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The Ultimate Product Positioning & Messaging Guide

How to define and communicate your product’s unique value proposition

So you’ve built a cool product and it’s time to take it to market.
One slight problem: you have no idea how to actually talk about it.
You’re unsure how to clearly communicate how your product provides actual value to your target audience. And maybe your team(s) are not completely aligned on why you built the product in the first place, or who you’re selling too.
Vision, mission, pitch and benefits.
Personas, Jobs To Be Done, and understand your existing customers.
The market, market leaders and emerging threats.
Market trends.

THE INTRO

So you’ve built a cool product and it’s time to take it to market. One slight problem: you have no idea how to actually talk about it. You’re unsure how to clearly communicate how your product provides actual value to your target audience. And maybe your team(s) are not completely aligned on why you built the product in the first place, or who you’re selling too.

Okay, this might be a bigger problem than we thought. The good news is that there is a simple solution: create a compelling product story through strong positioning and messaging.

Now you’re probably thinking: what the heck is positioning and messaging? You’re in luck because that’s exactly what this guide is going to help you understand. Let’s start with the basics.

Here at Olivine, our take on positioning is simple, yet effective.

Product positioning is where your product fits in the market, who you serve, what you’re doing, and how you’re different. In other words, this means answering (important) questions like:

Where does your product fit in the hearts and minds of your audience?
What market segments are you targeting?
How do you want your audience to think
about your product?
How are you different from competitors?
What unique value can only you provide
to your customer?

And while these questions seem simple, they’re most definitely not. It can take weeks just trying to answer these five questions, but in the end, it’s always worth it. That’s because positioning is foundational — without clear positioning, there is no story, and there is no strategy.

Product messaging is the clarity of what you say about your product. This can look different depending on your specific marketing channels, but messaging is the foundation for copy that will live on landing pages, blog posts, announcements, press releases—and even job descriptions. Product messaging is what you say about what you’re building.

In this guide, you’ll be introduced to Olivine’s core tenants of product positioning and messaging. Our framework has helped dozens of successful tech companies clarify their product’s unique value and how they communicate to the world. And now with this [template], you too will have an internal resource that informs everything you say and do related to your product.

Download our Product Positioning & Messaging Template

THE PRODUCT

Vision

Vision Statement

This is how your company plans to impact the market or the world in the future. Vision statements tend to be longer than mission statements and have that transformative and aspirational language. A simple way we like to think about this is: how will the product be in 5 years if resources aren’t constrained?

Salesforce is a great example:

“We believe that the business of business is to improve the state of the world, and we work to make sure Salesforce is a platform for change through serving the interests of all our stakeholders — employees, customers, partners, communities, and the environment.”

Mission

Mission Statement

This is what your company is currently delivering to the market and the world. In other words, your mission is how you plan to achieve your vision. A mission can be measured and accomplished.

Here are some of our favorite mission statements:

INTERCOM’S MISSION STATEMENT

“Make internet business personal.”

MAILCHIMP’S ENGINEERING MISSION STATEMENT

“We give marketers production-ready software designed to help them grow. We succeed through togetherness, momentum, and pragmatism.”

ZOOM MISSION STATEMENT

“Our mission is to develop a people-centric cloud service that transforms the real-time collaboration experience and improves the quality and effectiveness of communications forever.”

Pitch

Elevator pitch to buyers and users

Your elevator pitch is what you say to someone to get them interested in your product. Imagine you only have 45 seconds (the average time it takes in an elevator to get to your floor). What do you say? Your pitch should be succinct, easy to understand, and tailored to your audience.

At Olivine, we suggest crafting a pitch to your buyer and your user—as they often have different needs and goals. (The person who buys your product isn’t always the end-user).

A good pitch includes:

What the product is
Who it’s for
What it does
What benefits the buyer and user gets from the product

A clear and familiar example: Cheerios

Cheerios is a whole-grain toasted oat cereal for anyone who eats breakfast. It keeps you full until lunch and is packed with vitamins and minerals.

In this Cheerios example, the pitch to buyers (adults/parents) focuses more on health benefits. For users (aka children) it might focus on taste.

Benefits

The differences between benefits, capabilities, and features

These three have a lot in common, but they also have important distinctions.

Benefits are the value your customers get from using your product. Capabilities are the actions users can take to get value from your product. Features are the product components that enable user actions.

Back to our Cheerios example:

Benefit: Feel full after a healthy* breakfast
Capability: Eat breakfast
Feature: Calcium Carbonate

*This guide does not believe eating Cheerios is actually a healthy breakfast.

THE AUDIENCE

Personas

Personas are archetypal or fictional representations of the real users of your product or service.
They help you humanize who you are selling to and are an extremely valuable tool for better understanding the experiences, feelings, behaviors, pain points, and goals of your users. Personas are a huge part of our product marketing framework at Olivine — we always start every product marketing project by understanding and aligning on key personas.

Jobs To Be Done

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a product innovation theory for understanding what motivates customers to buy your product. Combining your buyer personas with the job people hire your product to do will give you a more complete picture of the real problem they’re trying to solve. This, in turn, will help you improve product development and create powerful product positioning and messaging that speaks to your buyers’ true needs and motivations.

We offer workshops such as Personas and Jobs To Be Done to help you align on who you’re selling to and identify the true pain points of your buyers.

Understand your existing customers

Often overlooked, customer testimonials are a powerful marketing tool. By letting your customers share an authentic experience of using your product, you can create a powerful endorsement that often resonates with prospects more than product landing page copy.

THE COMPETITION

The Market

Identify the market in which your product exists. Whether it’s data analytics and business intelligence for Looker, or marketing automation for MailChimp-it’s important to clearly define the space you operate in so your buyers can easily understand what you do.

Market Leaders

Market leaders are the companies who have established a brand presence in the mind of your target audience. They likely have a robust product offering, capital resources, and a large customer base. While there’s no need to obsessively track every move they make, it is important to understand what they offer and where they’re going so you can plan accordingly — and hopefully unseat them.

Emerging Threats

Emerging threats tend to be either early-stage companies looking to become market leaders, or ancillary products that could become competitors. An example of this could be Facebook, who just Messenger Rooms, a way to have group video calls a few years back. Although Zoom might not have previously considered Facebook a competitor, they sure do now.

Need help understanding how you stack competition? Work with us on a product up against your marketing project to uncover your unique value proposition.

THE INDUSTRY

Market Trends

To succeed in today’s competitive markets, having a great product isn’t enough — you need to position yourself as a thought leader in your field. That’s why staying on top of existing and new market trends, and sharing your opinions
on them, will help you craft new content, reach new audiences, attract leads to your sites, and position your company as a credible leader.

To give you an example, we’ve listed a few key trends in the AI/ML space below.

It’s important to not just define trends or list examples, but to actually share your point of view on them and how your company is making its contribution to the field. This helps people understand why they should care about what you are building.

Automated machine learning

The process of automating end-to-end the process of applying machine learning to real-world problems.

Big data

Data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a tolerable elapsed time.

Data rights

Data rights are the new IP rights. Data is the last competitive advantage in our world where
IP has become commoditized.

Ethics if AI

The discussion around designing and maintaining the automated systems we build for sustaining our lives and how we will ensure they are done so equitably.

GDPR

General Data Protection Regulation has had the most impact of any law globally in terms of creating a more regulated data market – with data being the key ingredient for AI applications.

Job loss due to AI

The concern around low and middle-skilled workers being replaced by technology and the impacts on unemployment and society.

Model governance

The practice of being able to control and validate machine learning models to ensure accuracy and reliability.

Making AI more auditable

Model reproducibility or explainability is critical to making business decisions and building trust with society.

Making models on ‘small data’

One-shot learning, few-shot learning.

YOU DID IT!

Congrats! You made it to the end, so you’re officially all caught up on what is Product Positioning & Messaging.

Our product marketing leaders come from a variety of different industries, roles, and verticals, so we can help you nail your positioning and messaging (it’s what we do best). And our work
for product positioning and messaging doesn’t just stop here, we’ll help you define your personas (your target audiences, both buyers and users) and identity and market the jobs-to-be-done for each persona so your positioning and messaging is even stronger.

Want to discuss a product marketing project?

Now that you’re a positioning pro, take the next step and work with us. Olivine’s product marketing consultants can work with your team to define, shape, and launch products to market.

What is Olivine?

Olivine Marketing is a full-service agency that helps growth-stage B2B SaaS companies with product marketing strategy, branding & websites, and sales enablement.

We also have Olivine Playbooks, a self-serve marketing program to help early-stage founders and first marketing hires nail their marketing strategy and drive revenue.