Obviously Awesome: What April Dunford Gets Right About Positioning

Obviously Awesome by April Dunford is one of the few marketing books that earns its reputation. It makes a single, commercially important argument: most companies fail not because their product is bad, but because they have positioned it in a way that makes it invisible or confusing to the people who would buy it. The book gives you a repeatable process for fixing that, and it works.

Dunford defines positioning as the act of deliberately defining how a product is the best at delivering something a specific set of customers cares about deeply. That sounds simple. In practice, most marketing teams have never done it properly, and most leadership teams have never agreed on it in a room.

Why Most Companies Get Positioning Wrong Before They Even Start

When I was running an agency, we had a positioning problem that took us two years to properly diagnose. We were describing ourselves as a full-service digital agency with global reach. That was accurate. It was also completely useless as a positioning statement. Every mid-sized agency in Europe could say the same thing. We were not differentiated. We were just present.

What Dunford identifies, and what I had experienced before I had the language for it, is that most companies default to positioning by analogy. They describe themselves relative to the category they think they belong to, rather than asking whether that category is the right one. The result is a product that sounds like every other product in a market it may not even be best suited for.

This is not a startup problem. I have seen it at enterprise level, across thirty industries, in brands with eight-figure marketing budgets. The problem is not budget or talent. It is that positioning is treated as a branding exercise rather than a commercial one. It gets handed to a copywriter or a brand agency, and the output is a tagline that everyone internally quite likes and that customers find entirely unmemorable.

Dunford’s contribution is to pull positioning out of the brand team and put it back where it belongs: in a cross-functional conversation that includes product, sales, and leadership. That shift alone is worth the price of the book.

The Five Components of Positioning, and Where Teams Stall

Dunford structures positioning around five interdependent components. They are: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target customer characteristics, and market category. She is deliberate about the order. You work through them sequentially because each one informs the next.

The component that trips up most teams is competitive alternatives. Dunford is precise here. The question is not “who are your competitors?” It is “what would your customer do if your product did not exist?” Those are different questions with different answers, and the second one is the one that matters for positioning.

I have sat in enough go-to-market planning sessions to know that this question makes people uncomfortable. Sales teams want to talk about named competitors. Product teams want to talk about feature differentiation. Nobody wants to say “our main competitive alternative is a spreadsheet and a part-time analyst” because it sounds like an admission of weakness. In reality, it is the most honest and useful thing you can say, because it tells you exactly what your value proposition needs to beat.

The market category component is where Dunford is at her most interesting. She argues that the category you choose to compete in sets the context for everything the customer believes about your product before you say a single word. Choose the wrong category and you inherit the wrong assumptions, the wrong comparison set, and the wrong expectations. She gives the example of a product that was positioned as a database but was actually better understood as a project management tool. The repositioning changed everything: win rates, sales cycle length, and the profile of the customers who were willing to engage.

This connects to a broader point about go-to-market strategy that I think about a lot. If you are finding that your GTM motion feels harder than it should, the problem is often upstream of messaging. It is in the positioning. Vidyard’s analysis of why GTM feels harder points to a similar structural issue: teams are executing well on tactics while the strategic foundation underneath them is misaligned. Dunford gives you the tool to fix the foundation.

If you want more context on how positioning fits into a broader commercial strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the surrounding territory in detail.

The Positioning Exercise: How It Actually Works in Practice

Dunford outlines a workshop-style process for working through the five components with a cross-functional team. She is honest that it is not a quick exercise. Done properly, it takes a full day or more, and it requires people who can disagree productively.

The process starts with a list of your best customers, not your average customers. The logic is that your best customers have already figured out the value of your product. They are the signal. You work backwards from them to understand what they were comparing you to, what they valued most, and what made them choose you. That becomes the raw material for your positioning.

I ran a version of this exercise at an agency I was brought in to turn around. The business had been losing money for two years. The instinct of the leadership team was to go broader: more services, more sectors, more pitches. What the exercise revealed was that the work they were best at, and most profitable at, was in a very specific vertical with a very specific type of brief. They had been hiding that capability behind generic positioning because they were afraid of narrowing their market. The repositioning around that specialism was one of the levers that moved the business from loss-making to profitable within eighteen months.

That experience maps almost exactly to what Dunford describes. The fear of narrowing is real. The cost of staying broad is higher.

What Dunford Gets Right That Most Positioning Frameworks Miss

Most positioning frameworks are descriptive. They give you a template: “For [target customer] who [need], [product] is a [category] that [benefit], unlike [competitor] who [alternative].” You fill in the blanks and you have a positioning statement. The problem is that the output is only as good as the thinking that went into each blank, and most teams have not done that thinking.

Dunford’s framework is generative. It does not give you a template. It gives you a process for arriving at the right answers. The distinction matters because the right answers are not obvious. They require the kind of cross-functional alignment that most organisations find genuinely difficult.

She is also clear that positioning is not permanent. Markets change. Competitors change. Customer expectations change. The positioning you set today may need revisiting in two years. This is not a weakness in the framework. It is an honest acknowledgement of how markets work. BCG has written about the relationship between brand strategy and go-to-market alignment in ways that reinforce this point: positioning is not a one-time decision. It is an ongoing commercial discipline.

The other thing Dunford gets right is the relationship between positioning and sales. She is explicit that positioning is not just a marketing asset. It is a sales tool. When positioning is clear, sales conversations become shorter and more productive because the customer arrives with the right frame of reference. When positioning is muddled, sales has to do remedial work in every conversation, correcting assumptions and reframing the product from scratch. I have watched sales teams carry that burden for years, and it is expensive in time and conversion rate.

The Limits of the Book and Where You Need to Go Further

Obviously Awesome is a focused book. That is mostly a strength. But it does mean there are areas it does not cover in depth.

The book is primarily written for B2B technology companies, and Dunford acknowledges this. The framework is transferable to other contexts, but the examples and the language are rooted in SaaS and enterprise software. If you are working in consumer goods, retail, or professional services, you will need to do some translation work. The principles hold. The application requires adaptation.

The book also does not go deep on how to activate positioning once you have it. It tells you how to build the foundation. It does not tell you how to translate that foundation into a content strategy, a paid media approach, or a sales enablement programme. Those are separate disciplines, and Dunford is right to keep them separate. But if you are expecting a full go-to-market playbook, you will need to look elsewhere for the execution layer.

For teams thinking about how to connect positioning to creator-led distribution or social activation, Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market campaigns is a useful practical complement. It is a different layer of the same problem: how do you take a clear positioning and get it in front of the right people in a credible way.

The book also does not address the organisational dynamics of getting positioning work done. Dunford tells you who needs to be in the room. She does not tell you how to manage a CEO who thinks positioning is a marketing task, or a product team that believes the product speaks for itself, or a sales leader who is convinced that the current pitch is fine because they closed three deals last quarter. Those are real obstacles, and handling them requires a different kind of skill than the framework itself demands.

Who Should Read Obviously Awesome and How to Use It

The book is most useful for three types of reader. First, founders and CEOs of B2B companies who have a product that is working with some customers but struggling to scale. The positioning process will almost always surface the reason. Second, senior marketers who are being asked to improve conversion, pipeline quality, or win rates, and who suspect the problem is upstream of their campaigns. Third, anyone who has just joined a company and is trying to understand why the messaging feels inconsistent or why sales and marketing seem to be telling different stories.

When I joined Cybercom, I walked into a business that had a positioning problem it had not named. The agency described itself one way internally and a different way in pitches, and the two descriptions did not quite match. Nobody had sat down and worked through what we were actually best at and for whom. That work took time, and it required the founder to be involved, which is exactly what Dunford prescribes. It is not a task you can delegate downward and expect to stick.

If you are going to use the book as a working tool rather than just reading it, I would suggest treating the positioning exercise as a structured workshop with a clear owner and a documented output. The output should be a positioning document that sales, marketing, and product all sign off on, and that gets reviewed when the market changes significantly. Semrush’s analysis of growth strategy examples consistently shows that companies with clear, differentiated positioning outperform those that compete on feature volume or price alone. The book gives you the process to get there.

One practical note: do not run the positioning exercise without your best customers in the data set. Dunford is clear on this and she is right. Internal assumptions about why customers buy are almost always partially wrong. The customers who have already chosen you are the most honest source of truth you have.

The Bigger Commercial Argument Behind the Book

Dunford’s book is in the end making a commercial argument, not a marketing one. Poor positioning is expensive. It lengthens sales cycles because prospects arrive with the wrong frame of reference and need to be re-educated. It reduces win rates because you are being compared to alternatives you cannot beat. It increases churn because customers who bought based on the wrong expectations become disappointed when the product does not deliver what they thought they were buying.

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically about marketing effectiveness. The campaigns that win are almost always built on a clear, differentiated positioning. The creative work is strong, but the strategic foundation underneath it is what makes the work land. You can feel it when you read the papers. The brief was clear. The target was specific. The competitive context was understood. That is positioning doing its job.

The campaigns that do not work, and you see plenty of those in the judging process too, are often well-executed on a weak foundation. The production values are high. The media plan is solid. But the product has been positioned in a way that makes the campaign message generic or confusing. No amount of creative quality or media budget fixes that problem. You have to go back upstream.

Vidyard’s research on pipeline and revenue potential for GTM teams points to a consistent pattern: the companies with the strongest pipeline quality tend to have cleaner market definitions and clearer value propositions. That is positioning. It is not glamorous work. It does not produce a campaign reel. But it is the work that makes everything downstream more effective.

Forrester has tracked this dynamic for years. Their intelligent growth model consistently identifies market clarity as a precondition for sustainable revenue growth. Dunford’s book is the most practical guide I have read for achieving that clarity at a product level.

Positioning is one of the most commercially consequential decisions a company makes, and most companies make it by accident. Obviously Awesome gives you a structured way to make it deliberately. That is the whole argument, and it is a good one. The rest of the go-to-market picture, from channel strategy to measurement, is covered across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub if you want to build out from here.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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