Reaching Customers

Product Positioning – ‘Customer Value’ Frameworks

Written by Jane Morgan on .
Frameworks, are useful for product management roadmap and development planning, product positioning to your customers, product pricing, and for structuring marketing communications to different customer persona.  

The ‘good, better, best’ product positioning framework is solid.  As is product positioning based on size – small, medium and large – (e.g. size of the customer, users/seats, number of transaction). But these product positioning frameworks go beyond and tie more directly into customer value.

Product Positioning Along The Customer Journey

Use customer journey mapping to identify the value points along the process.  Each product/service should represent a juncture or transition point, in the ‘journey’ and be easy to identify.

Example: Align your B2B technology services along the installation process.

  • Installation: Ensure your installation is correct.
  • Configuration: Speed your time to value and ensure settings are optimized for your specific business and needs.
  • Integration: Align your new investment with existing capabilities / systems through project design, planning and implementation.

Product Positioning By Customer Capability

Different customer have varying degrees of in-house capabilities and available resources.  Positioning services along this continuum ensures customers get the most out of your offering and you have a larger market opportunity.

Example: B2B technology operations support.

  • Education: Learn best practices and new skills to ensure your operations team get the best from the product investment.
  • On-going Support: Get service level agreement backup for your in-house team so together we effectively manage most complex challenges or unexpected hiccups over the lifetime of the system.
  • Outsourcing: Achieve value quickly and reliably without the need to develop in-house skills by choosing an expert for all or some of the processes.

Product Positioning by Emotion

Emotion in product features makes for functional and successful product messaging.  Grounded in overall branding and customer benefits, it requires deep understanding of customers..
  • Customer Benefit – what the customer gets
  • Product Features – what it is
  • Product Benefits – what it does
  • Emotional Benefit – how it feels
 As Maya Angelou said;
“At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.”

Nick Bonney, one of my fellow Expert Independent Researchers at ICG, has more on Emotion in Product Features.

To get expert assistance with product positioning, contact Jane.

Hide Author Bio

About Jane Morgan

With 20 years high-tech marketing & product development experience from Boston to Billund, Berlin to Bangalore, Jane has managed teams and tech products with millions of installs, and millions of revenue (annually). She's researched and developed market strategy for global markets, and established the blueprint for product management in many new teams. As an intrapreneur turned entrepreneur, she changed vowels in 2014 and founded JEM 9 Marketing Consultancy. Today she works with CEOs & business leaders to assist them in understanding and reaching customers. Speaker on market research, technology marketing and product management.