Obviously Awesome

Positioning is the market context that lets the right customer understand why a product is valuable. April Dunford’s central argument in Obviously Awesome is that many products fail to sell clearly not because they lack differentiation, but because customers are being asked to understand them through the wrong comparison, the wrong category, or a pile of features without a frame. A tagline can express positioning, and messaging can carry it into sales and marketing, but positioning itself is the strategic choice of where the product sits in the customer’s mind.

The hard part is that a product can often be framed several plausible ways. It might look like a cheaper version of an established tool, a specialized version of a broad platform, a replacement for a spreadsheet, or the first instance of a new category. Traditional positioning statements tend to assume the team already knows the correct market, competitors, value, and customer. Dunford’s method starts earlier. It asks what context makes the product’s strongest value easiest for the best customers to see.

Value appears only against an alternative

Dunford begins with competitive alternatives because customers do not evaluate products in isolation. A product is faster, easier, safer, or more complete only compared with what the customer would otherwise use or do. That alternative may be another vendor, but it may also be a spreadsheet, a manual process, hiring someone, or doing nothing. The real alternative is not the competitor a founder fears most; it is the fallback that appears in the customer’s actual decision.

This distinction changes the whole positioning exercise. If a team assumes it is competing against an ambitious startup that customers are not considering, it will emphasize differences that do not matter in the deal. If customers would otherwise use a spreadsheet, the meaningful value may be automation, collaboration, accuracy, or control. If customers are replacing a large enterprise system, the meaningful value may be speed, simplicity, or focus. The same product can look weak or strong depending on the comparison set.

Dunford uses the example of startups naming obscure competitors while customers say they would use a spreadsheet or hire an intern if the product disappeared. The point is not that spreadsheets and interns are always competitors. The point is that customer behavior reveals the frame the product must displace. Positioning against phantom competitors spreads attention across threats that may be strategically interesting but do not explain why the buyer should act now.

Starting with alternatives also prevents empty differentiation. A feature is not unique in the abstract. It is unique relative to the customer’s current choice. Once the team knows what the customer would otherwise do, it can ask which attributes the product has that those alternatives lack. That sequence keeps positioning grounded in the customer’s world rather than the company’s preferred story.

Differentiation must be translated into customer value

Unique attributes are the product’s raw material: capabilities, features, integrations, expertise, workflows, relationships, or technical properties that alternatives do not have. Dunford is careful to separate attributes from value. A team may want to say the product is easier to use, but ease is not an attribute unless the team can name the mechanism that creates it. The product might automate a step, remove a dependency, reduce configuration, preserve context, or make a workflow visible. Without the mechanism, the claim is just marketing language.

Attributes still do not sell themselves. Customers buy outcomes, not isolated properties. Dunford’s method asks teams to group attributes into a small number of value themes: the business or operational results that make the product worth choosing. A long feature list leaves the buyer to do the work of interpretation. Value themes explain what the features add up to.

The book’s early database example shows the chain. Dunford describes a product that struggled when positioned as a Microsoft Access competitor. Customer interviews revealed that a specific group of users valued it because it let mobile sales or field-service teams work with SQL databases away from the office and sync later. The relevant strength was not generic database functionality. It was the ability to support mobile, offline SQL use with synchronization.

Reframing the product as an embeddable database for mobile devices changed the comparison and made the value visible. The product did not become more capable at that moment. The context became more accurate. This is the book’s practical insight: positioning can reveal existing value that poor framing has hidden, but it cannot create value the product does not deliver. Proof has to sit beside the value claim, whether that proof comes from customer use, performance, implementation experience, or another credible source.

The best customer is the one who cares most

Dunford puts target customers after value because the best segment is not simply the biggest available market. It is the group that cares intensely about the value the product uniquely delivers. This reverses a common mistake: choosing a broad market because it looks attractive, then trying to make the product’s differentiation sound relevant to everyone in it.

A useful segment is recognizable by a situation, environment, constraint, behavior, or need that makes the differentiated value matter. If a product’s advantage is only mildly useful to a large audience, that audience may be reachable but weak. If the same advantage solves a sharp problem for a narrower group, that group may be the right starting point. Positioning is not about shrinking ambition for its own sake; it is about finding the context where strength becomes obvious.

Dunford’s CRM example illustrates this. A company competing as generic enterprise CRM against Siebel struggled to explain why it mattered. A relationship-modeling capability resonated strongly with investment bankers. Repositioning as CRM for investment banks avoided a losing head-to-head frame and made the capability central. In the broad CRM market, the company looked like a smaller generalist. In the investment-banking context, its special capability became a reason to care.

The qualification is important: a narrow position helps only when the narrowed context increases relevance. “Big fish in a small pond” works when the small pond is defined by customers who care about the value, not when it is a cosmetic niche. If no reachable group cares deeply about the claimed differentiation, the positioning exercise may reveal a product or market problem rather than a messaging problem.

Category choice controls the assumptions customers bring

Market category is the frame of reference that tells customers what kind of thing they are evaluating. It carries assumptions about expected features, competitors, users, budgets, implementation, and price. A good category lets customers borrow existing knowledge so they can understand the product quickly. A bad category forces the company to fight assumptions before it can explain value.

Dunford describes several category moves. A company can compete head-to-head in an existing category, which is easy for customers to understand but often favors leaders or strong challengers. It can narrow or qualify an existing category, which is often useful when a product is especially strong for a specific use case or segment. Or it can attempt to create a new category, which may be necessary when no existing frame points toward the product’s value, but is risky because customers must learn the category before the category can help them buy.

The practical decision rule is conservative: start with a category customers already understand, then change it only when that category hides the product’s differentiated value. If the current category makes the value obvious, use it. If it creates a losing comparison or buries the strongest attributes, qualify it, narrow it, or consider an adjacent category. Create a new category only when existing frames do more harm than good.

Trends are a different lever. AI, cloud, GDPR, blockchain, or DevOps can make a problem feel timely, but a trend is not the same as a market category. A category is something customers buy; a trend explains why a need matters now. Dunford’s Redgate example shows the productive version: the database tools company noticed GDPR and DevOps conversations among customers and developed a database DevOps point of view that connected its product suite to an urgent market conversation. The trend strengthened the positioning because it sat at the intersection of product strength, category, and customer concern. Detached from that connection, a trend can make the message less credible, not more.

The sequence matters because each choice changes the next

The five elements of positioning are interdependent. If the team begins with a slogan, it may polish confusion. If it begins with a desired category, it may inherit the wrong competitors. If it begins with a target market, it may chase customers who do not care about the product’s real strengths. Dunford’s method works because each step constrains the next one.

A compact version of the procedure is:

1. Identify what the best customers would use or do if the product did not exist.
2. List the attributes the product has that those alternatives lack.
3. Convert those attributes into a small number of value themes, with proof.
4. Identify the customers who care most about those value themes and can be recognized.
5. Choose the market category that makes the value easiest to understand, adding a relevant trend only when it clarifies urgency.

This is why positioning belongs to the company, not only to marketing. Sales sees which alternatives appear in deals. Product understands the mechanisms behind differentiation. Customer-facing teams know why satisfied customers stay. Leadership has to commit because the position affects roadmap, pricing, sales narrative, and market focus. If marketing writes one story while sales explains another, the company has not positioned the product; it has produced disconnected collateral.

The method is strongest for B2B startups and complex products, where buyers need help understanding alternatives, value, and category. It can inform other contexts, but it should not be inflated into a universal consumer-brand formula. Its force comes from clarifying a considered purchase: what this product is, what it replaces, why its differences matter, and who should care most.

The practical consequence is simple. When prospects are confused, do not start by rewriting the tagline. Start by asking what they are comparing you to, what you can do that those alternatives cannot, what value that difference creates, who feels that value most urgently, and what category makes the answer obvious. Positioning is the discipline of arranging those answers so the right customers can see the product the way its happiest customers already do.