The Product

Mission

Mission statement: What your company is currently delivering to the market and the world. Some examples of strong 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.”

Vision

Vision statement: How your company plans to impact the market or the world in the future. Vision statements tend to be longer than mission statements. Salesforce has a good example:

Salesforce: “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.”

Sidebar: Mission and Vision are covered in more depth in Playbook #1: Brand Positioning That Tells a Great Story

Pitch to buyers and users

Your pitch is what you say to someone to get them interested in your product. Your pitch should be succinct, easy to understand, and tailored to your audience. Be sure to develop a pitch to the buyer and the user—as they often have different needs and goals.

A good pitch includes:

What the product is
Who it’s for
What it does
What are the benefits

Pitch Example: 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 (children) it might focus on taste.

Benefits, capabilities, and features

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

Continuing with the Cheerios example:

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

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

The Audience

Personas

Personas are archetypal or fictional representations of real users of your product or service. They are an extremely valuable tool for better understanding the experiences, feelings, behaviors, pain points, and goals of your users.

Sidebar: This is covered in Playbook #2: Personas—Your New Secret Weapon To Great Marketing

Jobs to Be Done

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a theory for understanding what motivates customers to buy your product. You can think of it this way: users "hire" software to help get their job done. While many strategies tell you to be customer-obsessed, JTBD theory says you should focus on the customer’s job, not who that customer is.

Sidebar: Dive deeper with Playbook #3: Identifying and Marketing the Jobs to Be Done

Customers

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

The Competition

The Market

Define what market your product operates in. Whether that’s data analytics and business intelligence for Looker, or marketing automation for MailChimp—it’s important to define the space you’re in so that people can quickly 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 are either early-stage companies working towards becoming market leaders in your space or they are ancillary products that could make a shift and become a competitor. For example, Facebook, just announced Messenger Rooms, a way to have group video calls. It’s doubtful that Zoom had previously considered the social media app to be a competitor, but now they are.

The Industry

Market Trends

You not only need to build a great product, but you also need to establish your company as a thought leader in your industry. By identifying market trends and defining your point of view on them, you will be able to create content to reach new audiences, attract visitors to your website, and position your company as a credible leader. Sharing your point of view and how your product fits in with market trends is a great starting point for content to be used in blog posts, podcasts, and interviews with journalists.

To give you an example, key trends in the AI/ML space are listed below. Be sure to not just define the trends, but establish your point of view on them and how your company is making its contribution. Declaring your point of view not only establishes you as a thought leader, but 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 of 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.

Now that you’re clear on the core components of product positioning and messaging, create your own guide in the next chapter.

The core tenets of Product Positioning & Messaging