Positioning: The Choice You Make Before the Market Does

There’s a specific kind of demo that taught me what positioning actually is, and it wasn’t a good demo. We were showing a genuinely capable product — analytics for operations teams — and about four minutes in, the prospect leaned back and said, “so this is like a BI tool?” And the founder, who was driving the demo, said “no, not exactly,” and then spent six minutes explaining what it wasn’t. We lost the room in those six minutes. Not because the product was wrong, but because the prospect had reached for a shelf to put us on, we’d slapped the shelf away, and we’d offered nothing to replace it. People can’t evaluate a thing they can’t categorize. They don’t try harder — they just stop.

That’s the core insight I eventually got from April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome, and it reframed positioning for me from “marketing’s problem” to a product decision that sits at the strategy layer of the cascade: positioning is deliberately choosing the context that makes your strengths obvious. The same product, described in two different market categories, gets evaluated against two entirely different sets of competitors, expectations, and price anchors. That choice is happening whether you make it or not.

Dunford’s five components, and why the order is the whole trick

Dunford’s framework has five components, and — like Playing to Win in the strategy post — the sequence matters more than any individual piece:

1. Competitive alternatives — what customers would actually do if you didn’t exist. Not who you think your competitors are: what the customer would really use, which is very often a spreadsheet, an intern, or nothing.
2. Unique attributes — the capabilities you have that the alternatives don’t.
3. Value — what those attributes actually enable for the customer, in the customer’s terms.
4. Target segment — the customers who care intensely about that value, not mildly.
5. Market category — the shelf: the context you declare, which triggers all the assumptions the customer will make about you.

The trick is that most teams start at step five — “we’re a CRM,” “we’re an AI platform” — and work backwards, inheriting a category’s competitors and expectations before asking whether that context flatters them. Dunford’s order forces the opposite: you don’t get to pick the shelf until you know what you’re uniquely good at and who desperately cares. The category is the output of positioning, not the input.

The case where this earned its keep for me: a product that had been positioned as “project management for agencies” and was losing every deal to tools with ten times the feature surface. Running the exercise honestly, the competitive alternative for our best customers wasn’t another PM tool at all — it was the account manager’s memory plus a Friday-afternoon status email. Our unique attribute wasn’t task tracking; it was that the client could see status without anyone writing the email. Repositioned as client-facing reporting — a shelf where our thin feature set was complete instead of lacking — the same product stopped losing feature-checklist battles it had been voluntarily entering. Nothing about the product changed. The context did.

The three category plays

Once you’re at step five, Dunford names three moves, and knowing which one you’re making keeps the decision honest:

Compete head-on in an existing category. Cheapest to explain, most expensive to win — you inherit the category’s expectations wholesale, so you’d better genuinely beat the incumbent at the category’s own game. Most teams believe they’re doing this with a better product; most are actually doing it with a comparable product and better hopes. Even an incumbent’s resources don’t change that math — Figma versus Adobe XD is the reference case for what losing a category head-on actually looks like.

Subsegment an existing category. “CRM, but for construction.” You keep the category’s instant comprehension and shed most of its competitors, at the price of a smaller pond. This is the play I’ve recommended most often, because it’s the one that lets a small team’s narrowness read as focus instead of immaturity.

Create a new category. The glamorous one, and the one I now treat as a red flag when it’s the first instinct rather than the last resort. Category creation means paying to educate a market that wasn’t asking, for years, before anyone can even evaluate you — it worked for Salesforce and HubSpot, and those two examples have financed a thousand failed imitations. Slack pulled it off too, and the “we don’t sell saddles” story is the best account I know of doing it deliberately rather than by accident. The tell: if your “new category” is mostly your product’s name with “-ops” or “intelligence” appended, you’re not creating a category, you’re avoiding a comparison you’d lose.

The older tools, and where they still fit

Positioning didn’t start with Dunford, and two older tools still earn a place. Geoffrey Moore’s fill-in-the-blank positioning statement from Crossing the Chasm — for [target] who [need], [product] is a [category] that [key benefit]; unlike [alternative], we [differentiator] — is a compression format, not a discovery process. It’s where you record the answer once Dunford’s process has produced one; teams that start with the template just fill it with wishes in grammatical order. And Osterwalder’s Value Proposition Canvas — customer jobs, pains, gains on one side; your pain-relievers and gain-creators on the other — is the bridge between the discovery work in the discovery post and positioning: it forces the “value” component to be stated in the customer’s terms rather than as a feature list read aloud with enthusiasm.

The trap in the whole positioning exercise: it produces a document, and the document is not the positioning. Positioning only exists where it’s operationalized — the sales deck, the pricing page, the demo script, the category you claim in the first sentence of the website. I’ve watched a team run a genuinely excellent two-day positioning workshop, converge on a sharp answer, and then change nothing downstream of the workshop doc. Six months later the sales team was still selling the old category, because nobody had rebuilt the deck. Positioning that doesn’t reach the demo is a shared hallucination with good production values. (The operationalizing is where two later posts pick up: the sales room, where the position gets spoken aloud against real alternatives, and marketing, where it becomes the messaging house every launch traces back to.)

There’s also a decay problem nobody warns you about: positioning has a shelf life, because the competitive alternatives shift under you. The “spreadsheet and a status email” alternative that made our reporting product look complete eventually became “the AI assistant that drafts the status email,” and the position needed rework — not because we got worse, but because the shelf moved. Like the Kano classifications and Wardley maps earlier in this series, a positioning done once and cited forever is quietly wrong within a couple of years.

Put it to work

1. Ask five customers the alternative question. Not “who do you compare us to” — ask “what would you actually do next Monday if we shut down?” If the answers are mostly manual processes and spreadsheets rather than the competitors on your battlecard, your positioning is fighting the wrong war, and probably a harder one than necessary.
2. Run the shelf test on your own homepage. Show your homepage to someone smart who’s never seen the product, for thirty seconds, and ask what category it’s in and what they’d expect it to cost. If their answer surprises you, the market’s answer is surprising you too — you just don’t get to watch it happen.
3. Trace the workshop to the demo. If you’ve done positioning work before, pull up the positioning doc and this month’s actual sales deck side by side, and count the divergences. Every slide still selling the old context is a decision the workshop made and nobody executed.

Further reading

• April Dunford, Obviously Awesome — short, practical, and the source of the five components; her follow-up Sales Pitch covers the deck the positioning should turn into.
• Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm — the positioning statement template, and the segment-beachhead logic that still underlies most B2B go-to-market.
• Al Ries & Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind — the 1981 original; dated examples, but the core claim (positioning happens in the customer’s head, not your deck) is the whole field in one sentence.