Positioning is the choice of context a buyer places a product in, and messaging is what carries that choice outside the company. Al Ries and Jack Trout named the idea in a series of articles in Advertising Age in April 1972 and expanded it into the book Positioning in 1981. Their argument was that the position itself sits in the buyer's memory, so all a company chooses is what to offer that memory. April Dunford gave the working form most product teams use now in Obviously Awesome in 2019. The reference category a buyer files the product under decides the criteria the product gets judged on, and most companies arrive at that category by accident. Choosing it deliberately falls to the product manager.
The sections below set out where positioning came from and the five components a positioning document holds. The reference category comes next, then the messages written from the document for one audience at a time. The last three sections take the argument against differentiation as a goal and the two checks that hold a document to evidence. The page ends with where each syllabus puts the material.
Where positioning came from
Ries and Trout were writing about advertising in a market they already considered full of messages. They argued that a buyer keeps a short ordered list for each category and will not keep a longer one. The work is therefore to take a place on a list that already exists in somebody's head. A company cannot award itself a position. The most a company can do is offer a context, which the buyer either accepts or replaces with one of their own.
Since 1981 the work has moved into different hands. Positioning arrived as a discipline for advertising agencies buying broadcast time, and it reaches product managers now for two reasons. The document that sets the position has to exist before the team decides what to build, since the claims it makes are claims somebody then has to deliver. And a company that cannot explain itself the same way twice loses deals it never hears about. A buyer who leaves an evaluation confused rarely says so.
The five components of a positioning document
April Dunford set out five components in 2019, with a sixth she treats as optional. The order is the point, because each component comes from the one above it.
April Dunford put the five components in this order in 2019, because each one is derived from the one above it. A document that starts at the category has chosen a context first and then gone looking for evidence that fits it.
Dunford adds relevant trends as a sixth component and qualifies it at once. A product described mainly by the trend it sits inside has borrowed its credibility, and it loses that credibility when the trend passes. The five components above stand on their own. A team that can fill all five from customer evidence has a document, and a team that can fill only the middle three has a feature list with a heading on it.
The reference category a buyer places the product in
Naming the category is the choice that matters most in the document, and in most companies it is the one made least deliberately. A category is the set of criteria a buyer applies, the list of vendors that buyer asks for and the budget line the purchase comes out of.
The field service product from earlier in the course is the example. Its strategy rested on a finding that two visits in five end without a repair, because the engineer arrived without the right part. Three categories are available to it, and each one changes the conversation.
Called field service management software, the product is compared against established suites on scheduling, mobile applications and invoicing, and the parts finding becomes one row in a grid of forty. Called van stock management, it is bought by a depot manager with a small budget and judged on stock accuracy. Called a first time fix system, it is judged on the measure the finding was about, and the buyer becomes the service director who already reports that measure to a board. Only the first time fix category puts that finding at the centre of the evaluation, and that is the whole argument for choosing it.
Geoffrey Moore published the form most teams still use for writing this down, in Crossing the Chasm in 1991. The statement names the target customer, the need, the category, the key benefit, the primary alternative and the difference against it. All six have to be settled before the form can be filled in. Doing that for the field service product produces something a salesperson can say out loud. For service directors losing a fifth of engineer capacity to repeat visits, the product is a first time fix system that puts the right part on the van before the engineer leaves. Unlike a scheduling suite, it works from the parts history of the equipment already installed.
Messages written for one audience at a time
Once the document exists, messages are written for each audience separately. The product and the underlying claims stay the same. The emphasis and the evidence change.
| Audience | What they judge on | What counts as proof | What loses them |
|---|---|---|---|
| The person who signs | The business consequence, on the horizon their budget covers | A figure from a comparable organisation, with the method behind it | A description of how the product works |
| The technical evaluator | How it works, what it costs to run and what happens when it breaks | Architecture, a security review, the failure modes named honestly | A claim with no mechanism underneath it |
| The person who uses it | What changes in the first week | A short demonstration of the task they perform most often | Anything about return on investment |
Gartner's 2017 survey of business buyers put a buying group for a complex purchase at six to ten decision makers, each arriving with four or five pieces of information they had gathered for themselves. That figure explains why one message aimed at everybody fails. A message has to survive being relayed by somebody who was never in the room, to a colleague with a different job and a different worry. That is a harder test than being persuasive on first contact.
The argument against differentiation as a goal
Everything above assumes that a buyer notices a difference and acts on it. Byron Sharp and the marketing science group at the University of South Australia dispute that assumption. In How Brands Grow in 2010, Sharp argued that buyers perceive very little difference between brands in a category. The useful goal, he argued, is distinctiveness, which means being recognised quickly from assets a buyer already associates with the brand. On that account, money spent making a product seem meaningfully different is spent on something buyers do not register.
The disagreement comes down to which purchase each side is describing. Sharp's evidence comes from repeat purchase data in large consumer categories such as soft drinks, banking and packaged groceries, where a buyer chooses in seconds from memory and has bought the category hundreds of times. Dunford's method addresses business software, where a committee writes a requirements document, runs a trial and tells the losing vendor why. A product manager selling to a committee is in the business software situation, and the honest concession to Sharp is that recognition still has to come first. Nobody evaluates a product they have never heard of.
The two checks that hold a document to evidence
Whichever of the two situations a product is in, the document has to stay attached to evidence, and it drifts towards whatever the product team shipped most recently. Two checks hold it in place, and both are cheap enough to run every quarter.
- Every claim traces to a market problem somebody validated, with the evidence attached.
- Every claim is one a customer would recognise as a description of their own situation, in words they would use.
Win and loss interviews supply the real list of competitive alternatives, which routinely differs from the list the company assumes. Claims that survive only inside the building are the ones a sales team quietly stops using, and a deck nobody opens is usually the first visible sign that a claim has come loose from its evidence.
The strategy now stands complete. It has been chosen, tested, funded, sequenced, measured, explained inside the organisation and presented outside it. All of it assumes the choices were the right ones. The results that would settle that question arrive later than anybody wants.
Where each syllabus puts it
The Pragmatic Framework places Positioning in its Planning category, beside Buyer Experience, Buyer Personas, User Personas, Requirements, Use Scenarios and Stakeholder Communications. The instruction there is to describe the product by its ability to solve market problems, and to create internal positioning documents used to develop external messages focused on each key buyer or persona. The Foundations course teaches it alongside the Market category and market definition, so a Pragmatic PMC candidate meets positioning as the output of discovery rather than as a campaign.
The Product Strategy Practitioner course puts positioning at the end, once the strategy has been written, funded, sequenced and explained internally. The document is the same document. Every claim in it has to trace back to a choice the strategy made, so a positioning statement that contradicts the strategy is evidence about the strategy itself.