Positioning for tech companies. Author of the best-selling books Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch.
I had a great conversation this week with a team that was thinking about company positioning vs product positioning. Here's my thinking on this: In single-product companies, company positioning equals product positioning. Trying to force a separation is both expensive and potentially confusing to the market. Research in Motion's positioning wasn't well understood beyond Blackberry and it confused the market. When(if!) you launch a second product, you can stretch the company positioning to accommodate it. There are many examples of great single-product companies where company=product. Pre-Salesforce Slack, Canva, Twilio, etc. When you have multiple products you have choices in how you position the company vs those products. In large companies with many products, the positioning is often cascading. The company is positioned as delivering the sum of the value of all of the products. For example - when I was at IBM we positioned the company as the only provider of HW, SW, and Services, then we positioned Software Group as the leader in middleware, then we positioned the Database group under that. Each product had positioning that fit into the overall "Why IBM" story. That isn't the only way to do it, however. Many companies end up pulling their products together into a "Suite." Like a single-product company, the company positioning becomes equal to the Suite positioning. Docebo is a good example. Pulling everything together into a suite or solution simplifies the positioning and helps make the full breadth of what you do really clear for customers. Even if customers start by buying only a piece of it, it helps make the case for future cross-selling. Sometimes we have multiple products but they aren't equal as a starting point for a buyer. Sometimes you have one "base" product customers adopt first and then the others can be positioned as add-ons that you cross-sell and upsell to customers later. In these cases, the company's positioning leans heavily on the lead product. It might mention the others but it's downplayed. Salesforce, until recently, positioned itself mainly as a sales CRM - they marketed the CRM first, and the other products were cross-sold to you later. That made a lot of sense for Salesforce - they didn't have the leading Marketing suite in the market but they could make the case they had the best marketing suite for folks using their CRM. Today their situation is different with Slack, Tableau, and other products in the mix. We are now seeing Salesforce attempting to position Customer 360 as "real-time CRM" - a mega-suite that includes everything. I find this confusing but I suspect we will see this evolve over time. So if you have one product, I think it's unnecessary (and potentially dangerous) to try to position the company as something different. Once you have multiple products, you will have choices to make about how to position the company relative to the products in the portfolio.
Hi April Dunford, great read. I have a question. What if you have a company with multiple products… and those products are combined into multiple suites of products? Thanks!
Great insights April Dunford! I'm curious about your thoughts on how best to communicate this rationale to Product Management? Naming products and positioning them in market without considering the future state of your product suite creates disjointed communications and a confusing mess for customers to navigate.
Nice one April Dunford — to add to your post, another approach that seems to work for mission driven companies with multiple product brands (eg: Atlassian) is the company having an ambitious mission (with values that are verbs) to galvanize and guide its people while ensuring it’s product brands have distinct positionings grounded in the transformative benefits that each product will deliver
Sage advice, as always from April Dunford. If you haven’t yet read her ‘Obv!ously Awesome’ book on positioning, make it happen. You can thank me, and more importantly her later :)
The post couldn't come at a better time for me. Thank you! Looking forward to asking some follow-up questions at the Product Marketing Alliance Summit in Toronto!
April Dunford is a remarkably interesting thread. Why not post a video summing up your thoughts on this post? We/I would love it!
What about Brand positioning? 🙃 Is that the same as company positioning and therefore the rationale applies? I believe so. Spot on.
Very useful post, April Dunford, and complementary to the great Positioning method in Obviously Awesome! Any advice on how to think about product positioning in a company that offers "vertically oriented" products rather than horizontal add-ons (first you buy product A from us, then you buy product B)? Some products are pure off-the-shelf products targeted toward users, other products are targeted toward customers who will build their own solution and put it on the market for their intended users. The company positioning needs to cover a very broad spectrum of types of customers, whereas the products need to have a more specific positioning dependent on where in the value chain the target customers are. How can company and product positioning go hand-in-hand and create maximum clarity?
I would add another example: Apple. They are essentially a suite in terms of the apple ecosystem, and each product is part of that suite, however each individual product competes on it's own as it's own position, within the category for the product. (Airpods positioned as best wireless airbuds. iPhone positioned as first and best smartphone, etc). But, for each product, the apple ecosystem becomes an aspect of the positioning of the individual product. For some products it's a major selling point. iCloud drive, for example, would be irrelevant if not for the apple ecosystem. Airpods also gain significant value by being part of Apple ecosystem.
Enterprise B2B SaaS Marketing Exec. Ex BrowserStack, Red Hat, IBM Cloud (Softlayer)
1yThat's very well written April Dunford, thanks for sharing! The one place where I have a different POV is this: "So if you have one product, I think it's unnecessary (and potentially dangerous) to try to position the company as something different. " I agree that you shouldn't position the company entirely differently from the single product you have. However, there are nuances to consider here. Assuming product market fit has been achieved, I also think its a lost opportunity if you don't position the company as a visionary in the larger space. This will be different from product positioning since the product is likely solving a point problem, while the vision can be larger - but not too large, believability becomes an issue otherwise. Thanks again for sharing, I loved reading through it 😀