# Obviously Awesome **April Dunford**  --- _Position deliberately or the market will do it badly for you._ Most products aren't bad. They're placed in the wrong context. Positioning isn't a marketing exercise or a tagline; it's the deliberate act of setting context so customers immediately understand what you are, why you matter, and how you're different. Leave positioning to chance, and competitors or confused early customers will define you, often in ways you'll spend years trying to escape. Positioning works like the opening scene of a film. Within seconds, genre, tone, and stakes are set, shaping how you interpret everything that follows. Customers encounter something new and immediately search for context: what is this thing? What else is like it? How should I judge it? The context that gets applied, whether you set it or not, determines which attributes they value and which trade-offs they'll accept. Accounting software framed against Excel gets priced like Excel. The same software framed as enterprise workflow automation justifies a £50k annual contract. --- **Dunford argues positioning has five components.** Competitive alternatives: not your direct competitors, but what customers actually compare you against, which is often a spreadsheet or an internal process rather than another vendor. Unique attributes: features or capabilities you have that alternatives lack. Value: the meaningful benefit those attributes enable, which is different from the attributes themselves. Target market: who cares enough about that value to pay for it, the [[Niches]] question. Market category: the frame of reference that makes your strengths obvious rather than obscuring them. The order matters. Most companies start by trying to invent differentiators or pick a category, then work forward. Dunford's method runs backwards from your happiest customers. They reveal what you actually do well, which reveals who genuinely cares, which reveals what frame of reference makes that value legible. Start anywhere else and you're guessing. --- **Category choice is strategic, not descriptive.** The wrong category makes your strengths look like weaknesses, a kind of [[Counter-positioning]] in reverse. A well-chosen category does half your selling: "we're like X but for Y" immediately activates the right set of expectations. Creating a new category is expensive and risky; only do it when no existing frame fits. The test for a new category is whether customers would independently arrive at the same label, not whether you find it intellectually elegant. Attributes are features; value is what those features enable. A lower price is an attribute. The ability to get a junior employee productive in a day is a value. "Your opinion of your value does not count as proof," Dunford notes, which is pointed: only customer testimonials, case studies, and third-party validation establish value claims in a prospect's mind. Don't confuse consideration attributes (what drives purchase decisions) with retention attributes (what matters after they buy). Selling requires the former. --- **Positioning translates directly into sales storytelling.** The sequence is: establish the problem customers face today, show how they currently solve it and where that fails, describe the ideal solution in the abstract, then introduce your product as that solution made real. Handle objections through value themes and case studies. The positioning work creates the skeleton; the sales conversation puts flesh on it. Without clear positioning underneath, even good salespeople are improvising every time, and improvisation at scale doesn't compound. This connects directly to [[Value stick]] thinking: positioning creates WTP by clarifying value in the customer's mind before price is ever discussed. The better the positioning, the less work the price has to do. ---