Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It: Summary & Key Insights

Positioning is one of those marketing concepts that often gets warped into a vague catch-all term. People talk about branding or messaging when they mean positioning, or they treat positioning as if it’s something that happens once during launch and never needs revisiting. But positioning is far more foundational than any of those things.

In essence, positioning is the process of deliberately defining how your product is the best in the world for a specific set of customers under specific conditions. It is not about manipulating perception or inventing a story—it’s about uncovering and clarifying truths that already exist in your market and product. Branding expresses who you are; messaging conveys how you talk about yourself; vision describes where you’re going. But positioning ties all these threads together and gives them direction. Without clear positioning, everything else becomes inconsistent and confusing.

Imagine you’ve invented a tool that automates part of data analytics workflows. If you describe it as an 'AI platform,' customers might compare it to products far more general than yours and conclude it falls short. But if you position it as a 'data workflow accelerator for analytics teams drowning in manual cleanup,' suddenly your market frame is sharper, and the product’s value is instantly comprehensible.

The reason this matters is that customers never evaluate your product in isolation—they always compare it to something else. Positioning defines what those 'something elses' are and how you measure against them. It’s not the story you tell in ads—it’s the handle customers use to categorize your product in their minds. And if you don’t give them that handle intentionally, they’ll create it themselves, often incorrectly. Great companies take control of this mental framing.

In practice, positioning demands understanding your product’s unique attributes, what customers perceive as alternatives, and the context that makes those attributes valuable. My method builds on those elements systematically so that instead of guessing how to frame your product, you can construct a defensible, evidence-driven positioning foundation.

Context is how customers decide what your product is. No one encounters a new product as a blank slate—they filter it through past experiences, comparable categories, and known references. That’s why positioning is so deeply tied to market context: if you put your product in the wrong frame, it will be judged against inappropriate standards.

Consider the classic case of Salesforce. If Marc Benioff had described his product simply as 'CRM software,' customers might have compared it to Siebel, which required massive on-premise installations. Instead, Salesforce used the phrase 'CRM in the cloud,' creating a new context—one that emphasized convenience, scalability, and freedom from IT complexity. The context made it obvious why Salesforce was better.

Every product lives or dies by its chosen frame of reference. Put a baby stroller beside a sports car and it looks out of place; put it beside other strollers and suddenly we can discern its advantages. The same principle applies in technology, retail, or any domain: context determines perception. If your product is compared to something that highlights its weaknesses, you lose. If you anchor it to a context that amplifies its strengths, you win.

This means positioning is not only definitional—it’s strategic. You can’t simply describe your product by what it technically is; you must describe it in a way that defines how people should think about it. The right context creates understanding. The wrong context breeds confusion.

When I work with companies to reposition, we start by identifying what customers currently compare the product to. These comparisons reveal the implicit context already in play. Once we understand that, we can shift the frame strategically, choosing a market category that makes our strengths shine. Context is a lens you control—use it wisely, and customers will not only 'get it' but also feel it’s the obvious choice.