finding that which one works better and has attracted more customers. Other techniques could be heat mapping like if consumer has opened your website which part is his cursor moving and where he spends majority of time. Eye tracking is also a good technique in that case.

As a final step, it's necessary to seek continuous feedback, to remain open to receiving customer feedback and adjust the strategy accordingly. Continuous improvement is key to staying relevant in a competitive market. Additionally, it's important to keep iterating, to conduct A/B tests with different messages and positioning approaches to see which resonates best with your audience.

One of mistakes that might cause your product positioning and messaging not to resonate with customers is failing to differentiate your product clearly from competitors. Address this by diving deep into what makes your product unique—be it features, customer experience, or value. Highlight these distinctions in your messaging. Tailor your narrative to showcase how your product solves problems differently or better than anyone else.

If product positioning and messaging aren't resonating, reassess by conducting customer interviews and surveys to understand pain points and preferences better. For instance, if marketing a new health app, gather feedback on messaging clarity and relevance to users' needs. Iterate messaging based on insights gained, emphasizing benefits that align with customer priorities. Test revised messaging through A/B testing or focus groups to validate effectiveness. By continuously refining positioning based on customer feedback, resonance with the target audience can be achieved.

First and foremost action must be to identify the reason for mismatch and dissonance. If it is a new product, then it means revisiting your research and assumptions about the target market. If it is an existing product, the question to chase is 'what changed?'. Either scenarios you must engage with your customers and target audience to understand their sentiments and thoughts about the product. You may use qualitative or quantitative methods depending on the situation but do not skip speaking with the customers even if you can only do a handful. Once you have identified the gap or issue at hand, get the team together to figure out how to fix it. Remember, a problem well defined is a problem half solved.

Evaluate competitors positioning and messaging to identify opportunities. Ensure your messaging communicates a distinct value proposition in the market.