The steps for crafting exceptional positioning and messaging
ARTWORK BY Alessandro Nicoli
Why does your product exist? How is it unique? What value does it provide? Great positioning and messaging answer these questions and ultimately guide how you tell the story only you can tell. Without a distinctive product story to start with, everything from product roadmapping to landing press will be a lot harder. Let’s talk about how to execute positioning, messaging, and copywriting effectively.
The definitions of positioning, messaging, and copywriting
Here it is clear and simple:
Positioning is where your product fits in the market, who you serve, what you’re doing, and how you’re different.
Messaging is the clarity of what you say about your product.
Copywriting is the cleverness of how you communicate it all.
Check out our posts about the importance of positioning and how to find your competitive advantage through brand positioning for related info.
Why each one matters for new products - plus a great example
Positioning and messaging tell your audience where your product fits in the market, why it exists, how it’s unique, and how you communicate all of this. Positioning and messaging is both a science and an art, which is why they’re so difficult to do well. Analyzing your competitors and opportunities for where your product fits into the market is more science, whereas figuring out how to communicate that positioning is an art.
People often look at the current positioning and messaging of successful companies for inspiration, but they neglect to look at those brands when they were just getting started (and no one knew who they were or what they did yet).
Let’s look at Uber as an example.
Here’s their first website:
It’s pretty ugly, but highly effective and specifically positioned. When Uber launched, the idea of getting into a stranger’s car to get somewhere was completely new. They had little brand awareness at the time, which is why their very clear and specific positioning and messaging is so important. Moreover, since people were already familiar with the idea of a private driver, Uber anchored itself well in the customer’s mind by identifying as ‘everyone’s private driver.’
Here is one of their more recent websites (after they achieved mass adoption):
If we didn’t already know what Uber was, we’d look at this and think, “moving them where, how?” This messaging would’ve been too ambiguous and we’d be confused.
Aspirational live-happily-ever after messaging sounds nice, but almost always fails to connect with buyers. Don’t look at current brands’ positioning and messaging for inspiration - look at when they got started. This is key for early-stage; unless your product is completely innovative, you can most likely position your product in a market category that already exists and benefit from that familiarity in the buyer’s mind. Your positioning and messaging should solve an immediate need and problem for customers.
Splashy, aspirational positioning and messaging doesn’t work unless you already have a big brand muscle behind them. You need to understand where you are on the scale of brand recognition so you can calibrate your positioning and messaging to it.
How to create your positioning - plus another great example
Positioning = where you fit in the market.
Your product story starts to reveal itself in your positioning while your messaging and copywriting bring it to life. Positioning has the power to change how people view your product entirely. A great example of this is Listerine.
Listerine started as a surgical antiseptic and with very few product changes, sold as a floor cleaner and now a mouthwash. Not a lot changed about the product, but the positioning of it did, like its packaging, user instructions, and where it was placed in the store. Where you sell surgical antiseptic, who you sell it to, and for how much is fundamentally different from mouthwash. And while floor cleaners and mouthwash are both purchased at the grocery store, they are in different aisles.
A similar product with different positioning changes the whole go-to-market function.
Here are the five steps to create product positioning:
Let go of preconceived notions.
Isolate your uniqueness: What is the story only you can tell?
Value: What can your uniqueness do for customers? Do this with a Jobs to Be Done exercise.
Who cares? Figure out who your personas are.
What category do you compete in? Market categories provide a crucial frame of reference.
There are many lenses of product positioning, but here are a few:
Price: 365 by Whole Foods is the generic, cheaper version of products
Quality: Tesla started high-end and is working their way down market
Specific use case: The iPhone is positioned as a smartphone, but it does a whole lot more. Calling people is the least useful thing people do on the phone, but we still call it an iPhone. When it was launched, mid 2000, Apple knew it would be more than a phone, but they had to create the “mental bridge” for people to discover what it was.
Competitors: Bookshop is an online bookstore which connects all the independent bookstores through one inventory database. When you buy a book online, you're buying it from a bookshop. But they positioned themselves as the “rebel Alliance to Amazon's empire”.
How to create your messaging
Messaging = clarity on what you say.
Copywriting = cleverness of how you say it.
Be very mindful of this distinction. Cleverness without clarity will almost always end in disaster.
Here are the six key elements of product messaging:
Product description: What your product is in 5 words or less.
Headline: A compelling headline and image that resonates with the buyer and makes them want to learn more about your product. Generally, this is a combination of why you exist and what you do.
Subhead: Hint at the problem and how your product solves it.
Benefit/Outcome: What your target buyer will achieve by using a combination of features. Use the description to explain how that happens.
Customer testimonial: In a perfect world, what would your ideal customer say about your product?
Features: This is where you check off their shopping list with feature names and descriptions.
Once we hone in on the right product messaging, we like to create what we call “messaging in the wild”. This involves taking the messaging and illustrating how it might look in real life. Using the company’s branding, we create things like display ads, twitter posts, the homepage hero, a sales deck slide, an ideal Product Hunt comment, a LinkedIn tagline and more - and compile all these mockups to visually showcase how everything would look, well, in the wild. It’s a great way to circulate messaging to the wider team or company, and bring everyone on your messaging journey.
Stay on track with these 10 rules
Based on everything we’ve shared so far, here are ten rules to guide your positioning and messaging efforts:
Calibrate to the current brand recognition.
Be specific: If people can’t picture themselves using your product, they won’t.
Speak to your buyer personas: How will your target audience know they are in the right place? Be clear with yourself about buyers vs end users.
Speak to your Job to be Done: When communicating the value of your product be sure to speak to their situation, motivation, and outcome (outcomes → benefits → features).
Make your messaging singular: Your messaging should only apply to you. If other companies can use your message, you’re not there yet.
Check off their mental shopping list: Address buyer intent, not unexpected product results.
Include hard claims: ROI, data, and hard claims are powerful. This takes product instrumentation, customer interviews, and updating sales contracts.
Keep it short: 50% of visitors stay at the top of your site, 25% scroll down, and 10% reach the bottom. We like this quote by Mark Twain as a reminder: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one instead.”
Test your messaging: Experimenting with your messaging is cheaper than experimenting with your product. Use betas to test messaging, not just product. You can use tools like Wynter to test your messaging with the right audiences and leverage market research tools like SurveyMonkey to run concept tests with larger audiences.
It’s all in the editing! Here are some quotes to remind you of that ;-):
“Good stories are not written. They are rewritten.” - Phylis A. Whitney
“When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.” - Enrique Jardiel Poncela
“Write without fear. Edit without mercy” - Unknown.
Tell your story with a strong foundation
Following specific positioning & messaging frameworks will make your life a lot easier when the time comes to launch your product—and beyond. Start small and be specific about what your product solves for customers today, not in five years. Let messaging and copywriting bring your story to life in a clear and compelling way. You’ll be glad you crafted a strong story earlier rather than later.
