Review: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford

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.

Rating: 4 stars