A playbook along with a practical step by step workbook to position your product for success.
Most B2B buyers can’t tell competing products apart. Research from CEB and Gartner puts that number at 86 percent, nearly nine in ten buyers see no real difference between suppliers. This playbook walks you through a structured, order-dependent approach to marketing segmentation, targeting, and positioning, built on April Dunford’s positioning methodology. It’s also paired with a companion worksheet you fill in as you go. By the end, you’ll have a category you picked on purpose and a positioning statement your whole team can say out loud without hedging.
Rather than handing you a template to fill in blind, the playbook takes you through the decisions that need to happen before you write anything down, in a specific order, with a worked case study showing a real team’s answers at every stage. You’ll come out the other side with a defensible category. It will have a clear read on competitive positioning, and a positioning statement built to survive a stress test.
Product positioning is how a product is defined in comparison to alternatives in a buyer’s mind. It is the segment where the category is placed in, the audience it’s built for, and the value it delivers compared to what that buyer would use instead. It shapes messaging, pricing, and which competitors you’re actually judged against.
Product positioning defines how a specific product fits into a market and against specific alternatives. Brand positioning is a broader term which covers the overall perception, values, and reputation of the company across every product it sells. Product positioning usually feeds into brand positioning.
A positioning statement is a short, structured sentence that names your target buyer, the alternative they’re using now, the category you compete in, and the value you deliver instead. It’s usually the last thing written in the positioning process in our playbook.
A face wash repositioned as a clinical-strength acne treatment, a budgeting app repositioned as a spend tracker for irregular income, or a project management tool repositioned as a campaign execution system for marketing teams. Same product, different category. Each one changes who it’s compared to and what it can charge.
Market positioning looks at where a company sits across an entire market or industry. This playbook focuses specifically on product positioning strategy. We look at the decisions and sequence needed to position one product clearly, which then feeds into broader market and competitive positioning work.
This playbook is for both marketing teams preparing for a launch or a refresh. It’s built for people who’ll run the worksheet with input from sales, not just read about the framework.
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