Um Hi, everyone. Um I'm Ricky. Um I'm one of the lead. Um I'm just gonna actually, sorry. Hold on. Uh sorry is my, is my presentation big enough for everybody. Um Anna, you can see my slides. Yeah, cool. OK. We can see your slides. We cannot see you.Oh OK. Hold on. There we go. So um so yes, thank you. So I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about how I've gone in success um from product positioning over the last few years and I suppose it started um with me um a little bit like some of you. Um you know, when you spend hundreds of hours on your product, um you're spending a lot of money um developing it yet, you know, despite all of our best efforts, um the competitor somehow just gets all the buzz in the marketplace. So, um and you know, people start to really struggle to stand out. So, you know, you, you kind of go back to the drawing board a little bit and you think, well, what, what is it that I need to do here? Do I need to um change my pricing? Do I need to develop more features. Do I need more capital? But I guess before you go back to the drawing board, it's always really good to look at um product positioning and um and, and really reconsider that first.

So I'd like to claim all these ideas in the presentation of my own, but I'm afraid it's shameless plagiarism of um a lot of books that I've read, um a lot of uh events that I've attended over the years um as well as learning from, you know, some of the best product people um in the industry.

So, um oh, so what we're taught, um So traditional positioning really revolves around positive statements. So what is it that we sell? Who is it for how it works? What are the benefits? And, but however, as a market gets more crowded and commoditized, um negative statements actually become far more valuable and because media buying now with ad agencies is pretty much a race to the bottom. Um Companies are really having to lean very hard across their messaging into what they are not and what they don't do. And by actively positioning yourselves in the market about who you're not and what you don't do, you actually create a lot of separation from some of your competitors in that market. Um And you also, um you know, carve out that separation as well in your prospects minds also.

So what is product positioning um to put it really, really simply product positioning is simply about context. Now, for those of you who don't recognize this violinist in this picture, um This is Joshua Bell and he has a career spanning um more than 30 years. Um And is the one of the world's most celebrated violinists and, and performers. But here, as you can see, he's nothing more than a street performer. But look what happens when we change the context. He goes from street performer to, you know, pretty much a musical genius here.

But, oh, sorry. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. But, oh, sorry, we're just heading. Yeah, but the product here, as you can see, it didn't change, it's the same product, but we changed the con we, we changed the context. So let's look at some common mistakes before we kind of go into, you know, how we really position product. And I know that I certainly made some or all of these mistakes that I'm just gonna, I'm gonna quickly run uh run quickly through with you. So you aren't considered the preferred brand. If you're watching this and you are the preferred brand in your marketplace, you probably don't need to kind of carry on listening to this and you could probably go and have a cup of tea. But if you're not, then let's go on. If you recognize any of these devices that you see in this presentation, then congratulations. You guys are as old as I am. Um But Blackberry used to be the number one selling smartphone in the world. It was revered and it had customers that span the globe from celebrities to lawyers to kids. Um unfortunately, also to criminal gangs who loved their Impenetrable and non intercept encryption technology on their devices. But then what happened, Apple then came into the market and they said, hey, we're gonna launch a phone and they took the market by storm.

Now having worked at Blackberry during this time and, and many years before the iphone was actually released, I can tell you that Blackberry was in terms of feature that the, the iphone was actually technically deficient when you compared it to the Blackberry device. Blackberry was the meat and potatoes of the communications world and Apple was like this flimsy cotton candy type thing that would blow away in the wind, you know, if there was one strong enough. But one of the issues is that Blackberry, they didn't realize what their strengths were and, and where their market was until it was really too late and it became less obvious to their target market and to their existing customers um that they were the best choice. Um And it wasn't clear to their customers that if they went to Apple, what were they going to miss out on one of the other things is you struggle to express your value. Um You know, are you confident in your team's ability to really um express your value very, very clearly to the marketplace. Do you have a consistent tone of voice? I think hubspot actually said um that brands are cons that brands that consistently present themselves across the market have an average revenue increase of around 23% which is huge.

And if you promote different benefits in your data, uh you know, in, in your, in your ads versus your landing pages, or if your brand tone changes from social media to your email communications or from mobile to web, that inconsistency can actually be really, really costly after all.

If your team isn't on the same page, how do you expect your prospects to know why they should choose you and for your team to develop this new position? You know, you need a common understanding um of the goals and also all of the expected outcomes of your product. Now, while having 100% of your organization aligned at all times really isn't realistic. And, and I've never worked for a company that has been, you know, completely 100% aligned, but a weak foundation of understanding makes p positioning for you as a product team incredibly difficult. If customers don't know what they're getting and managers and your sales teams don't really know what they're selling or promoting, then it's almost impossible for companies to really identify where their competitive position is here. Another common, um another common mistake is you, you try to appeal to everyone and without targeting a specific audience, you risk blending in with your competition. People really don't start to see kind of where you begin, where they end et cetera, et cetera. And one of the most common mistakes that brands actually make when crafting messaging for their things like their website, for example, is they try to speak to everyone.

Um It's completely fine to sell to multiple personas and even to multiple markets and, and, and in multiple market segments, but you don't need to try and sell to every single persona in every single campaign or in every single website. And if you remember a company called Evernote, some of you might remember them. Um They were once a really promising note starting app. I loved their, I love their solution. And unfortunately, Evernote started to drift really away from its original vision, um which was a note taking app and they started to create a whole host of other offerings that, that just didn't stick in the marketplace. They built a chat chat app, they built a recipe app, they built a contact management app and it even sold like business gear um in a really ambitious kind of e-commerce venture as well and with their attention so scattered over, you know, multiple messaging multiple brand, you know, just it was an absolute mess.

What they found was actually new note taking apps like Bear. And also um there was one other uh notion um they really quickly stepped in to serve those customers that Evernote felt, you know, so their customers felt that Evernote weren't really delivering a solution anymore.

Um One of the other common mistakes is, you know, you think you're the sole source of a product, you think that you have the only solution in the marketplace. And again, you know, customers now have control, complete control over um where they choose to spend their money and you must adapt really quickly to that. Um social media and digital channels have given customers away to really start to connect with each other as um as customers, but also um gather data from sources that weren't typically available to them before. And they're now starting to form opinions about brands and are increasingly starting to become skeptical about messages coming directly from companies um and brands. So how are you engaging with your current custom customers and also your prospects. How often do you interact with them?

What other sources are they using to learn and form opinions about your company and your products if you're messaging prospects and customers only when you're trying to sell to them. Um It's really obvious to the customer and they get turned off really, really quickly when you guys do that. So add value with things like high quality content and engage with comments, questions and also concerns across multiple channels um including including social media, one of the big, big problems and you know, I've been guilty of this before. In the past as well is you're n you're selling products on your brand values or purpose. I mean, patently the whole concept of brand purpose to me as a product manager and I'm sure there will be lots of people who disagree with me is just moronic, right. I don't want Starbucks telling me about race relations and world peace. I want it to serve me a really good cup of coffee in a really pleasant location. Positioning is an active evolving process that requires constant refinement. If you're not regularly adjusting your strategy and experimenting with how you market and sell, you'll struggle to position yourself effectively. Even if historically, you felt you've always been pretty well positioned. How long, for example, does it take you guys to adjust your messaging?

If you can make minor changes in days rather than waiting for your next quarterly or yearly um strategy meeting, then your positioning should and can change whenever you want it to and whenever you feel the need to. So these are really the symptoms of poor positioning. So we're gonna understand a little bit about how can we effectively um you know, put that product positioning into process and improving your positioning isn't straightforward as just, you know, coming up with a title for a blog post. Um but that doesn't mean there aren't some really nice concrete steps to work on it. So let's just look at a few examples of how we can actually position properly. The first thing I always say is tell a story, right? Um If dove, a bar of soap can find an amazing way to tell a story of real beauty. There is literally, I don't believe not a brand in the world that can't find their interesting this or their sort of inner meaning and figure out how to tell their story. And when you craft a compelling story, you help change the conversation from comparing features and benefits to communicating the end result um that your product provides.

So while features and benefits are important, of course, they're important, particularly in in the build, building your product process, they're easy to replicate and they don't often say anything compelling and many times, you know, and this is might be uh news to some of you.

The customer doesn't actually care. So uh docs send here is an example here, they overhauled their product strategy and they completely moved away from feature and benefit selling to storytelling. And they saw a significant increase in their conversion, identify and learn from your best customers instead of spending hours in meetings, nose deep in spreadsheets, looking at analytics, looking at stats, reach out to your best customers and find out why they chose you. While it might be tempting to survey everyone. Your top customers often provide you with the key data. So focus on them first, which customers were quick to adopt your product and services, which consistently refer your business. Customer interviews are a really good place to find out those answers and don't be afraid of them, your top customers. And certainly my top customers as well have provided me with insights into how they see my competition. And most of the time, it's drastically different from how I see my competition and let go of your existing baggage. If you've always thought of your product in one way at competing in a particular market or solving a particular problem, it's hard to see it in any other way. The reality is that most products can be lots of things to different types of buyers.

So what does your product do best? You know, is it simple? Is it easy to use? Is the support you offer world class internally? You might have the answers to all of these questions. But does your branding and messaging really communicate that to your target audience revolu, which is um uh what we call a disruptive finance brand in the UK. Um They offer to simplify banking. They took a mobile first approach which appealed to their target audience at the time, which was young professionals and they leveraged the common frustrations of traditional banking and they communicated their difference in a story by clearly telling you what they were not.

And it's, you know, really reaped dividends for them and they're growing at a AAA massive rate finally communicate a really simple promise. What can you promise customers? Um if they invest in your product, how can you communicate that? In the simplest terms, a great example is geckos, 15 minutes could save you 15% on your car insurance in a single sentence. They have set expectations and then they also promise value and finally make positioning a team effort. Positioning for products really works best when it comes ideally from different parts of your organization across different functional teams, each team from sales to marketing to customer success. You know, it can bring a really unique, different viewpoint to how customers perceive and also experience your products, including all these teams in the positioning process, really ensures that firstly, that everyone is on the same page. Um And we've talked about some of the challenges of that with everyone being on the same page can can really hinder, but it also helps you unlock insights that may not always reach across departments. For example, you know, maybe your customer service team have um have noticed that 15% of churn or cancellations result in a frustration with a particular feature that isn't explained very well during the sales process.

So your positioning affects multiple departments and every single leader of those departments should have a seat at your product table and you'll need company wide buy in really to reap some of those um some of those benefits. The other thing you can do is change the conversation.

It's tempting to really compare yourself with a competition. Um, and we've all seen those competitive comparison spreadsheets with the little ticks going all the way across it. Um, but the most effective positioning really changes the conversation entirely. Um And there is perhaps nobody that embodies this better than, um, supply. And, um, they basically sell razor blades for 5 to 7 times the cost of a single razor blade and their, their, their, their, their kind of way that they come into the market, the way that they position themselves, the stories that they tell um is, is absolutely incredible. And this is really where strong positioning can help make customers feel like you're the way of the future. And that choosing anyone else would be a mistake and then determine who cares. OK. So once you have a good understanding of your product, what it's delivering versus other alternatives, you can then start to look at audiences that care a lot about value. But remember even if you have some unique attributes, not all customers will feel the same way. And then finally is find a market frame of reference for you.

And there's a lot of um there, there are a lot of things, but I'm just gonna really talk very, very quickly cos I can see we only got a couple of minutes left on, on three things here. So head to head. So head to head is really where you are aiming to be the leader in a market category that already exists. In the minds of customers. So there's an established market leader and your goal is to beat them at their own game by convincing customers that you are better at delivering the solution. If you choose this way of taking your product to market, then you should be prepared to do battle against multiple competitors in this space who will be simultaneously trying to prove that they are better than you. The next one is big fish, smaller pond. If you're not able to compete directly with a market leader in the segment that you want to compete in, there's still a way for you to get a foothold in that market. And many start ups actually use this method. Um and they do so successfully by simply just breaking up the market into very smaller manageable chunks in product, we call this sub segmentation. So you get all the advantages of a well defined market category without some of the stiff competition.

A lot of companies do, particularly those who are a little bit more established. They do shy away from this approach because they're worried that moving from targeting the entire market to then just carving out a small subsegment for themselves will mean less opportunity. But actually, in my experience, it, it's completely the opposite. You're simply unselected those parts of the market that we're never going to buy from you anyway. And you know, and it helps you focus on the customers who will see a clear advantage with your product. And finally, um the the the last sort of element is change the game. Um And sometimes new technology or circumstances pave the way for an entirely new market. Before you enter this strategy. Though, you should probably have exhausted all other options. And because this style of positioning is very, very difficult, it can work well if your company is large and powerful and they already capture the attention of customers, media analysts, exa for example, um but you aren't simply capturing demand that's already here. Using this, this um this process is you have to really create that demand. You have to spark that interest first.