The Product
Positioning
Grand Prix
(Or, how CMOs can make their marketing and sales pipeline leakproof.)
Product positioning is a race.
The finish line? Your prospects’ mindshare.
Imagine yourself behind the wheel of a high-performance race car. Engine revving, poised at the starting line.
The track ahead is the crowded market, teeming with competitors, each vying for the coveted chequered flag: the right to be front of mind.
When you occupy the right space in people’s heads, you’re more likely to become a trusted and preferred choice for prospects and customers.
This sets the stage for sustainable growth, leading to faster lead generation, lower customer churn, and increased profitability.
The challenge here is that there’s not enough space for everyone. ONLY THE BEST-POSITIONED PRODUCTS GET REMEMBERED.
The average person’s head has a finite amount of space to categorize products. There’s room for maybe three. If your product isn’t in one of those slots, you must de-position a competitor in order for a different product to take its place.
Luke Sullivan and Edward Boches, authors of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This
Think about it. Need a satisfying snack on the go? A Snickers bar springs to mind.
When someone mentions a quick and cheap meal, there’s a reason you’ll think of a McDonald’s burger before anything else.
These brands have perfected their product positioning strategies, securing their spots in people’s consciousness.
But how did they get there?
Not through a single move – but rather through a series of smaller strategic steps.
HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW.
Preparing for victory
Just like any competition, the work begins long before the race starts.
That means you need to understand the track, the weather, and the competitors – in other words, the market conditions.
This involves:
Analyzing the market dynamics
Tap into the pulse of your industry and examine the trends reshaping your market.
What are consumers and buyers most impacted by?
How fierce is the competition? How saturated is the market?
By analyzing the macroenvironmental forces at play, you’ll be able to spot opportunities before they’re obvious and sidestep potential pitfalls with finesse.
Performing competitor analysis
First, you’ll need to identify who your competitors are.
Who poses the most threat? The answer to this question may be less obvious than you think.
After, you’ll be able to get the inside scoop on your rivals.
Analyze their strategies, pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses, and look into their product positioning.
What messages are they leading with? What product capabilities are they highlighting?
Having this intel will help you figure out ways to gain a strategic advantage.
Gathering customer intel
Before you begin this step, you must be able to identify who you want to target.
Are they the most profitable segment in the long term?
Once you have this figured out, tune into what really matters to them. Uncover their needs, expectations, and priorities. Who are they most influenced by?
When you understand what makes them tick, you’ll be able to forge stronger, more meaningful connections with your personas.
Only after completing these steps should you focus on using those insights to position your own product.
Many brands, however, launch their products first and hope for the best.
AVOID THIS.
Simply having a good product is no longer enough in today’s crowded market.
Performing competitor analysis
First, you’ll need to identify who your competitors are.
Who poses the most threat? The answer to this question may be less obvious than you think.
After, you’ll be able to get the inside scoop on your rivals.
Analyze their strategies, pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses, and look into their product positioning.
What messages are they leading with? What product capabilities are they highlighting?
Having this intel will help you figure out ways to gain a strategic advantage.
That’s why nearly approximately
30,000
new products are introduced every year,
Ready, set, gooooooo!
Your product launch must make a strong, memorable impression from the start.
The last thing you’d want to do is to go silent on your marketing channels.
However, if prospects have a poor, inaccurate, or unclear impression of what you offer, they won’t even consider it – even when they have a need for it.
This is exactly why thorough preparation is key.
You only have one perfect chance to make an impression.
It’s hard (though not impossible) to change people’s minds once they’ve dismissed your product as unimportant.
To avoid this, your product messaging must clearly articulate the benefits.
They must be delivered in a way that resonates with your target personas.
But above all, they must be relevant – tapping into your personas’ most important challenges and pain points.
Distill all of this into a messaging framework.
Without the necessary audience insights, you risk missing the mark.
Shopify is a great example of a brand that created momentum with its messaging.
Founded in 2006 to address the founders’ struggles in finding an accessible e-commerce solution, Shopify swiftly gained traction with its intuitive platform and customizable templates.
Recognizing a gap in the market, the company emphasized its ability to create bespoke store layouts, significantly enhancing its appeal to diverse retailers worldwide.
Today, Shopify remains at the forefront of e-commerce, supporting over 1.75 million merchants globally and shaping the future of online retail.
Unexpected shifts in consumer behavior and market trends
Positioning is inherently human-centric. People’s needs evolve.
This means the goalposts move too.
Staying attuned to these shifts lets you adapt quickly and effectively.
Staying competitive mid-race
As you navigate the race, you’ll face challenges: other cars trying to overtake you, sudden changes in track conditions, and the need to refuel or change tires.
In marketing terms, this means:
Products or promotions that threaten your market share
Competitors can employ various tactics to challenge your market position.
They might launch aggressive strategies, such as initiating a price war.
They could also adopt more subtle approaches. For example, they may launch campaigns that indirectly highlight your product's weaknesses.
Unexpected shifts in consumer behavior and market trends
Positioning is inherently human-centric. People’s needs evolve.
This means the goalposts move too.
Staying attuned to these shifts lets you adapt quickly and effectively.
The need to refresh your strategy or update your messaging to maintain peak performance
When the market changes, you have three options: let yourself be overtaken, leave the race and join a new one with different competitors, or change your strategy.
You don’t want to choose the first option.
The second option should be considered only when it makes strategic sense.
Most of the time, you should pick the last option.
At this stage, optimization is more important than ever.
It’s not enough to just have data. To deliver impact and value across different areas of your business, you must be able to translate what you have into insights.
Data-driven insights are your best tools for not only analyzing performance and assessing strategies, but also for discerning whether competitors are catching up or if the gap is widening in your favor.
In short, they allow you to maintain your competitive edge throughout the race.
Let’s take a look at HubSpot as an example.
Originally recognized as the pioneer of inbound marketing software, the company faced a changing landscape where businesses sought comprehensive solutions for customer engagement beyond marketing alone.
When HubSpot saw that customer needs were changing, the team immediately embarked on a strategic repositioning journey.
They consolidated their inbound marketing tools into a full-stack CRM platform that integrates sales, marketing, customer service, and operations.
This shift in positioning was more than just a rebranding exercise. It involved a fundamental realignment of their product messaging.
In doing so, HubSpot not only addressed market shifts but also repositioned its offering as a necessary, holistic solution for businesses looking to scale and succeed in a customer-centric digital environment.
The finish line?
PRODUCT POSITIONING GRAND PRIX
When you secure a firm spot in your target audience’s minds, you earn the opportunity to thrive.
This means you benefit from more word-of-mouth referrals…
…making you a magnet for advocates who consistently provide new opportunities for growth.
However, positioning isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it exercise.
Markets are in constant flux.
Why?
New technologies and trends can make your positioning outdated or obselete.
Economic shifts can strain your customers’ budgets, influencing their purchasing behaviors.
Regulatory changes can completely impact the way you deliver value.
Disruptors can enter the race and become your rivals – especially as markets become saturated over time.
In all these cases, your product positioning must be tweaked to acknowledge these impacts. Simply ignoring them will push you wildly off course.
Every major change you experience – whether it’s new market conditions or other factors – means you have to run another lap.
The importance of having continual insights
In business, it’s rarely about one big move that wins the game.
It’s the little adjustments you make along the way that build up over time and push you toward victory.
When you have continual access to the right data, and the right people to extract insights from it, you’re in a better position to make incremental improvements that help you outpace competitors…
…and prepare for the next race.
Remember how the fate of British Cycling changed forever thanks to this approach?
In 2003, the team’s performance director Dave Brailsford introduced a new strategy: the aggregation of marginal gains.2
From bike seat redesigns to sleep quality optimizations, he focused on improving every single thing by just 1%.
These small changes snowballed into astonishing results: 60% of gold medals at the 2008 Olympics and British riders winning multiple Tour de France titles in subsequent years.
2 https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-1-performance-improvements-led-to-olympic-gold
Having the right support makes all the difference
Caught between shrinking budgets and greater responsibilities, CMOs are stretching themselves thin.
This is where your pit crew – the right team, equipped with knowledge, expertise, technology, and data – becomes invaluable.
When you have the right support, you’ll be able to work quickly, without any drop-off – and make impactful changes that keep you ahead of the competition, race after race.
It’s time to find the right position for your product
Learn why positioning helps CMOs attract more sales, reduce churn, and achieve sustainable growth.
Download now