Today’s guest is April Dunford, positioning expert and the author of the book Obviously Awesome.  April Dunford is an executive consultant, speaker, and author who helps companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love. She is a globally recognized expert in Positioning, having launched 16 products across her 25-year career as VP Marketing at a series of successful startups.

Positioning as a concept has been around since 1969 when it was first introduced by Jack Trout and Al Ries. The idea became mainstream marketing knowledge after Ries and Trout published“Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” in the early 80’s and marketers have been taught this style of positioning ever since. Ries and Trout argued that Positioning was the solution to standing out in a noisy marketplace filled with too many products and too many marketing messages trying to promote them. Positioning is the act of giving those customers a map of the current landscape and then instructing them where they fit and why one solution is better than the others around them.

April points out that positioning has a positioning problem today and provides a 10 step positioning playbook for companies and marketers to adopt. Developing a positioning statement is often done as a fill-in-the-blank “Mad Libs” exercise based on a template.  In this podcast April tells us what good positioning should look like with examples. She wants us to be cognizant that the  early adopting customers may not be your eventual mainstream ones (as Geoffrey Moore has written about in his iconic book Crossing the Chasm).

The history of Twitter, is an example of how a venture whose founders thought it would do one thing ended up doing something entirely different once they were exposed to the market.

Website: aprildunford.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprildunford/

Twitter: @aprildunford