Product Positioning
Overview
Every organisation should aim to achieve product-market fit with a large enough customer base to be profitable. Product positioning helps you optimise both your offering and brand.
There is a careful balance between a large enough target customer base and going too wide. Appealing to many different types of customers can confuse the value proposition. The feedback you receive can send your product off in many different directions. Ultimately, this doesn’t satisfy anyone. The problem here is the mindset of feeling you are “leaving money on the table” by not going after everyone. This is particularly important in business-to-business (B2B) sales, where the cost of acquiring a customer can be much higher.
There is a canvas available for each of these outputs. They can be run as standalone tools or as part of the CAF process. See the sections below for these.
Process in Detail
Market positioning
Market positioning helps you identify how to maximise success by understanding your strengths and weaknesses. It is particularly important to consider competitors when forming your value proposition. The Market Positioning Canvas (full instructions and a download in this link) gives you the tools to optimise the position of your product in the market.
B2B personas
In B2B (Business to Business), we deal with three types of personas.
B2B Company profile
The first is the type of companies that will buy your product. The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is where you can maximise profit. Here is a canvas (full details and free download in the link) for defining the B2B company profile.
B2B - Buyer Persona
To help the sales process, you can also profile the different types of people involved in the buying process. Here is a canvas (full details and free download in the link) for defining the B2B buyer persona.
B2B - User Persona Canvas
Finally, the product's users may differ from the buyers. Meeting the needs of these people will have a large impact on customer retention. Here is a canvas (full details and free download in the link) for defining the B2B user persona.
B2C personas
In B2C (Business to Customer), the buyer and user of a product are usually the same person. Therefore, there is only one type of persona. To focus the product and maximise revenue, identify an Ideal Customer Persona (ICP). The B2C Customer Persona is a canvas (full instructions and a free download in the link) that helps you structure this.
