Dolly, Beyoncé and Differentiated Value
My favorite positioning quote is from Dolly Parton, who said, “Find out what you are and do it on purpose.” I think about this quote a lot (I used it in my book, Obviously Awesome, and I even made stickers). I think a great positioning exercise is a structured process that allows a team to get real clarity on exactly “what you are” so marketing and sales can “do it on purpose.”
We have to understand our value first before we can “do it on purpose.”
It’s not uncommon for teams to lose sight of the unique value they can deliver to customers. That value often shifts over time as markets mature, technology evolves, and players move into and out of a market. Teams will often have to pause and re-examine their differentiated value to get back on track.
Some teams feel like they can invent their differentiated value in the marketing department. That attitude is disrespectful to prospects and underestimates how easy it is for vendors to get caught in a lie. Other teams aren’t being deliberate about putting their strengths at the center of their marketing and sales efforts - shifting too much work to the customer to figure it out on their own. Often, that’s because they aren’t clear on what their value is in the first place. I believe it’s impossible to do anything great in marketing or sales without clearly defined differentiated value. When we deeply understand the value we can deliver for customers that no other product or company can, we understand the core of what makes us, US, as a business.
A thousand little decisions
When I worked at IBM, one of our key value pillars that made us very different from the competition at the time was “openness.” We believed that the key to building a world-class technology infrastructure was making it very easy for the piece parts to play together, now and in the future. We believed that great innovation could only happen when systems were open. That wasn’t just a marketing slogan - it was reflected in the way we built products, the way we built partner relationships, the way we participated in standards bodies, and our contributions to open source. Our competitors approached all of that in a very different way. Our marketing and sales materials focused on helping customers understand the value of openness and how IBM delivered on that. And we came with the proof to back up every word we said.
Value is what it is
Great positioning centers our marketing and sales efforts on what makes us uniquely valuable. If we have an established product currently in the market, we cannot simply make up our value. If the value you deliver today is weak, undifferentiated, or otherwise unimportant to customers, you can’t just pretend it’s there—you will have to build a roadmap that makes it true.
I was thinking about Dolly’s quote last week when Beyoncé launched her new album. As a person who thinks a lot about positioning, I particularly enjoyed this part of her album announcement - “This ain’t a Country album. This is a “Beyoncé” album.” The point is that it isn’t simply the genre that makes this music interesting - it’s what the artist does with it. There is an expectation of what we will get from Beyoncé, regardless of the era or style she happens to be exploring at a given moment.
Do you think your company or your product is putting your unique value at the center? Are you doing it on purpose?
Season 2 of Positioning with April Dunford has officially dropped. Check out episode 1 here, where I discuss why positioning doesn’t make the jump from marketing to sales. Next week, I’ve got one of my favorite CEOs talking about how he thinks about positioning. I’m not going to say I committed to doing a Season two just so I could have him on the show (but I kind of did).
I am on the Women in Product Management podcast with Mary Sheehan this week. Mary’s a very experienced Product Marketer, and I loved our conversation. We discussed my career journey and my thoughts about AI related to product marketing and positioning work.
I’m also on the ARRtist podcast this week. These folks run an amazing B2B SaaS community in Europe. I will be speaking at their upcoming Summit this fall in Berlin. We talked on this podcast about what founders need to know about positioning and the intersection of positioning and Jobs theory.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading - as always, I appreciate you!
April
I also like what Beyonce did there. Not a Beyonce expert, but by simply reading that line it's clear to me the category is "Beyonce", not "country".
A true monopoly-of-one.
When you say some teams “invent” (as in lie about) differentiated value in marketing, that’s absolutely harmful to customers and a business. On the other hand, crafting (not inventing) differentiated value is exactly what a marketing team should do. The framing, contextualizing, and articulating that the marketing team does is vital work. Now, the issue is that some non-marketer types don’t see the distinction. Moreover, they fail to see that marketing delivers real, tangible value in the form of content, customer education, and community—all of which augment the core product features and enhance the experience the customer has with the company as a whole.