Stop competing on features. Learn April Dunford's proven 5-step positioning framework to make your product 'obviously awesome' to the right customers — backed by powerful analogies, real-world case studies, and actionable worksheets from the expanded edition.
6/2/2026
Written by: Aware Ascent
Credit Notice: This post explores the core principles and practical frameworks detailed in “Obviously Awesome” by April Dunford. The core concepts of positioning as deliberately choosing the context of comparison, the Five (Plus One) Components of Effective Positioning, the 5-step positioning process (competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target market characteristics, and market category), and the powerful real-world examples, including the Joshua Bell experiment, the Cake Pop transformation, the Siebel case study, the milkshake analogy, and the database repositioning, are all derived from Dunford’s extensive experience and work.
You have a brilliant product. It solves a real problem. But your ideal customers keep choosing competitors — or nothing at all.
That sinking feeling happens to founders and product marketers every day. The usual culprit? Terrible positioning.
Most teams position their product by listing features or comparing themselves to a category leader. But April Dunford, a 25+ year tech positioning veteran and author of Obviously Awesome, says that’s exactly backward.
In her book, she delivers a proven, structured framework that has transformed how companies like Slack, Lightbend, and IBM position new offerings. The book has recently been updated and expanded to include new insights from hundreds of positioning workshops and to better address the needs of multiproduct companies.
This guide walks you through the entire book — no fluff, no filler — so you can apply the framework tomorrow.
If you’re a product manager, founder, or marketing lead, this book will change how you think about go-to-market strategy.
Here’s a painful truth that runs throughout Obviously Awesome: Features have no intrinsic value. Their value depends entirely on the context a customer uses to evaluate them.
Dunford opens with a stunning real-world example. Joshua Bell is an award-winning violinist who sells out shows averaging $300 per ticket. The Washington Post convinced him to play his $3.5 million Stradivarius violin in a Washington D.C. subway station during morning rush hour.
The result? Over 1,000 people passed by in 45 minutes. Only 27 stopped to listen. He collected less than $40 in donations — not even a sixth of what a single concert ticket would cost. The largest crowd at any given time was only about 7 people. Some even found his world-class music annoying. In the subway, he was just “a man trying to make a dollar.”
Same musician. Same instrument. Same music. Different context = completely different perceived value. As Dunford writes, “Like Joshua Bell delivering a world-class performance in a context that didn’t ascribe value, lousy positioning makes your prospects work harder to figure out if you are worth paying attention to.”
Deep Insight: Most people rely on a frame of reference; they need to be able to compare one product or experience to another to better understand its value. Most products are exceptional only when we understand them within their best frame of reference.
| Context Element | What Customers Assume | Strategic Risk If Unmanaged |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Key features, pricing model, typical customer | Being compared to wrong competitors |
| Competitive Set | Available alternatives, feature benchmarks | Being seen as a weak copycat |
| Use Case | Specific problem being solved, workflow integration | Being perceived as a generalist “nice-to-have” |
| Target Customer | Relevant pain points, budget size, decision criteria | Messaging that resonates with no one |
Dunford identifies two common traps that keep companies stuck in ineffective positioning.
You get so stuck on what you intended to build that you don’t see when your product has become something else.
The Cake Pop Story (Expanded): A baker set out to create “the greatest chocolate cake in the world.” But during development, the cake turned out small — single-serving size. So the baker wrapped it in fancy packaging and tried to sell it in high-end bakeries.
The Cake Pop was a square peg in a round hole until they realized: “Yes, your product contains cake, but it’s the stick and the shape that make it amazing. You need to position your product so that the stick and the shape make sense.” By repositioning it as a lollipop for grownups, the stick and the ball suddenly belonged. It wasn’t a dessert; it was a snack for coffee drinkers on the go.
| Aspect | Cake Positioning | Cake Pop Positioning |
|---|---|---|
| Target buyers | Fancy bakeries, fine dining | Coffee shops, busy adults |
| Competitors | Cakes, pies, ice cream | Donuts, Danishes, candy bars |
| Price point | Premium, sit-down treat | Affordable, impulse buy |
| Key features | Organic ingredients, French salt | Convenience, portability, fun shape |
| Perceived Value | ”A small, overpriced cake" | "A clever, portable treat” |
You carefully designed a product for a specific market, but that market evolved. Competitors repositioned. Customer expectations shifted.
In Dunford’s own experience, a team sold a “diet muffin” for health-conscious consumers. Then a competitor opened across the street, selling the exact same muffin positioned as a “gluten-free paleo snack.” The trendy positioning won. The original baker lost customers — not because the product changed, but because the context changed. A product that was well-positioned in a market can suddenly become poorly positioned, not because the product itself has changed, but because the markets around it have shifted.
“While we understand that context is important, we generally fail to deliberately choose a context because we believe that the context for our product is obvious.” — April Dunford
| Symptom | Why It Happens | The Hidden Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Sales cycles are long and unpredictable | Prospects need time to invent their own context | Lost revenue, demoralized sales team |
| Deals are lost to “do nothing” | The case for change hasn’t been made | Zero-sum market growth |
| Constant price pressure | Product is seen as a commodity | Eroded margins, race to the bottom |
| Inconsistent sales messaging | No shared understanding of the competitive playing field | Inefficient marketing, confused buyers |
Great positioning rarely comes by default. If you want to succeed, you have to determine the best way to position your product deliberately, test, and try again. It’s a foundational marketing concept, but unlike marketing tactics that change every year, the basic tenets of positioning have held constant since the term was first coined.
Dunford outlines five essential components of effective positioning (plus a bonus sixth), all of which must be defined together and are interdependent.
| # | Component | Description | Key Question |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Competitive Alternatives | What customers would do if your solution didn’t exist | ”Do we understand the real alternatives, including ‘do nothing’?“ |
| 2 | Unique Attributes | The features and capabilities that the alternatives lack | ”What is our ‘secret sauce’ that truly stands out?“ |
| 3 | Value (and proof) | The benefit that those features enable for customers | ”Why does our secret sauce matter to the customer? Where’s the evidence?“ |
| 4 | Target Market Characteristics | The characteristics of buyers that lead them to care about the value | ”Who are the customers who buy quickly, rarely ask for discounts, and tell their friends?“ |
| 5 | Market Category | The market you describe yourself as part of to help customers understand your value | ”What box do we want customers to put us in?“ |
| 6 | (Bonus) Relevant Trends | Trends that your target customers understand and can help make your product more relevant right now | ”Why is our offering especially relevant today?” |
The components are linked by a powerful causal chain: The value you deliver depends on your differentiators, which depend on what alternatives you compare your product to.
In the updated edition, Dunford has refined her process to have five components and five steps instead of the original 10 steps, after hearing feedback that the numbers didn’t match. The pre-work section has also been expanded to include key decisions a team should make before beginning a positioning exercise.
Most people list direct rivals. Instead, list everything a customer does to solve the problem: Do nothing, use a manual workaround (spreadsheets, email), hire an agency, use a point solution, or use a suite product.
Deep Insight: In business software, the most common competitive alternative is a combination of general-purpose business software (spreadsheets, documents, presentations) and manual processes.
Example from the book: When Dunford positioned a new data streaming product, competitors weren’t just Kafka or RabbitMQ. The real competitor was “customers building fragile point-to-point scripts.” Positioning against that weakness changed everything. Understanding the alternatives is crucial, and the first step in any positioning exercise is to make a short list of your best customers, as they hold the key to understanding what your product truly is.
Write down 5–10 capabilities you have that competitors (from Step 1) lack. Don’t filter yet. Be specific. The key is to make sure they are different when compared with the capabilities of the real competitive alternatives from a customer’s perspective.
Weak: “AI-powered analytics” Strong: “Real-time anomaly detection without historical training data”
Ask: In what situation does my unique sauce matter most? And Which competitor does this situation hurt the most?
This is often where teams get stuck, and Dunford has significantly expanded this step in the updated edition based on client feedback.
Worksheet:
| Your strength | Where it’s valuable | Who suffers |
|---|---|---|
| No training data required | High-velocity data streams (fraud detection) | Legacy ML tools needing days of training |
| 99.99% uptime | Financial trading alerts | Open-source message queues (no SLA) |
Don’t invent nonsense jargon. Instead, describe the value you deliver and use words customers already understand. “It’s always better to be a little boring than completely baffling.”
Deep Insight: If you choose your category wisely, all the assumptions are working for you. You don’t have to tell customers who your competitors are. It’s assumed! You don’t have to list every feature, because it’s assumed that all products in the category have basic category functions.
Good: “Continuous integration for data pipelines” Bad: “Omni-channel hyperconverged data fabric”
Use this template:
For [target customer] who needs [urgent job to be done] , our product is a [category name] that delivers [most important benefit] . Unlike [competitors or alternatives] , we [unique primary differentiation] .
Real example from the book: A database company that couldn’t compete as a “database” repositioned as a “data warehouse.” The team delivered value that was much more clearly aligned with that category of solutions than it was with databases.
How do you know your positioning works? Run the elevator pitch test.
Ask someone to describe your product to a colleague. If they say:
“It’s like [competitor] but with [feature]” — your positioning is weak.
If they say:
“You know how [problem] happens in [context]? This solves it by [unique value]” — you’ve succeeded.
The goal: Make your product obviously awesome in the right context, not slightly better in the wrong one.
Dunford shares a personal story from early in her career. She was selling a next-generation database developed by PHDs. But the world didn’t want a fancy new database, and it showed. Often, her team would be booted off before they’d finish their presentation.
Everything changed when a customer told her, “You aren’t a database.” Completely baffled, she asked, “What the heck are we?” The customer explained that in his eyes, they were more of a business intelligence tool — specifically, a data warehouse (a specialized system used for data analysis).
By repositioning as a data warehouse, even though they lacked some traditional warehouse features, their unique value became clear. And importantly, the repositioning didn’t stop with marketing and sales — it changed the way they viewed themselves. They looked at future features and adjusted them to fit their new vision.
“Changing the way the company thinks about itself will usually have an impact on how product features get prioritized in the future.” — April Dunford
Dunford also shares a remarkable turnaround at Siebel. An enterprise CRM product had unique many-to-many mapping capabilities but few customers. Sales reps constantly heard: “Oh, it’s like Siebel, but crappy.”
The team repositioned the product as “CRM for investment banks” — a specialized niche where their unique data modeling capabilities were essential, not optional. By deliberately choosing this specific context, they went from being a weak copycat to an essential solution. The result was that Siebel itself had to acquire the company.
Dunford uses the famous “milkshake marketing” story from Clay Christensen to illustrate the power of understanding the “job to be done.” When a fast-food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes, traditional segmentation (demographics, flavor preferences) got them nowhere. They discovered the “job” their customers hired a milkshake to do: to make a long, boring morning commute more interesting, with a drink that could last 20+ minutes and be consumed one-handed.
By understanding this context, they could compete not just against other milkshakes but against bananas, donuts, bagels, and coffee — and win.
For companies without enough experience to see a clear pattern, Dunford suggests the “Fishing Net” approach. Position your net broadly as a generalist to catch as many fish as possible. Once you notice you’re catching “tuna,” you can move your boat to the tuna spot. It’s a deliberate “test and learn” strategy for positioning.
The updated version of Obviously Awesome includes several key refinements based on over 100,000 copies sold and hundreds of workshops conducted.
Strategy defines where you’re going; positioning reflects where you are today. Positioning must evolve as your product and market change. The pre-work section now includes key decisions a team should make before beginning a positioning exercise.
Simply adding AI is no longer meaningful. If everyone has it, the focus shifts to what tangible value you deliver right now.
Without customers, positioning is a best guess that must be tested and refined rather than treated as fact.
Positioning should resonate with the internal champion within a prospect’s organization, while objections from other stakeholders are handled separately.
There are now dedicated sections for multiproduct companies grappling with how to position their products in a company with multiple offerings.
Dunford’s framework is not just about logic; it’s about psychology. She argues that B2B buying is driven by the desire to avoid a public, career-limiting failure. Understanding this dynamic is critical for effective positioning.
| Customer Fear | How Weak Positioning Makes It Worse | How Strong Positioning Helps |
|---|---|---|
| Fear of making the wrong choice | Lists 10 undifferentiated features | States one clear, dramatic benefit |
| Fear of looking foolish to peers | Uses jargon and invented category names | Borrows a legitimate, understood category |
| Fear of high switching costs | Fails to differentiate from incumbents | Proves unique value in a new context |
| Fear of the unknown (status quo bias) | Competes on feature parity | Competes on enabling new capabilities |
| Fear of recommending a risky vendor | Vague market, no clear “winner” narrative | Clear market context and comparison set |
A powerful mental model from the book is to ask: For which jobs are we the only sensible choice? If you can’t answer that, you don’t have positioning; you have hope.
| The Customer’s Job to Be Done | Why Your Product Gets Hired | Why It Gets Not-Hired |
|---|---|---|
| Process-sensitive, compliance-heavy workflow | Audit trails, versioning, approvals (unique strengths) | General-purpose file sync without controls |
| Real-time alerting for high-stakes events | Guaranteed 99.99% uptime, millisecond latency | Batch-oriented systems without SLAs |
| Cross-functional team collaboration | Shared context, integrated comments, notifications | Email chains or disconnected tools |
| Trap | Why It Fails | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| The feature laundry list | No one remembers 10 features | Lead with 1 dramatic benefit |
| ”We’re like X, but better” | Trains customers to compare to X | Choose a different category |
| Positioning for everyone | Means you win no one | Narrow your initial beachhead |
| Changing positioning every quarter | Confuses buyers and sales | Keep core positioning for 12–18 months |
| Positioning without customer evidence | Sounds like marketing hype | Use quotes or data to anchor |
| Adding features that muddy positioning | Every new feature risks confusing your core message | Ask: “Does this serve our core customer?” |
You don’t need to be a VP of Marketing to use this. Try these exercises:
Write down 5 alternatives customers use instead of you. Circle the one you beat most badly. That’s your initial context.
List 3 strengths you have. For each, write one customer situation where that strength is a 10/10 and one where it’s a 2/10. Double down on the 10/10.
Until you have enough customer experience to see a pattern, position your net broadly as a “fish net.” This keeps your options open. Once you notice you’re catching “tuna,” move to the tuna spot.
Gather a cross-functional team. Ask everyone to agree on: (a) how to define the problem, (b) current solutions, (c) the gap, and (d) the key purchase criteria a customer should have.
Take your current homepage headline. Rewrite it using the positioning template. Show both versions to 3 customers who know you and 3 who don’t. Compare reactions.
Pro tip: Use the free worksheets on April Dunford’s website. They mirror the book’s exercises.
Dunford lists clear warning signs:
“If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales. If we fail at marketing and sales, the entire business fails.” — April Dunford
Q: Does this work for B2C products? A: Mostly yes, but B2C often involves emotional differentiation. Dunford’s examples lean B2B/tech. Still, the core idea (choose the comparison context) applies.
Q: How often should I revisit positioning? A: At least annually, or when you add a major new feature, enter a new segment, or see a new competitor emerge. Positioning is a process you might have to repeat over the course of your company’s life; markets change and products have to change with them.
Q: What’s the difference between positioning and strategy? A: Strategy defines where you’re going; positioning reflects where you are today. Positioning must evolve as your product and market change.
Q: How does positioning affect pricing? A: Directly. When you are the obvious choice for a specific job in a specific context, price becomes a secondary consideration. When you are a generic alternative, price is the primary consideration.
When you change the context, you change everything. The Joshua Bell experiment proves it. The Cake Pop story proves it. The $1.7 billion Siebel acquisition proves it.
Start with one step this week: map your true competitors. Not the ones you fear — the ones customers actually choose. Then ask: In what context does my product win by a landslide?
The noise of the market isn’t going to quiet down on its own. You have to choose to position deliberately. You have to practice the framework when you launch a feature or enter a new segment. It is the key to standing out without shouting.
“Great positioning rarely comes by default. If you want to succeed, you have to determine the best way to position your product. Deliberate, try, fail, test and try again.” — April Dunford
Actionable Takeaway: For the next week, before you write any marketing copy or pitch a prospect, run the “obviously awesome” test. Ask: What context makes my product the obvious choice? Lead with that context, not your feature list.
