Editors Reads Verdict
April Dunford's Obviously Awesome is the book that finally made product positioning make sense for the vast majority of marketers and founders who had struggled with the concept for years. Practical, opinionated, and unusually specific for a marketing book.
What We Loved
- The five-component positioning framework is immediately applicable and comprehensive
- Dunford's twenty-five years of positioning practice give every principle concrete grounding
- The distinction between features, value, and best-for-customer is among the most clarifying in marketing
- The writing is direct and opinionated — no hedging, no both-sidesing
Minor Drawbacks
- Primarily oriented toward B2B technology products — some adaptation required for consumer or other sectors
- The workshop process described is difficult to implement without significant organizational buy-in
- Some examples are from companies readers may not be familiar with
Key Takeaways
- → Positioning is not a tagline or a mission statement — it is the context you set for customers before they evaluate your product
- → The five components of positioning: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target market, and market category
- → The market category you choose frames everything — it sets customer expectations and determines what your product is compared against
- → Best-for is more powerful than better-than — narrow targeting enables premium pricing and strong word of mouth
- → Weak positioning happens when a product's best features are described as features rather than the value those features create
| Author | April Dunford |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Independently Published |
| Pages | 207 |
| Published | May 10, 2019 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Business, Marketing, Startups |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Product marketers, founders, and product managers who need to position products; anyone who has struggled to explain what makes their product different and why that matters. |
What Positioning Actually Is
April Dunford has spent twenty-five years helping technology companies position their products, and the first thing Obviously Awesome does is correct a fundamental misunderstanding: positioning is not a tagline, a mission statement, or a marketing campaign. Positioning is the context you set for potential customers before they evaluate your product — the frame through which they understand what it is, who it’s for, and why it matters.
Bad positioning — the default condition of most products — is invisible. The product exists but customers cannot see themselves using it because they cannot place it in a coherent mental category. Good positioning makes the product obviously valuable to the right people for obvious reasons. Hence the title.
The Five Components
Dunford builds her framework around five components that must all be explicitly defined for positioning to work: competitive alternatives (what would customers use if your product didn’t exist), unique attributes (what your product has or does that alternatives don’t), value (the benefit created by those unique attributes), best-for customer profile (the specific customers for whom your value matters most), and market category (the context in which customers will evaluate and understand your product).
The most powerful of these is market category. The category you choose determines what your product is compared against, what customer expectations it must meet, and what your pricing can legitimately be. A product positioned as “a new kind of database” is evaluated against databases; the same product positioned as “an AI-powered analytics tool” is evaluated differently, priced differently, and bought by different people.
The Positioning Workshop
Dunford provides a detailed process for conducting a positioning workshop — involving sales, marketing, product, and customer success — that produces a positioning statement the whole organization can align around. This is important because positioning only works if everyone in the company communicates it consistently.
Why This Book is Different
The marketing section of any bookstore is full of books about positioning that are vague, theoretical, and full of frameworks that do not translate to actual products. Obviously Awesome is specific, process-driven, and full of examples from real technology companies. The specificity is its most valuable quality.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — The definitive product positioning book — finally making an abstract marketing concept concrete, actionable, and useful for founders and marketers who have struggled with it for years.
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