The key ideas

Obviously Awesome

April Dunford, 2019

Customers love the product, yet new buyers can't work out what it is? April Dunford spent many years bringing technology products to market, and she believes the problem is usually not the advertising but the context in which people see the product. Her book shows, step by step, how to choose a place in the market where the product's strength is obvious at once.

Who it is for

For founders, marketers and salespeople whose product is loved by its current customers but baffles new ones. And for anyone tired of explaining how their work differs from everyone else's.

Your product is not doomed to languish in a market where nobody understands how awesome it is.

America's best violinist outside a subway station

Morning rush hour in Washington. Outside a subway station a violinist is playing, a man whose concert tickets cost 300 dollars or more. This is Joshua Bell, who at the time was considered the best classical musician in America. The Washington Post set up the experiment to find out whether passers-by would notice his talent.

In 45 minutes, 1,070 people walked past. Seven stopped to listen, 27 gave money, and in total Bell earned 32 dollars and 17 cents. The music was the same as in the concert hall. Everything around it had changed: instead of a stage and an orchestra, there was a trash can beside him, and he was playing for tips.

April Dunford repositioned every one of the sixteen products she brought to market. She describes positioning as context: everything that tells a person, within a couple of seconds, what they are looking at, who it is for and why it matters. In the wrong context even a world-class product can fail.

Dunford is convinced that a product's place in the market can be chosen deliberately. Ahead: a cake that became a muffin, a database its customers didn't consider a database, and Dunford's own step-by-step method.

The cake on a stick nobody wanted to eat

Dunford explains her main idea with an example she made up. Imagine a baker who decided to bake the best chocolate cake in the world. By calling the product a cake, he decided, before mixing any batter, who his buyers would be, where to sell it, what to compare it with and how much to ask for it.

But the cake came out small, a single serving, and the baker put a little wrapper around it. Same batter, but now the product is a muffin. Muffins are sold in coffee shops next to donuts and bagels for a buck or two, and that is a completely different business. The first trap: through all the tweaks the product has become something else, while its creator still sees in it what he set out to make.

The second trap is that the market around it changes. For years the baker sells a “diet muffin” with nuts and dates. Across the street a bakery opens with almost the same muffin, only it is called a “gluten-free paleo snack”, and even his regulars go there. The word “diet” has simply gone out of date.

The funniest example is a cake on a stick that you eat without a fork. It sounds odd: a stick has no business being in a cake. Now call the very same thing a lollipop for grown-ups. The stick and the ball are suddenly where they belong, and it's a snack, not a dessert. That is how the cake pop came about.

Dunford's conclusion: there is no such thing as a default position. Almost any product can be placed in different markets, and the best of them is rarely the one it started in.

Read in Livria

About the author

April Dunford is a consultant on positioning and market strategy. Over twenty-five years as a vice president of marketing at fast-growing startups she launched sixteen products, and today she runs workshops for teams at technology companies.

All books by this author: April Dunford

Terms from the book

  • Trend
  • blockchain
  • Uber
  • IBM
  • Bell
  • Positioning
  • Washington Post: One of the largest American newspapers, published in Washington, DC.
  • Muffin: A small single-serving cake, usually sold in coffee shops with breakfast.
  • Paleo: The paleo diet, a fashionable way of eating in which people eat only what, in its followers' view, ancient humans ate: meat, fish, nuts and vegetables, with no grain or sugar.
  • Cake pop: A ball of sponge cake and frosting on a stick. It looks like a lollipop.
  • DB2: A database from IBM. It was known above all as a system for mainframes.
  • Mainframe: A large, powerful computer on which big companies store and process their data.
  • Malicious compliance: Doing exactly what was asked, to the letter, in order to show how stupid the request was.
  • Competitive alternatives: Dunford's term: what customers would use if your product didn't exist. It can be a competitor, a spreadsheet, an intern or a decision to do nothing.
  • Unique attributes: Dunford's term: the capabilities your product has and the competitive alternatives don't.
  • Value: For Dunford, the benefit that the unique attributes give a customer, put in terms of the customer's own goal and backed by proof.
  • Market category: The market in which you place your product. In Dunford's view, the name of the category itself tells a customer whom to compare you with, what you should have and how much you cost.
  • Excel: Microsoft's spreadsheet program.
  • Data warehouse: A system into which a company gathers data from different sources in order to analyse it and build reports.
  • Fuzzy logic algorithm: An example from the book: a way of computing that works not only with “yes” and “no” but with the answers in between. Dunford uses it as a model of a feature that tells a customer nothing.
  • CRM: Customer relationship management, a system for working with customers: contacts, negotiations and deals are kept in it.
  • Salesforce: An American company, the leading seller of CRM systems.
  • Clearpath: Clearpath Robotics, a company that makes self-driving vehicles for factories and warehouses.
  • OTTO Motors: A division of Clearpath Robotics that builds driverless vehicles for moving materials inside industrial sites.
  • Janna Systems: A Toronto startup where Dunford worked. It sold CRM and was later acquired for 1.7 billion dollars.
  • Siebel: Siebel Systems, an American company that led the enterprise CRM market in the years Dunford worked at Janna Systems.
  • Big Fish, Small Pond: The name of one of Dunford's three styles of positioning: winning a piece of an existing market where buyers have special needs.
  • Segment: A part of a market: a group of buyers with shared traits and shared needs.
  • Redgate: Redgate Software, a British company from Cambridge that makes tools for working with databases.
  • DevOps: An approach in which writing software and running it on servers are handled as one process. The name is built from the English words development and operations.
  • Groomers: People who trim, wash and brush pets.
  • Long Blockchain: The new name of the American company Long Island Iced Tea, which sold iced tea.
  • Nasdaq: An American stock exchange where the shares of many technology companies are traded.
  • Sales story: Dunford's term: the order in which a salesperson talks about the product. First the problem, then how it is solved today, what the ideal solution would be, and only then the product itself.

All terms

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