Your product has been in market for 18 months. Sales cycles are too long. Prospects say "interesting, but we're not sure we need this." Deals get stuck in evaluation. Win rates are inconsistent.
The product is good. Customers who use it love it. But prospects don't understand what it is, who it's for, or why it matters.
You don't have a messaging problem. You have a positioning problem.
April Dunford's positioning framework, outlined in her book "Obviously Awesome," provides a systematic approach to finding the market context where your product's value is obvious. It's not about clever taglines or catchy slogans. It's about strategic choices that determine whether prospects immediately understand your value or remain confused.
What Makes April Dunford's Framework Different
Most positioning advice focuses on crafting statements: "We are X for Y." Dunford's approach is different. She treats positioning as a system of five interconnected components that work together to make your value obvious to the right customers.
The five components are:
- Competitive alternatives: What customers would do if your solution didn't exist
- Unique attributes: Features and capabilities only you have
- Value: Benefits those unique attributes enable
- Target market characteristics: Customer segments who care most about that value
- Market category: The context that makes your value obvious
These components must align. If they don't, your positioning fails.
The framework is iterative, not linear. You might start with a hypothesis about your target market, then discover your unique attributes suggest a different market would value them more. That's expected. The framework helps you test positioning hypotheses systematically.
Component 1: Identify Competitive Alternatives
Most product marketers start by analyzing direct competitors—other products that look like theirs. Dunford says start with competitive alternatives instead.
Competitive alternatives are what your best customers would do if your product disappeared tomorrow. For some customers, the alternative is a competitor's product. But often it's:
- An internal tool they build themselves
- A manual process using spreadsheets
- Multiple point solutions duct-taped together
- Simply not solving the problem at all
This matters because your positioning must differentiate against the real alternative customers consider, not against competitors you wish they considered.
Interview your best customers. Ask: "Before you bought our product, how were you handling this? If we disappeared tomorrow, what would you do?"
Their answers reveal your real competition. A customer who says "we'd go back to managing everything in spreadsheets" has different needs than one who says "we'd switch to Competitor X."
Component 2: Isolate Your Unique Attributes
Once you know the competitive alternative, identify what you have that the alternative doesn't.
These aren't features you think are unique. They're capabilities customers confirm are unique when they evaluate alternatives.
Ask customers: "What can you do with our product that you couldn't do with [alternative]?" and "What made you choose us over [alternative]?"
List every unique attribute they mention. You might identify 10-15 items. That's okay. You'll narrow them down later.
Common mistake: listing "better" as a unique attribute. "Better support" or "better UI" aren't unique attributes unless you can point to specific capabilities that enable that superiority.
Actual unique attributes sound like: "Real-time collaboration where five people can edit simultaneously without conflicts" or "Built-in compliance controls that automatically enforce SOC2 requirements."
Component 3: Map Attributes to Value
Features aren't value. Features enable value. This component maps your unique attributes to specific benefits customers care about.
For each unique attribute, ask: "What does this enable customers to do?" and "What outcome does this create?"
Use the "so what?" test. State an attribute. If the customer response would be "so what?", you haven't reached value yet. Keep asking "so what?" until you reach a business outcome or meaningful benefit.
Example chain:
- Attribute: "Real-time co-editing"
- So what? "Multiple people can work on the same document simultaneously"
- So what? "Teams can collaborate without version control issues"
- So what? "Projects get completed 40% faster because there's no back-and-forth on revisions"
That final statement is value. The earlier statements are stepping stones.
For each unique attribute, identify the specific value it creates. You're building a value chain: attributes → capabilities → benefits → business outcomes.
Component 4: Determine Who Cares Most
Not all customers value the same things equally. This component identifies which customer segments care most about your unique value.
Start with your best customers—those with high engagement, short sales cycles, strong retention, and enthusiastic advocacy. What do they have in common?
Look for patterns in:
- Company characteristics: Industry, size, growth stage, business model
- Team characteristics: Technical sophistication, existing tools, team structure
- Situation characteristics: What they were trying to accomplish, constraints they faced, urgency level
The goal is finding segments where your unique value is most valuable. A feature that's "nice to have" for Segment A but "absolutely critical" for Segment B means Segment B is your better target.
Component 5: Choose Your Market Category
Market category is the context you put your product in. It determines what prospects compare you against, what expectations they have, and what alternatives they consider.
The same product can be positioned in different categories:
- Slack could be "team chat," "collaboration platform," or "communication hub"
- HubSpot could be "marketing automation," "CRM," or "growth platform"
- Notion could be "documentation tool," "project management," or "workspace platform"
Each category choice creates different competitive sets and different value expectations.
Choose a category where:
- Your unique attributes are actually unique (not table stakes)
- Your value is highly relevant to category needs
- You can credibly claim to be one of the best options
Sometimes the right category doesn't exist yet and you need to create one. That's category creation, which is expensive and risky. Only do it if you have significant advantages in an existing category and resources to educate the market.
The Positioning Process
Dunford recommends running this as a workshop with cross-functional stakeholders—product marketing, sales, customer success, and product management.
Step 1: Interview 5-10 best customers about alternatives, unique attributes, and value. Bring those insights to the workshop.
Step 2: Map competitive alternatives. What would customers do if you didn't exist?
Step 3: List unique attributes compared to those alternatives.
Step 4: Map attributes to value using the "so what?" test.
Step 5: Identify segments that care most about that value.
Step 6: Determine which market category makes your value most obvious to those segments.
Step 7: Test the positioning with customers and prospects. Does it make your value immediately clear?
The workshop should take 3-4 hours. The real work is the customer research before and validation after.
How to Use This Framework
Once you've defined positioning using this framework, it drives everything:
Messaging: Your messaging hierarchy starts with market category and value, then explains unique attributes that enable that value, and addresses the target segment.
Sales positioning: Sales should open calls by confirming the prospect fits your target market characteristics and faces the problems your unique value solves.
Product roadmap: Prioritize features that strengthen your unique attributes or create new value for your target segments.
Marketing campaigns: Target segments who match your best customer patterns and experience the problems your value solves.
Content strategy: Create content for your target market about their goals and challenges related to your unique value.
Common Mistakes with This Framework
Skipping customer research: You can't run this framework in a conference room. The competitive alternatives, unique attributes, and value must come from real customer conversations.
Choosing attributes customers don't value: An attribute is only valuable if customers confirm it matters to their decision. Don't list attributes you think are cool that customers don't care about.
Targeting everyone: "Any company that wants to grow" isn't a target market. Find the segment where your unique value is most critical, dominate it, then expand.
Picking a category you can't win: Don't position as "CRM" if you're a five-person startup competing with Salesforce. Find a category or sub-category where you can credibly claim leadership.
Treating it as one-time work: Positioning should evolve as your product, market, and competition change. Revisit it every 6-12 months.
When to Use April Dunford's Framework
Use this framework when:
- Your current positioning isn't resonating with prospects
- Sales cycles are long because prospects don't understand your value
- You're launching a genuinely new type of product
- You're repositioning to enter a new market
- Different stakeholders have conflicting views about positioning
This is strategic work. Block dedicated time, involve cross-functional stakeholders, and commit to doing the customer research.
The payoff is positioning that makes your value obvious to the right customers, shortens sales cycles, and gives your entire go-to-market team clarity about who you serve and how you win.