Positioning: set the context that makes your product obviously awesome
April Dunford's five-component method — competitive alternatives first, market category last — and why most startups position by accident and then wonder why buyers shrug.
The theory in one paragraph
Positioning is the context you give a buyer's brain so it knows how to evaluate you — and most startups inherit it by accident from whatever category they first said out loud. Dunford's method inverts the usual order: don't start with the category, derive it. Start from what customers would actually use if you vanished (competitive alternatives), isolate what you have that those alternatives don't (unique attributes), translate attributes into value customers care about, identify who cares most (best-fit segment), and only then choose the market category that makes all of it obvious. The same product, reframed, changes price expectations, competitors, and win rates — her consulting career is a catalog of companies that changed nothing but the frame and watched sales unlock.
How it works
The mechanics — as April Dunford defined them, not the folklore version.
Alternatives before category
The foundational question is not 'who are our competitors?' but 'what would customers do without us?' — and the honest answer is often a spreadsheet, an intern, or nothing. Positioning against named rivals when buyers actually compare you to Excel produces messaging that answers questions nobody asked.
Attributes → value → who cares
Unique attributes only matter translated into value: the feature is the fact, the value is what the buyer's boss hears. Then narrow to the segment with the most acute version of the need — best-fit customers, not addressable ones. Dunford's rule of thumb: if your positioning tries to speak to everyone who could buy, it convinces no one who should.
The category is a strategic choice
The market category you claim triggers a bundle of assumptions — expected features, competitors, pricing bands. You can position within an existing category (fastest to explain), create a subcategory, or — rarely, expensively — create a new category. Choosing the frame where your unique value is table-stakes-plus rather than weird is the entire game; 'email for teams' and 'team chat' describe the same product with different fates.
Your category does your marketing before you say a word
Dunford's sharpest point is that buyers use the category to fill in everything you didn't say — pricing expectations, must-have features, who you compete with. Claim 'CRM' and you inherit Salesforce comparisons and per-seat pricing wars; claim 'revenue intelligence' and the same product is judged on different axes at a different price. Founders agonize over homepage adjectives while the category noun quietly decides the sale. Tabby calls itself a shopping app, not a lender — that's positioning doing structural work.
The person behind it
April Dunford
Positioning consultant · 25 years as a startup and enterprise marketing executive
Dunford ran marketing through seven startup exits and repeatedly watched good products lose to worse ones with clearer frames — including her own launches that only worked after a repositioning nobody had planned. Obviously Awesome turned that scar tissue into the first genuinely operational positioning method; it deliberately modernizes Ries and Trout's 1981 classic for founders who need a process, not a metaphor.
How to apply it this week
Each step maps to a field in the Marketing Strategy tool — finishing the read means finishing the work.
List the true competitive alternatives
Interview recent wins and losses: what would they have done without you? Include 'do nothing', 'spreadsheet', and 'hire someone'. This list — not your competitor slide — is the baseline everything else measures against.
Marketing Strategy · positioning statementIsolate attributes the alternatives can't claim
Features, capabilities, business-model traits (pricing structure, data, distribution) that are demonstrably yours. Cut anything a rival could say with a straight face — parity dressed as differentiation poisons the whole exercise.
Translate each attribute into customer value
'So what?' every attribute until it lands on money, time, or risk. Then cluster the values into two or three themes — buyers remember themes, not feature lists.
Marketing Strategy · 3 core messagesDefine who cares most, then pick the frame
Characterize the buyers with the most urgent version of the need — industry, size, trigger event. Then test category frames against them: in which market is your value obvious within one sentence? That frame is your positioning; everything else is copywriting.
Marketing Strategy · target audienceWrite it down and force the org to use one version
Fill the classic template — for [segment], [product] is the [category] that [value], unlike [alternative] — and align the homepage, deck, and sales narrative to it. Positioning that lives in one founder's head repositions itself in every meeting.
Feeds your Readiness Score · Plan
Build it, don't just read it
The steps above are the Marketing Strategy tool's structure. Open it and work through them with your own startup — your readiness score starts building from the first field.
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See it in the wild
Teardowns from our benchmarks library where this framework is doing real work.
Benchmark teardown
Tabby
Positioned as shopping-with-flexibility, not consumer credit — the frame changes the regulator, the merchant pitch, and the shopper's self-image
Read the teardown
Benchmark teardown
Notion
Deliberately category-ambiguous — docs, wiki, projects — until the template economy let users position it for themselves
Read the teardown
Benchmark teardown
Zid
Same market as Salla, different frame: retail operating system for merchants that simplicity can't serve — segmentation as positioning
Read the teardown
Frequently asked questions
What is product positioning in simple terms?
Positioning is the context that tells a buyer what your product is, what to compare it against, and why it matters — before they evaluate a single feature. Deliberate positioning chooses the market frame where your genuine strengths are obvious; accidental positioning lets an inherited category decide how you're judged.
What are the five components of April Dunford's positioning method?
Competitive alternatives (what customers would do without you), unique attributes (what you have that alternatives don't), value (what those attributes enable for the customer), best-fit customer characteristics (who cares most about that value), and market category (the frame that makes it all obvious). They're worked strictly in that order — the category comes last, derived from the rest.
How is Dunford's positioning different from Ries and Trout's?
Ries and Trout's 1981 classic established the concept — positioning happens in the buyer's mind, and being first in a category beats being better. Dunford's contribution is operational: a step-by-step process a founding team can run in a workshop, starting from real competitive alternatives rather than aspirational category claims. One diagnoses the battlefield; the other hands you the drill.
When should a startup reposition?
When the evidence says the current frame is fighting you: sales calls spent re-explaining what you are, losses to 'do nothing', price pushback from category comparisons you can't win, or a segment of users who love you for reasons your homepage never mentions. That last one is the strongest signal — your best customers have often already found your true positioning.
Should you create a new market category?
Almost never first. Category creation means funding the education of an entire market — Dunford estimates it's a strategy for companies with dominant share and deep pockets, not seed-stage startups. Position within an existing category or a subcategory first; create one only when you keep winning deals for value no existing category can express.
Related frameworks
The Golden Circle
Simon Sinek · 2009
Blue Ocean Strategy
W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne · 2004
Jobs to be Done
Clayton Christensen · 2003
Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey Moore · 1991
Sources
Independent educational summary written by StartupKit from public sources. Positioning (Obviously Awesome) is the work of April Dunford; this page is not affiliated with or endorsed by the author.