April Dunford: Perfecting Your Product’s Positioning [Members Only]

Shane Parrish: I want to start with the basics. What is positioning?

April Dunford: It’s interesting. I’m a positioning expert, and when I started out as a consultant being a positioning expert, the worst part about that is [that] nobody really knows what positioning is. They think they do. People will say, “Positioning—it’s just like messaging, isn’t it?” And I’m like, “Actually no, it’s not quite that.” Or they’ll say, “Positioning is like a tagline.” We’re coming up with a tagline and I’m like, “Oh gosh, no. There [are] a lot of things that we do that aren’t tagline related.” My personal pet peeve is when people talk about brand positioning; that drives me nuts. There is positioning and there is branding. Those two things are actually really separate. Most of the things that we confuse with positioning are actually things we do with positioning once we’re done with it. Positioning is an input. If you think about it this way, if everything we do in marketing and sales is the house, positioning is the foundation upon which the house is built.