Title: Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It | Author: April Dunford | Year: 2019 | Pages: 224 | Rating: 5/5
Cold Open: The Product That Was Failing Because No One Knew What It Was
Marcus ran a B2B software company. The product was genuinely good — a database management system technically superior to its competitors in several measurable ways. The sales team was competent. The marketing was professional. Website clean, demos polished. The company was growing at about 12% per year, adequate for the category it was competing in. Management was satisfied. Marcus was not, because he kept having a specific conversation with prospects he couldn’t shake: they’d watch a demo, say “that’s impressive,” and then not buy. Ask why, and the answers were vague — “not quite the right fit,” “we’re exploring options,” “timing isn’t great right now.” Not the objections of people who’d seen the product and decided it wasn’t good enough. The deflections of people who weren’t sure what the product was for.
A consultant told Marcus his positioning was wrong. He didn’t fully buy it — his positioning seemed fine to him. He was selling a database management system that was fast, reliable, and reasonably priced. Seemed like clear positioning. The consultant’s counter: that’s a description of the product’s features, not positioning. Positioning tells the customer what context to use when evaluating the product — who it’s for, what problem it solves that nothing else solves as well, and why the customer should care. His product was being evaluated as a generic database management system and losing to established players with more brand recognition. It was actually a specialized analytical database optimized for a specific use case where those established players were genuinely inferior. Wrong battle. Wrong market. Wrong customers.
When Marcus repositioned — changed who he was selling to, changed the competitive frame, changed the way he described the product’s value — revenue grew 87% in eighteen months. Not because the product changed. Because the customers now understood what they were buying and could accurately judge whether it fit their specific problem. The product had been obviously awesome for the right customers the whole time. Nobody had told those customers it existed in their world until the positioning finally got it right.
April Dunford has been the person fixing Marcus’s exact problem for twenty years. Obviously Awesome is the best systematic account she’s produced of how positioning actually works and how to do it correctly.
Straight Talk on Obviously Awesome
Obviously Awesome is the best book on product positioning currently available. Not close. The field has a real problem: most of the writing on positioning is either so abstract it’s useless in practice, or so specific to one product category that it doesn’t generalize. Dunford’s book is neither. Built on twenty years of actually doing the work of repositioning real products in real markets, and the framework it produces is theoretically rigorous and immediately applicable to whatever the specific positioning problem happens to be.
The 224 pages are dense with applicable content. Almost no filler. The examples are real, the exercises specific and well-designed, and the framework complete enough to use without supplementary materials. For anyone building or marketing a product — software, physical, service, any business that has to communicate its value to potential customers — this is the single most important strategic resource available. Read it, do the exercises, and the understanding of a product’s own positioning changes fundamentally.
The one limitation: the examples skew heavily toward B2B software, Dunford’s primary professional context. The framework applies elsewhere, but readers outside that world will have to do some translation work. The principles are universal. The illustrations are narrow.
The Core Idea Behind Obviously Awesome
Dunford’s central claim is that positioning is the foundation everything else in marketing and sales gets built on — and that most companies get it wrong, not from lack of caring but from misunderstanding what it actually is. Most people, thinking about positioning, think about messaging — the words used to describe the product. Dunford argues messaging is downstream of positioning. Positioning answers a prior set of questions: What is the competitive alternative? What is the differentiated value given that alternative? Who are the customers for whom that value matters most? What market category makes the differentiated value obvious? Only after those questions are answered can messaging be designed correctly.
The most important and most counterintuitive insight in the book concerns competitive alternatives. Most companies define their competition as other products in their category — other database management systems, other CRM platforms, other email marketing tools. But the customer’s actual competitive alternative is whatever they’d do if the product didn’t exist — which is often not a competing product at all, but a combination of existing tools, manual processes, or simply not doing the thing. Understanding the real competitive alternative changes everything, because differentiated value is defined relative to that alternative, not to other products in the category.
“Products are like people — they have strengths and weaknesses. Positioning is about understanding which of your strengths matter most to customers and then making that obvious.”
The competitive frame — the market category chosen to compete in — isn’t a description of what the product is. It’s a strategic choice that determines which customers find the product, how they evaluate it, and what alternatives they consider alongside it. A company framing itself as “a CRM” gets evaluated against Salesforce. A company framing itself as “a sales workflow tool for agencies with complex client relationships” gets evaluated against a different, smaller set of alternatives it may be clearly superior to. The category choice determines the competitive context, and the competitive context determines whether the company wins or loses before the customer has even seen the product.
The Breakdown: Dunford’s Five-Component Framework
Component 1: Competitive Alternatives. The first and most important component of positioning. Not “who are your competitors?” but “what would the customer do if your product didn’t exist?” For many B2B products, the honest answer is “they’d use a spreadsheet and email” or “a combination of three different tools.” The competitive alternative sets the baseline differentiated value gets measured against. If the alternative is Salesforce, the product needs to beat Salesforce in ways that matter to the target customer. If the alternative is a spreadsheet, it needs to beat a spreadsheet in ways that matter. Very different competitive positions, even for an identical product.
Component 2: Differentiated Value (Unique Attributes). Given the competitive alternative, what does the product do that the alternative cannot, or cannot do as well? These are the unique attributes — not unique features in the sense of specific specs, but unique capabilities that produce real value for a specific customer. This list is usually shorter than companies want it to be. Most features aren’t differentiating — they’re table stakes any product in the category has to have. The genuine differentiators are the ones customers can’t get elsewhere and actually need. Finding them requires honest comparison to the real competitive alternative, not the ideal one.
Component 3: Value Themes (What the Attributes Enable). Unique attributes produce value, but the value isn’t always self-evident. A database that processes queries 10x faster than the alternative is a unique attribute. The value that attribute produces — running analyses in real time instead of overnight, iterating on models during a meeting instead of between meetings, giving customers immediate answers instead of follow-up emails — is what customers actually care about. The value theme translates the attribute into the outcome the customer experiences. Most positioning mistakes happen right here: companies describe their attributes without connecting them to the value those attributes produce.
Component 4: Target Market Characteristics. Not all customers value the same attributes equally. The specific characteristics of the customers for whom the differentiated value matters most — the characteristics making that value more relevant to them than to anyone else — define the target market. The best customers aren’t just the ones who buy. They’re the ones who buy, succeed with the product, and tell others about it, because the value the product provides is most relevant to their specific situation. Understanding what makes those customers specifically different from other potential customers gives the filter for finding more of them.
Component 5: Market Category. The category used to describe the product sets the competitive frame. Tells customers what to compare it to, what assumptions to bring, what evaluation criteria to use. The category choice is strategic — a choice about which competitive frame makes the differentiated value most obvious. A product positioned as “a database” gets evaluated against Oracle and Postgres. The same product positioned as “a real-time analytics engine for customer-facing teams” gets evaluated against a completely different set of alternatives, and may be obviously superior in that specific competitive context. The category choice isn’t just marketing language. It’s a decision about which market to exist in and which customers get to find you.
The optional sixth component: Relevant Trends. If the positioning can connect to a significant market trend — a technological shift, a regulatory change, an industry transition — that makes the urgency of the solution obvious, this can strengthen the positioning considerably. Optional, because not every product has a relevant trend, and trend-based positioning can go stale when the trend shifts. But when it’s genuinely available and accurate, it adds the “why now” dimension that makes positioning more urgent and more compelling.
What Obviously Awesome Gets Right
The competitive alternative insight is the single most practically important thing in the book. Realizing that the actual competition is often not another company’s product but a combination of existing tools, manual processes, or plain status quo behavior — and that this realization changes the entire positioning — is worth the price of the book on its own. Most companies define competition the way investors define it: who else is in this space. Dunford defines it the way customers define it: what would I actually do if this didn’t exist. Different questions. More useful answers.
The distinction between attributes and value is essential, and consistently neglected. Product teams love features. Sales teams love features. Marketing teams describe features. Customers don’t care about features — they care what the features do for them. The translation from “our product processes queries 10x faster” (attribute) to “your analysts can answer questions in meetings instead of by email” (value) is the specific translation most companies perform badly, and Dunford provides the clearest available framework for doing it systematically.
The process for identifying best-fit customers is directly applicable. Dunford’s method — starting from the customers who succeed most dramatically with the product and working backward to figure out what makes them specifically different from everyone else — beats the standard demographic/firmographic segmentation most companies rely on. It produces segments defined by behavioral and situational characteristics rather than category membership, which is more predictive of fit and more useful for targeting.
The market category as strategic choice is a powerful reframe. Most companies think of their market category as a description of what they are. Dunford’s insight: it’s a strategic choice about which competitive frame best serves the differentiated value. Permission to choose the category rather than inherit it is genuinely liberating for companies stuck fighting an unfavorable competitive battle because they’ve accepted someone else’s framing of what they are.
Where Obviously Awesome Falls Short
The B2B software examples narrow the accessible application. The framework is universal, but the examples are predominantly B2B software, which means readers in other categories — physical products, consumer services, professional services, non-profits — need to do significant translation work to apply it. A parallel set of examples from other categories would make the book more broadly accessible without lengthening it much.
The framework is thorough, but the process for discovering the inputs is underspecified. Dunford gives a clear framework for what the components of positioning are and how they fit together. She’s somewhat less specific about how to discover the competitive alternatives, unique attributes, and best-fit customer characteristics when you don’t already know them — particularly for early-stage companies without enough customer data to spot patterns. The qualitative research processes that generate the positioning inputs get described but not fully specified.
The organizational change dimension is touched on but not fully addressed. Dunford acknowledges that repositioning requires organizational alignment — sales, marketing, product, and executives all need to understand and commit to the new positioning for it to work. The challenge of achieving and maintaining that alignment, often the hardest part of repositioning for real companies with entrenched teams and existing customers, gets less attention than the strategic positioning work itself.
The DUNFORD Protocol: Positioning That Makes Your Value Obvious
Dunford’s five-component framework, implemented as an operational sequence — the DUNFORD Protocol:
- D — Define the real competitive alternative. Not “who else sells products like ours” but “what would a customer actually do if we didn’t exist?” Interview the best customers. Ask directly: before us, how did you handle this problem? What’s the realistic alternative for a prospect who decides not to buy? The answers are often surprising, and almost always more specific than “our competitors.”
- U — Uncover the unique attributes. Given the actual competitive alternative, what does the product do that the alternative genuinely cannot? Filter ruthlessly. Table stakes — features any product in the category must have — are not differentiators. The genuine differentiators are the capabilities that produce value the alternative can’t. This list is usually shorter than expected.
- N — Name the value each attribute produces. For each genuine differentiator, translate from attribute to customer outcome. Not “our query processing is 10x faster” but “your team can make decisions in meetings rather than waiting until morning.” Customer value is what motivates purchase. The attribute is just the mechanism. Most positioning talks about the mechanism. The best positioning talks about the outcome.
- F — Find the customers for whom the value matters most. Starting from the best existing customers — the ones who succeed most dramatically, renew most reliably, refer most consistently — identify the specific situational and behavioral characteristics that make them good fits. Not just “companies with 50-500 employees” but “companies with 50-500 employees running customer-facing analytics teams currently juggling three or more disconnected data tools.” The more specific the best-fit profile, the more useful it is for targeting and positioning both.
- O — Optimize the market category choice. Which competitive frame makes the differentiated value most obvious to the best-fit customers? There’s no requirement to stay locked into the current category. Consider alternatives: a sub-category, a different adjacent category, a new category defined from scratch. The right category is the one where a company can be “obviously awesome” rather than “pretty good among many.”
- R — Run the positioning through the go-to-market. Positioning is not a marketing document. It’s the foundation for every customer-facing decision: which channels reach the best-fit customers, how leads get qualified, what gets said in sales conversations, what the pricing strategy signals about the category, how demos get structured. Positioning that lives in a document and never changes actual go-to-market decisions hasn’t been implemented at all.
- D — Decide on the trend layer. Is there a genuine, significant market trend making the value the product provides more urgent right now than it was two years ago? If yes, how does that get incorporated into the positioning without overstating it or becoming trend-dependent? If the answer’s unclear, leave it out. Trend-based positioning that goes stale is worse than trend-neutral positioning that stays accurate.
Key Lessons from Obviously Awesome
- Positioning is the foundation, not the frosting. Messaging, content, sales scripts, go-to-market strategy — all downstream of positioning. Get positioning wrong and all of it gets worse. Get it right and all of it gets better. Almost every other marketing or sales problem is, at root, a positioning problem.
- Competitive alternatives define the battlefield. Customers will place a product in a context whether or not the company chooses it deliberately. Leave that choice undefined and they’ll default to a context that may not serve the differentiated value at all. The choice of competitive frame is a strategic decision that determines the fight.
- Best customers are the source of best positioning. The specific characteristics of the customers who succeed most with the product, told as their actual success story, is typically the most accurate positioning available. It reveals the value actually being delivered and to whom — more reliable than any abstract positioning exercise.
- Features don’t sell. Value does. The translation from attribute (what the product does) to value (what that enables for the customer) is the most consistently under-performed step in positioning — and the one with the highest payoff. Customers buy outcomes, not specifications.
- Category choice is not a description of what you are. It is a strategic choice about who you compete with. There’s no obligation to compete in the category a product most obviously belongs to, if that category is one where the value isn’t obvious. The category that makes differentiated value most visible to the best-fit customers is the right category — even when it requires creating or reframing one.
- Positioning is a living document, not a one-time exercise. Markets change, competitors change, customer needs evolve. Positioning accurate two years ago may be suboptimal today. Regularly returning to the positioning questions — particularly the competitive alternative and best-fit customer questions — is the maintenance practice that keeps positioning current and effective.
Books Similar to Obviously Awesome
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore — The classic framework for technology product market entry, focused on the transition from early adopters to mainstream market. Moore’s technology adoption lifecycle gives the broader strategic context Dunford’s positioning framework operates within. Essential companion reading for B2B technology companies especially.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick — The best available guide to the customer discovery process that generates the inputs Dunford’s positioning framework requires. Dunford tells you what to do with customer insights; Fitzpatrick tells you how to get customer insights that are actually useful rather than misleading. Read both: Fitzpatrick supplies the research methodology, Dunford the strategic framework.
Play Bigger by Al Ramadan et al. — The most systematic available treatment of Dunford’s category creation concept, expanded into a full strategic framework. More ambitious, more conceptual than Dunford, less immediately practical. Useful for companies with the resources and ambition to define a new market category rather than compete in an existing one.
Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen — Christensen’s Jobs-to-Be-Done framework supplies the customer psychology foundation for Dunford’s competitive alternative analysis. Understanding what “job” a customer is “hiring” a product to do is a different, complementary framing to Dunford’s competitive alternative question, and the two together produce a more complete picture of the customer’s decision-making context.
Influence by Robert Cialdini — The psychology of how context shapes perception, the underlying mechanism that makes positioning work at all. Dunford shows what positioning to create. Cialdini explains why the right context so powerfully determines how customers evaluate what they see. Practice and science, same underlying principle.
Who Should Read Obviously Awesome
Read Obviously Awesome if you sell any product or service that requires customers to understand its value before they can buy it — which covers essentially all products and services that aren’t pure commodities. If customers routinely say “that sounds interesting, let me think about it” and then disappear, or if conversion rates run lower than satisfaction rates would predict, that’s a positioning problem, and this book is the framework for solving it.
Read it as a founder who’s built something and is struggling to explain it to investors, customers, or partners in a way that makes the value immediately obvious. Dunford’s framework supplies the vocabulary and the process for the explanation the product deserves but hasn’t yet found.
Read it as a marketer handed a product and told to “make it grow” without a clear positioning brief. The book supplies the process for developing that positioning from scratch, using the company’s existing customers as the primary research source.
Read it as a salesperson losing deals that should be wins — where the customer likes the product but “just doesn’t quite see the fit.” Those losses are almost always positioning failures, and understanding positioning gives both the diagnostic framework and the specific conversational tools to address it.
Read it while building something new, to establish a strong market position before having to fight for it. Positioning established early, with time to be thoughtful and flexibility to choose the competitive frame, is dramatically easier and cheaper than repositioning later, once there are entrenched customers, salespeople who’ve learned a specific pitch, and a market that already has a mental model of what the company is.
Integration: Running the Dunford Process
The most direct implementation is running the positioning exercise Dunford describes, starting with competitive alternative discovery. The process: identify the five to ten best customers — the ones who renew most reliably, refer most actively, and describe the product most enthusiastically. Schedule thirty-minute calls with each. Ask: before our product, how did you handle this problem? What would you do if it didn’t exist today? What made you choose us over what you were doing before? Listen for patterns across all the conversations. The competitive alternatives that surface are the starting point for everything else.
Second step: the attribute filter. For each competitive alternative identified, list the capabilities of the product the alternative genuinely cannot match. Apply the filter ruthlessly: table stakes (things the alternative can also do) are not differentiators. Whatever survives the filter is the genuine differentiated value. For many companies this list turns out shorter than expected, and the shortness is itself useful — it says exactly what to protect, develop, and lead with.
Third step: the value translation workshop. For each differentiated capability, spend thirty minutes with a cross-functional team asking: what does this let the customer do that they couldn’t before? What does that mean for their business? What does it mean for the person using it day-to-day? The translation from technical capability to customer outcome is the work most companies skip, and it’s where the most compelling positioning language actually gets generated. Best done by a combination of the product person who understands the capability and the customer-facing person who’s heard customers describe what the capability means to them.
The category choice is the final and most strategically important decision in the exercise. Given everything now known about the differentiated value and the best-fit customers, in which competitive frame is that value most obvious and most compelling? A decision with significant downstream consequences — it determines which analysts write about the company, which sales tools get built, which conferences get attended, which other companies it gets compared to. Make it deliberately, with full understanding of the tradeoffs, not by default or by inheritance from however the company happened to start.
What People Ask About Obviously Awesome Summary
How is positioning different from messaging?
Messaging is how the positioning gets expressed in specific words and phrases for specific audiences and channels. Positioning is the underlying strategic decisions that determine what the messaging should say: what competitive frame you’re in, what differentiated value you provide, who the best-fit customers are. Positioning is the foundation; messaging is the construction built on it. Good messaging can express bad positioning, and the resulting communication will be clear and compelling and still fail to win customers because the competitive frame is wrong. Most marketing problems that look like messaging problems are actually positioning problems.
Can you have multiple positions for different customer segments?
Yes, with specific conditions. Dunford addresses this directly: genuinely different customer segments with different competitive alternatives and different value propositions may need segment-specific positioning. The danger is creating so many positions that the organization can’t execute any of them consistently. General principle: start with one core positioning that captures the primary market, then develop segment-specific variations only with evidence a segment is large enough and distinct enough to warrant it.
How do you know when your positioning is wrong?
The clearest signals: customers who seem interested but don’t convert; prospects asking “how are you different from X” where X isn’t seen as the primary competition; customers succeeding with the product in a use case that wasn’t being targeted; sales cycles that consistently stall at the “value justification” stage; and the specific pattern Marcus ran into — customers who like the product but “don’t quite see the fit.” Any of these suggests the competitive frame in use doesn’t make the differentiated value obvious to the customers who’d benefit most.
How often should you revisit your positioning?
Dunford recommends a formal positioning review whenever a key input changes significantly: the competitive landscape shifts substantially (a major new competitor enters, a major existing one exits or pivots), the product adds capabilities that could meaningfully differentiate against new alternatives, a new customer segment emerges performing significantly better than the current primary one, or win/loss patterns shift in ways that suggest the competitive frame has moved. As a default, annual reviews are reasonable for most companies in relatively stable markets. Faster-moving markets need more frequent review.
What is the relationship between positioning and pricing?
Strong. The category chosen sets the pricing expectations. A product positioned as “a database” gets evaluated against database pricing expectations. The same product positioned as “a real-time analytics engine” gets evaluated against analytics platform pricing expectations, often substantially higher. Positioning that makes differentiated value obvious to customers who genuinely need it also enables pricing that captures more of that value. Companies underpriced relative to the value they provide are often companies whose positioning fails to make that value sufficiently obvious.
One final note on implementation: the biggest obstacle to good positioning isn’t analytical difficulty. It’s organizational politics. The sales team has been telling a specific story to customers and built their pitch around it. The marketing team has created content around the current positioning and resists changing it. The product team is attached to features that don’t appear prominently in the repositioned value proposition. Executives have made public statements about what the company is and don’t want to appear to contradict themselves. None of these obstacles have anything to do with whether the new positioning is better. They’re about the organizational cost of change, which is real, and which Dunford acknowledges without fully addressing. Anyone implementing a major repositioning inside an existing organization should expect the change management to take as long as the strategic positioning work itself, and plan accordingly. The positioning process generates the right answer. The change management process installs it. Both required.
Twenty years of positioning work inform this book, and they produce one durable insight underlying everything Dunford writes: a product cannot speak for itself. A product that’s technically superior, functionally excellent, and genuinely more valuable than its alternatives can lose to inferior alternatives consistently, because the customers evaluating it don’t know what context to use. Positioning solves exactly this problem — the deliberate creation of the context that makes a product’s value obvious to the customers who need it most. Done well, it makes the sales process easier, the marketing more efficient, the product development more focused, and the company’s strategy more coherent. Done poorly, or not at all, it makes everything harder. Marcus’s 12% growth and his vague non-objections from prospects are available to any company with a good product and bad positioning. So is the 87% growth after repositioning. The difference is the work in this book.
Related: Between a Rock and a Hard Place Summary
Related: The Way of the SEAL Summary
Related: MONEY Master the Game Summary
Related: Lord of the Flies Summary
The Practical Framework: Applying Obviously Awesome Summary In Real Life
References
Editorial StandardsCorrectionsMedical DisclaimerAbout Our ContentAffiliate DisclosureSite Map