Product Positioning & Messaging 101

One of the most common exercises I've done over my career is creating core product positioning and messaging. To me, good product positioning serves as the foundation for all of marketing - and it is one of the first activities I do when I start working with a company. Without clear, concise, and customer-centric product positioning, the rest of your marketing activities (content marketing, brand marketing, demand generation, etc.) will all struggle to be effective.

In this post, I will explain the differences between product positioning and messaging, and walk through how I have put this together for multiple companies and products. I will also share the templates I use so you can create your own positioning and messaging. I welcome your feedback on the templates - and this approach.

Positioning vs Messaging

The first thing I often have to clarify is that positioning and messaging are not the same. People often use them interchangeably or get confused about which is which. For this purpose, I use the analogy shown above: positioning is internally-facing, and messaging is externally-facing. Positioning is the raw ingredients used to create those externally-facing messaging materials. Positioning statements and work are only meant to be seen and used by internal teams to then create the messaging and materials used externally.

Before you can craft external messaging statements and materials - like a pitch deck, elevator pitch, or home page - you need to align with key internal stakeholders on the core positioning you are trying to convey.

Positioning defines the core story elements about your target buyer, your product or service, and why that buyer needs your product.

Product Positioning Ingredients

There are a lot of different templates and approaches to creating product positioning out there, but for me, it boils down to 5 key ingredients that come together in a core positioning statement.

The first half of the positioning exercise is taking an outside-in perspective: articulating the situation that a specific set of people have that opens up the opportunity for a product like yours. What is happening in the market and with this group of people that means they would be willing to expend time and money on a product or service to improve the situation? What is the urgency to solve this problem now? Common questions to be answered here include:

• Market drivers: are market dynamics opening up a need or opportunity? Are there new regulations, industry consolidation, supply chain issues, etc? Or is this an ongoing issue of market competition and the need to improve time to market, lower costs, improve services, or compete more effectively across some other dimension?
• Technology drivers: are technological advances allowing existing problems to be solved more effectively? Are rapid AI advances, compute or storage prices decreases, or some other technology step-change enabling new solutions that can solve existing pain points more effectively or open new opportunities for a target set of customers?
• Target customer: who is most impacted by these market and technology drivers? Is this unique to, or most prevalent in, certain industries, geographies, or company sizes? What other attributes define an ideal target customer?
• Lead pin in the bowling alley: using Geoffrey Moore's bowling alley analogy, based on your company resources which of those target segments will you be focusing on first? Will you start in the US first, and then expand internationally? Which vertical will be your "lead pin"? Most companies cannot go after every possible customer segment at the same time - having a lead pin helps focus your marketing and sales efforts, increases efficiency, and provides faster and more actionable market feedback.

This work helps identify the reason a product like yours can succeed, and where you think you can have the most success out of the gate. But it is also important to articulate where you aren't focusing.

As you are working on your ideal customer profile and buyer personas, a helpful exercise can be to articulate the anti-target as well - who your product is not well-suited for.

What attributes would make a bad customer for you? This could be industries that are much harder to sell into, geographies where you don't have representation, companies that might not be able to afford your technology, and so on. Documenting who you don't want to sell to can help your sales and marketing teams focus and align efforts.

The second half of the positioning exercise is the inside-out perspective: what makes your solution the best option for customers facing the challenges you just articulated? Start by mapping out your key capabilities and why they are important. For this initial pass, they don't have to be competitively unique, but you need to be able to frame them from the user's point of view: why is this feature important to your target customers?

Then take a second pass and map out what truly differentiates your solution from alternative approaches or competitors. Two key things to consider here: focus on true alternatives vs perceived competitors, and broaden your view of differentiators beyond just product features.

• True alternative: make sure you are focusing on what your customer will do if they don't buy your product - and how you differentiate yourself from that. If they will likely buy a very similar competitive product, differentiate yourself from it. But in many instances, especially for new-to-market solutions, customers may instead take a completely different approach - e.g. status quo, DIY, outsourcing, or alternate technology. If that is the case for you, then differentiate yourself from that.
• Non-product differentiators: in addition to enumerating the capabilities that truly make your product unique, think about what else differentiates your total solution from the alternative. This could be pricing, services, community, onboarding, etc. - those can all be important differentiators from direct competitors or alternative approaches.

True differentiators are typically not nitty-gritty technical differences - instead they are the things your customers would tell their peers about why they chose you.

Once you've defined the outside-in and inside-out perspectives, you can pull all of these ingredients together into the core positioning statement:

This is a standard statement that lays out the market opportunity (the outside-in perspective), and the solutions definition and competitive advantage (the inside-out perspective). This is not meant to be something you use externally - but meant to crisply summarize the positioning work you've done, and be something that the entire company should be able to understand and articulate.

Product Messaging Dishes

Now that you have assembled all the ingredients, you can start putting them together into dishes to serve the market.

There are a lot of possible dishes you could create with the ingredients you've pulled together, but I like to start with 3 must-haves:

• Product descriptions: you will undoubtedly have myriad locations where you need to insert a 25, 50, 100 word, or longer product description. While you may want to tailor these for certain circumstances, having a standard set at the ready can be very helpful.
• The story: similarly, while many people in your company should be able to articulate the positioning statement, and a longer story about your company, in their own words, having a well-defined story laid out in a slide deck and/or document can be a helpful training guide and alignment tool. I've frequently seen this referred to as the "coat rack" - the core story that serves as the foundation for many other marketing materials.
• Keywords & sound bites: develop a set of reference materials that your marketing teams (SEO, paid advertising, PR, social media, etc.) can all refer back to when writing copy, creating ads, pitching stories, etc. can all use. At a minimum, this should include keywords to always incorporate, and helpful sound bites and customer quotes to help strengthen stories and build credibility.

Ultimately you and your marketing team will inevitably create a wide array of materials - and these "starters" and the underlying ingredients can make that work much easier, and more consistent.

While tailoring messaging to specific audiences and mediums is important, maintaining consistency with the underlying positioning and core messaging will ensure your brand is better understood by your target audience, and ultimately more successful.

Summary & Downloadable Templates

I believe that product positioning and messaging remain the most important foundation for marketing. Investing time in aligning and getting buy-in from key internal stakeholders on core positioning and messaging, and documenting this for future reference and use, is one of the most important things any marketing leader can do.

This post outlined how I approach positioning and messaging - curious to hear what you think I missed, or how you approach this foundational step. If you want to build on what I've outlined here, you can access and download slides and a spreadsheet template here.