If nobody wants your product, you're just positioning it wrong
Adapted from April Dunford’s "A Quickstart Guide to Positioning".
Twenty years ago, my first job out of engineering school was in marketing at a startup. I was assigned to a product intended to be a "Microsoft Access killer" with support for SQL, a server-side database language. At the time, SQL only ran on large servers, and the idea of "bringing it to small businesses" seemed groundbreaking. The team invested significant money in marketing. In one year, they sold 200 copies. It became clear that it was time to kill the product.
Before shutting it down, we decided to call the customers to see how they would react. Since I was the new hire, the calling duties fell to me.
The first twenty calls went the same way:
— Hello, I’m calling to see how you’re using our product. — Miss, we don’t have anything like that. — But according to our records, you paid for it back in January. — Oh, that thing. We tried it and abandoned it.
The decision to kill the product seemed obvious. But on the twenty-first call, everything changed.
"Your product made me the hero of the sales department!" a client shouted. Their reps used to visit customers, take orders on paper, return to the office, and manually type them into the system. Orders were riddled with errors, and line items were constantly going missing. Once they installed our product on their laptops, reps started processing orders on the spot and syncing them with the office database. "We doubled our sales. This SQL is a game-changer for us!"
I conducted twenty more similar interviews before I found my second superfan. They were using our product for their field service engineers—updating data on-site and syncing with the database upon return. "We boosted our service productivity by 60%."
In total, that was one hundred conversations. Out of those one hundred clients, 94 didn't even remember they had bought our product. But for six of them, it had fundamentally rewired their business.
I brought these results to leadership. Instead of killing the "Microsoft Access killer," we decided to try repositioning it as an "embedded database for mobile devices." A year later, we saw rapid growth, an acquisition by a major player in the database world, and expansion into a product suite generating hundreds of millions in revenue. Twenty years later, that "failed" product is still running on mobile devices all over the globe.
Since that moment, positioning has become my obsession. How could we have figured out earlier that our product was simply being presented to the market the wrong way?
Positioning is not what you think
If you put twelve experienced marketers in a room and ask them to define "positioning," you’ll get twelve different answers. When I speak at conferences, I often start by clarifying what positioning is not:
It is not website copy. It is not a tagline. It is not brand storytelling. It is not a mission statement or your "why." And it is not "all that stuff you marketers make up," as one CEO once tried to convince me.
My definition is this:
Positioning is the way you demonstrate that your product leads in something that matters to a clearly defined group of customers.
That sounds complicated. But behind this formula lies a specific five-element framework. The relationship between these elements is the magic that transforms a "product nobody needs" into a "product they can't live without."
Why you need it: positioning sets the context
Positioning functions like the opening scenes of a movie. The opening shot orients the viewer—where are we, what year is it, what is happening, who are these people, and what is the tone?
Think of Terminator 2. The opening shots show a ruined Los Angeles in 2029, machines hunting humans, and a voiceover about Judgment Day. A sharp cut: a night highway in the present day, a lightning strike, and a naked man appearing in an electric discharge. Less than three minutes have passed, and the audience already knows: the story is set in our time, the threat comes from a specific future, the protagonist arrived from there, and the film is about stopping a catastrophe. Setting, timing, stakes, hero, and genre—all without a single line of exposition.
Positioning works the same way. It triggers a set of assumptions in the client’s mind—who your competitors are, what features the product should have, who it’s for, and how much it should cost.
Suppose I tell you, "I have a CRM system." What will you assume before I even open the second page of my slide deck?
You’ll assume my main competitor is a familiar CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce. That I’m selling to a sales manager. That my product includes deal tracking, a customer database, and a sales funnel. You’ll even make an assumption about the price—something in the range of the average CRM market value.
Good positioning triggers assumptions in the client that are true for your product. Bad positioning triggers assumptions that aren't—and then your sales and marketing teams waste time trying to debunk those false expectations.
If I said, "I have an email," you’d have one set of expectations. If I said, "I have a messenger," your expectations would be entirely different. The functions overlap: sending messages, reading, replying. But from email, we expect spam filtering, archive organization, and calendar integration. From a messenger, we expect instant delivery and read receipts. The same product can be pitched as email or as a messenger, but a good messenger will make for a bad email, and vice versa.
A shift in positioning can completely transform the perception of a product. And that is the difference that determines whether a business fails or becomes a billion-dollar company.
What Doesn't Work: The "Positioning Statement"
Many learned about positioning in a "fill-in-the-blanks" format. The template looks something like this:
"For (target audience) who (problem/need), our product is a (category) that provides (key value), unlike (competitors) who (differentiator)."
I consider this exercise useless and even dangerous. It assumes that every blank has one "right" answer that you somehow "already know." In reality, most products can be positioned in several different categories, against different competitors, for different audiences. This exercise wouldn't have helped me realize that my "Microsoft Access killer" was actually an "embedded database for mobile devices." The fill-in-the-blank template won't reveal that.
The Five Elements of Positioning
The structure of positioning itself breaks down into five constituent parts:
- Alternatives: What customers consider—what they would do if your product didn't exist.
- Unique Attributes: What you have that these alternatives do not.
- Value: What these attributes provide to the customer in the real world.
- Ideal Customer: Those for whom this value is mission-critical.
- Market Category: The context in which your value becomes immediately apparent.
These elements are interconnected. Unique value depends on unique attributes. Attributes are only "unique" in comparison to alternatives. The ideal customer is the one who needs your value most. And the market category is the frame that makes your value understandable at a glance.
Each element depends on the others. So, where should you start?
The right starting point: Customer alternatives
For a long time, I thought you could start with any element and then tweak the rest. That worked, but it was slow—each hypothesis took weeks of testing.
Then it hit me. You have to start with what the customer would do if your product didn't exist. Not "which companies could theoretically compete with you," but "what the customer is actually doing today to solve this problem."
This changes everything. If you start with "features" or "your uniqueness," you risk creating positioning that sounds great in an office meeting but fails with real buyers—because it doesn't differentiate you from what they’re already doing.
The flow should look like this: customer alternatives → what we offer that alternatives don’t → the real-world value derived from that → who finds this value mission-critical → which market category makes this value instantly apparent.
Case study: how it works in practice
Early in my career, I led marketing for a company that positioned its product as an "enterprise CRM system." This was a long time ago, back when Salesforce still only worked with small businesses and Siebel Systems was the undisputed leader in the enterprise segment.
At every client meeting, we were asked the same question: "How are you better than Siebel?" That was a bad question for us. By all formal metrics, Siebel was better: 8,000 employees versus our couple dozen, $2 billion in revenue versus our $2 million, 400 clients versus our six.
But we had two differentiators. The first was a feature that Siebel didn't replicate: we knew how to map relationships between people differently. The problem was, we couldn't explain why that mattered. We showed the feature in every demo, and when clients asked, "What are we supposed to do with this?", we replied, "Anything you want!" That didn't work.
The breakthrough happened when we sold the product to an investment bank. Through that project, we realized what our feature actually provided: the ability to see who has influence over whom within a client organization. Who went to school with whom. Who worked with whom ten years ago. Who makes decisions by bypassing the formal hierarchy.
For businesses driven by personal relationships—like investment banking or private wealth management—this restructured the entire sales department. They gained a map of actual, rather than formal, relationships within a client company.
We could finally define our "value proposition" and "ideal client profile." This immediately shifted our strategy: we pivoted all marketing and sales efforts toward investment banks, where we had a genuine competitive edge over Siebel.
Finally, we changed our market category. We couldn't win the "Enterprise CRM" market. But "CRM for Investment Banks"? We could definitely win that. Banks found us through that specific search query, and we differentiated ourselves from Siebel in the very first sentence.
In the 18 months following this shift, revenue grew from $2 million to $80 million. We planned to expand into retail banking and insurance next. We didn't get the chance—Siebel acquired us for $1.3 billion.
An example of the same shift
Imagine a document-workflow tool for small businesses. Its initial positioning is simply "online document management". The market is led by established enterprise products with large budgets, so competing head-on would be a mistake.
Look instead at what the customer does without the product. A small company may rely on spreadsheets, shared folders and email attachments because an enterprise suite is too costly or complex. The true alternative is not always the market leader; often, it is "manual work and chaos".
And that’s when your positioning changes. It’s no longer "online document workflow service," but "electronic invoicing for small businesses without an in-house accountant." The value isn't "digital transformation," but "getting a closing document processed in an hour instead of a week." Your ideal customer is a sole proprietor or a micro-business with outsourced bookkeeping. The market category becomes "closing documents for small businesses," not "electronic document management."
This shift is exactly what separates a company that spends years "pushing the market" without growth from a company that becomes a niche leader in 18 months.
Two Typical Mistakes
Mistake 1: Treating everyone theoretically nearby as a competitor
The most common startup mistake at step one is labeling anyone even remotely similar to you as a competitor.
The right question is different: what will the customer do if your product doesn’t exist? Sometimes the answer is "nothing." In practice, this means the customer will keep solving the problem the way they always have: with an Excel spreadsheet, a manual process, or a hired intern.
In enterprise sales, deals are most often lost not to a competitor, but to the "decision to change nothing." In my experience, about 25% of potential contracts die exactly this way. If your positioning doesn't account for the "status quo" as your main competitor, you won't be able to nudge the client to move forward.
Next, there are what I call "phantom competitors." These are companies that could theoretically compete with you, but you never actually encounter them in real deals. As long as they don't appear in your funnel, don't try to differentiate yourself from them. It only dilutes your messaging. Your positioning should address what the client actually sees, not your analytical market report.
Mistake 2: Thinking you need to create a new category
When choosing a market category, there are two paths: take a spot in an existing one or try to create a new one and become the first in it.
An existing category relies on what the client is already familiar with. If I say "embedded database for mobile devices," you understand what a database is, and the qualifiers immediately narrow the scope. You understand the difference.
A new category is when you invent a framework that didn't exist before. For example, you say: we aren't a CRM system, we are a "customer relationship engine." No one knows what that is. Before "customer relationship engine" begins to mean something in the client's mind, you will spend years and millions trying to imbue the term with meaning.
There is a persistent belief that a category creator will inevitably dominate once the market matures. In practice, history often teaches the opposite. Category creators frequently lose to those who follow and refine the model.
People typically choose a familiar default tool over a lesser-known alternative. 90% of the IT companies that have gone public over the last five years were positioned in existing categories rather than creating new ones. Salesforce was a "CRM for small business"—a niche player in an existing category—until it reached hundreds of millions in revenue. Only then, once it had the capital and the momentum, did it begin to redraw the boundaries.
Creating a new category makes sense only when you have the resources and the time to do so. Most startups first need to capture a niche within an existing framework, survive until they hit hundreds of millions in revenue, and only then think about rewriting the rules.
The Bottom Line
Positioning is not a marketing gimmick or an exercise in word choice. It is the strategic foundation of your business. Everything else depends on how you define it: who you sell to, which channels you use, what you feature on your homepage, which product features you develop, and how you set your pricing.
And most importantly: positioning can be re-evaluated and changed. My “Microsoft Access killer” was a dead product right up until the moment someone thought to ask the six customers it actually helped: what are you doing with it and why? Sometimes, the only thing standing between a “failure” and a “billion-dollar breakthrough” is one well-formulated question.
If your company is currently tasked with rethinking its positioning and you want to pressure-test your logic with an active entrepreneur who has been through the process in their own niche, sign up for a free 30-minute consultation at unimentors.co.
