Positioning For Traction
Category Design or Positioning? Which Is Best For You?
To gain traction, first clarify why you are different.
If I could offer only one piece of advice to a founder or product marketer, this would be it.
Of course I don’t mean be different for the sake of being different. I mean being meaningfully different from competitors as perceived in the mind of a valuable audience.
This is the essence of positioning, a concept first popularized by Al Ries & Jack Trout in their seminal book “Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind” (1980)
Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position your product in the mind of the prospect. –Ries & Trout.
Fast-Forward 4 Decades…
More than 40 years have passed since the days of Xerox and Atari in which the book was written.
That’s 18 years before Google search and 27 years before the iPhone. So naturally several new approaches that augment Ries & Trout’s thinking. Of these the most influential are probably:
Play Bigger (2016) - Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher
, Kevin Maney. The original book on Category DesignObviously Awesome (2019) -
. The leading modern voice on Positioning.
The experience and opinions of the authors differ to the extent that many wonder whether Category Design is a part of type of positioning, or something different entirely.
And if they are in fact competing approaches, this presents you with a choice to make…
Should You Practice Category Design or Positioning?
This article started as an exploration of the similarities and differences in these methods. But mid-way through writing I realized it had become a long and overly academic splitting of hairs.
Worse still, it was rather boring. 😬
So let’s shorten all that, and jump instead to how these techniques can help you in gain traction in the modern age of AI, which is what Traction Design is all about.
More Alike Than Different
Both the Play Bigger and Positioning camps cite inspiration and reverence to Ries & Trout’s work, so they share many goals and principles including:
The importance of differentiation
The importance of point of view, which Category Design famously emphasizes, but April agrees too
The importance of positioning coming from the top as a whole-business activity, not just a marketing activity
The importance of taking a customer-centric view, not a product-centric view
In the importance of creating a new category when the situation demands it
In this regards, the two camps are closely allied in how they to help companies, albeit with different ideas on how to get there.
(Hat-tip to Joe Zboch for sharing this clip)
More Different Than Alike
The key difference of approach between Category Design and positioning is the entity that you would position yourself against.
In Ries & Trout’s original work they describe a ladder that they suggest should influence how you position relative to other products around you.
In Obviously Awesome April also emphasizes the role of competitors in the positioning of your product.
Strong positioning is centered on what a product does best. Once you have a list of competitive alternatives the next step is to isolate. What makes you different and better than those alternatives.
It’s important to note that “competitive alternatives” here does not refer only to direct competitors in the form of other similar products. Just as important (if not more) are indirect competitors, such as post it notes, spreadsheets, interns, or doing nothing at all!
Meanwhile, As I explained in my last post, Category Design positions not one product against another, but a new category against other categories, wrapping and de-positioning all other products in the market in the process,
The authors and other proponents of the approaches enjoy some debate of which approach is better, (as well as some unnecessary debate and misunderstanding which I’ve decided to cut from this article)
A Complement Not A Choice
It’s no secret that I am huge fan and proponent of Category Design, but I’m not an absolutist and I find great value in contrasting it with the advice from both April and Ries & Trout too.
In this regard I’m pleased to have found the excellent Category Thinkers community. Even within a community expressly formed around interest in Category Design, there is a productive willingness to explore alternative views.
Some such as
propose that Category Design is a form of good positioning, albeit a form with an especially assertive POV.
Other such as John Rougeux share models of how to use both Category Design and Positioning together in a single framework.
Positioning within Traction Design
Like great category design, great books focus on moving the world’s perception from a certain state, to a new state.
Ries & Trout’s books moved the marketing world from creatively crafted advertising slogans to strategic positioning
April’s work sought to add a practical “How to” to implement positioning
Play Bigger taught applying positioning at the level of the category, not product in the pursuit of more impactful outcomes
Researching this article has convinced me there is not a huge amount of value to be found in debating the differences within the books as the intended scopes were different.
I’d rather ask how the context has changed in the years since these books were published, and what new augmentation of ideas that new context requires. In my opinion the most important context right now is the increased focus on traction.
aims to address the problem that the #1 existential threat to startups today is lack of traction.As the market is the most powerful force influencing startup success, Traction Designers should start by designing a lucrative position in the market. This means whether creating a new category is needed/desirable or taking a position within an existing category will do.
With that in mind, here are three opportunities to augment & tweak the work of the aforementioned authors for this new context.
1: Starting From The Founder
One area of white space between April Dunford’s advice and that of some of the Play Bigger authors is where you should start.
Based on her experience positioning for hundreds of B2B tech startups, April has found starting from competitive alternatives to be the most practical.
In April’s model, this places the category as a later consideration.
Play Bigger authors such as Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney quite strongly disagree, as this is a core principle of Category Design.
Category Design is a discipline of creating and monetizing new markets in a noisy world. The journey starts with understanding the problem that you desire to solve. The problem is the proxy for the category and is the strategic element you see missing in the world.
–Play Bigger
Contrary to popular misconception, Category Design does not actually start with the category. It actually starts with the problem, as is well explained in these posts from Mike Damphouse and Pablo Gonzalez.
Positioning In Traction Design Starts With The Founder
Traction Design believes that what’s more important than satisfying a market, is satisfying a market that satisfies the founder. No process should lead a founder to a product they don’t want to build, or a market they don’t want to serve.
That’s why in my consulting I always start by understanding which of the following is non-negotiable for the founder:
The problem they solve (Most common)
In this case, the process flows as A: Problem 👉 B: Customer (that most values the problem) 👉 C: Solution (That solves the the problem)The customer they solve it for (Typical for mission-driven founders)
Flow becomes A: Customer 👉 B: Problem (That customer most values) 👉 C: Solution (That solves the the problem)The solution they are creating (Common for technical founders)
Flow is A: Solution 👉 B: Problem (It solves) 👉 C: Customer (That most values the problem)
All of the these 3 approaches crystallize context on the problem, from which the founder’s contrarian (non-consensus) opinion is crystallized. This is what category designers call the POV, and is the razor that bisects even a crowded market into just 2 categories of product:
Those that agree with your POV (Your category)
Those that do not agree (Anti-category)
This defines the level of need for creating a new category.
In some cases it could be that a valuable sub-category of a given market exists and is virtually unchallenged or ripe for disruption. But if the market is mature, competitors are entrenched, or no appropriate existing category exists, category design is recommended.
2: Positioning For Long And Short Traction
The Play Bigger authors recount their experience working for public companies such as Macromedia, and their subsequent companies seem to mostly serve enterprises.
April’s describes her experience to mostly focus on fixing positioning problems in the growth stage of startups these days, though her earlier career included many positioning products in the earlier stage.
My general impression is that the methods described in their respective books better suit companies that are already established and well funded. This creates a need for more exploration of earlier stage technique.
Traction Design encourages practicing positioning long before the budget for a lightning strike exists, and long before the product’s differentiated value has been validated.
This detail influences the logical order of positioning as discussed above, but also the purity of with which you should apply category design.
Category Designers like Christopher Lochhead often defend against the objection that category design is expensive by countering that in the long run it is much less expensive than hand-to-hand combat with competitors.
I can believe that this is ultimately true in the long term, but in the short term, that just doesn’t put food on the table.
If your strategy envisions a new category that you are yet to create, the inbound demand for that category is zero.
Just as Jay Z said “I can’t help the poor if I’m one of them” I find in practice that you need to start with some pragmatic conquesting of demand from within existing categories to pay the bills while you build the new category.
This creates the need to change positioning at least once en route to your category, feeding early sales when you “Dam the demand” from existing categories until demand for your new category is sufficient.
In Traction Design this maps two distinct phases - Long Traction and Short Traction - which I plan to explain in a future post.
3: Positioning Drives Product
If the market is what makes or breaks the product, then your market positioning should be designed and validated before the product is made.
Good positioning - either by Category Design or not - defines all the constituent parts of a good product by covering:
The problem it solves
The very specific customer it is for
What outcome it needs to create in the customer’s lives
What features and benefits it needs to deliver this
Precisely what killer features and superpowers it must excel at and be known for in order to stand out in the market
The best time to position a product, and/or design a category therefore, is before the actual product is built.
This creates the opportunity to build only the right features, pitched for just the right buyers, and do it earlier in your runway.
Of course in practice, that’s rarely the case. You probably already have a product in some form, and if you’ve read this far you’ve already experienced some pain from positioning that doesn’t quite work.
But don’t worry, because the second best time to nail your positioning is right now.
Or maybe not “nail” it, because early stage startup life is prone to significant pivots and major discoveries. But in a world where Traction is king and funding is lean, startups can’t afford to spend months of their time building the wrong product.
Therefore the third offering I wish to contribute to augment the existing work of the aforementioned authors is specifically how to do positioning before the differentiated value is really known. And how to design a valuable category for the long term, while also putting food on the table in the short term.
These three principles
Founders First
Long and Short positioning
Positioning before product
Combine to update positioning for AI era.
I’ve been developing techniques to implement them over the last 8 years and will be walking through practical examples in future posts.
It’s true that almost all of my positioning work is predominantly Category Design work. But I do also get value from reading the positioning books discussed, so I recommend you give them a try too.
In many ways pitching Positioning against Category Design offers a false choice. As with the contrast of Lean Startup and Category Design, there are benefits of using both techniques together, or drawing inspiration from each.
Category Design in particular is more than just the assignment of a category name. It is a deep consideration of the fundamental problem and solution space which deepends value and differentiation even if you eventually decide to land in an existing category.
If you are interested in discussing this further, you can DM me on LinkedIn or subscribe to this publication to get a link to my Free Office Hours.
Special thanks to everyone that contributed including
, Christopher and all the folks at Category Thinkers.I hope that removing the exhaustive explorations of differing opinions helped it stay interesting. But if I’ve over-edited and omitted some key points about positioning and category design, do let me know in the comments below and we can keep it rolling. 👇