A product launch is an expensive way to discover that your messaging was wrong. By the time the emails are scheduled and the sales team is briefed, the cost of a vague value proposition is locked in. Product marketing is the work you do before that, deciding who the product is for, what it replaces, and the handful of words a stranger has to believe to buy it.

The quick version

  • Positioning comes first, messaging second. Positioning is the decision (who it's for, what it competes with, why it wins); messaging is how you say it. Get the decision right and the words get easier.
  • Your real competitor is usually "do nothing". Most buyers compare you against a spreadsheet, an intern, or the status quo, not the rival you obsess over.
  • Size the launch to its ambition. Not every release deserves a campaign. A simple tier system stops you over-launching a bug fix and under-launching a new market.
  • Write messaging the sales team can repeat. If a value proposition can't survive being said out loud on a sales call, it isn't messaging, it's a slogan.

The idea in depth

Product marketing sits in an awkward, valuable gap: between the people who build the product and the people who sell it. Its job is translation. Engineers produce features; customers buy outcomes; product marketing turns one into the other and decides which outcomes to lead with. Three ideas do most of the heavy lifting.

1. Positioning is a deliberate choice, not a tagline

The most useful modern frame here comes from April Dunford's Obviously Awesome (2019). Her argument is that positioning isn't branding or a clever line, it's the context you set so a customer instantly understands what you are and why you're better. She breaks it into five components: your true competitive alternatives, the unique attributes you have that they don't, the value those attributes create, the customers who care most about that value, and the market category that makes the value obvious. Change the category and the same product can look mediocre or magical.

The component leaders most often skip is the first one. In Dunford's account, the competitive alternative is rarely the named rival on your battlecard. It's the spreadsheet, the manual workaround, the intern, or simply doing nothing. She has pointed out that in B2B a large share of deals are lost not to a competitor but to "no decision", the buyer looked, hesitated, and stayed with what they had. If you position only against direct rivals, you write messaging that answers a question nobody is asking.

You're not just better than the competition. First you have to be better than doing nothing.

So the move is practical: before you write a word of copy, list what your customer would actually do if you didn't exist. Then write your positioning against that, make the case for change first, and the case for you second. A one-page positioning statement (for: this customer; who: has this problem; our product: is a [category]; that: delivers this value; unlike: this alternative) drags all five choices into the open, where the team can argue about them.

One caveat worth keeping in view. Dunford's framework is a structured practitioner method, not a peer-reviewed result. It gives you a way to decide, not a guarantee you've decided correctly, and the output is only ever as good as the customer truth you feed in. Positioning that skips talking to real buyers tends to describe the product the team wishes it had built.

2. Not every customer wants the same story

Positioning also has to account for when in a market's life you're selling. Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm (3rd edition, 2014) builds on the technology adoption lifecycle and argues there's a dangerous gap, the chasm, between the early adopters who buy on vision and the early majority who buy on proof. Early adopters tolerate rough edges for a competitive jump; the pragmatic early majority, which Moore puts at roughly a third of the market, wants references, reliability, and the sense that respected peers have already moved.

That distinction matters because the messaging that wins the first group actively repels the second. "Be first, get an edge" thrills a visionary and frightens a pragmatist. The pragmatist's question isn't "is this exciting?", it's "who like me is already using this, and did it work?"

The move, then: know which side of the chasm your buyer is on and change the proof, not just the words. Selling to early adopters, lead with ambition and the upside of moving early. Selling to the mainstream, lead with named reference customers, before-and-after numbers, and a narrow "whole product" that solves one segment's problem completely rather than everyone's problem partly.

Where this one frays: the lifecycle is a model from the technology sector, and the clean five-segment curve is a tidy simplification of messy real markets. Treat it as a lens for a single question, "is this buyer a visionary or a pragmatist?", rather than a law that predicts adoption percentages.

3. Messaging is engineering, not decoration

Once positioning is settled, messaging makes it concrete. The most reliable input here is the customer's own world, and Osterwalder, Pigneur, Bernarda and Smith's Value Proposition Design (Wiley, 2014) gives a clean tool for capturing it: the value proposition canvas. One half maps the customer, the jobs they're trying to get done, the pains that frustrate them, the gains they want. The other half maps your offer, the products, the pain relievers, the gain creators. You have "fit" when your relievers and creators line up against the pains and gains the customer cares most about, not the ones you find easiest to build.

The discipline this enforces is anti-feature-listing. A feature is something your product has; a value proposition is a pain it removes or a gain it creates. "Single sign-on" is a feature. "Stop chasing six logins before your first coffee" is a message, because it names a pain a real person feels.

So in practice: write your messaging hierarchy as a short pyramid, one core value proposition at the top, three supporting pillars under it, and proof under each pillar. Then pressure-test it with the people who'll actually say it. If a salesperson can't repeat your top line from memory after one read, or a customer doesn't recognise the pain you named, the message has failed its only real test. Polished copy that sales quietly abandons is worse than rough copy everyone uses.

flowchart TD
  A(["Positioning · the decision
who it's for, what it replaces, why it wins"]) --> B(["Messaging hierarchy · the words
core value prop + 3 pillars + proof"])
  B --> C(["Launch · the timing & volume
sized to the release's real ambition"])
  C --> D(["Enablement · the sales team
can repeat it without the deck"])
  D -.->|what wins & loses feeds back| A
Positioning sets the decision; everything downstream is execution, and the field feeds it back. Leaders Loop

A worked example

Illustrative scenario; the company and figures below are invented to show the method, not a real case.

A small SaaS team has built a tool that schedules shift workers for cafés and shops. The first messaging draft reads: "AI-powered workforce optimisation with real-time analytics." It launches to silence. Demos book, then evaporate.

The product marketer runs the three steps. First, competitive alternatives: she asks the last ten lost prospects what they're using instead. Nine say a paper roster and a group chat; one mentions a rival app. The real competitor is pen, paper and "we cope." So the positioning has to make the case for changing at all, not for choosing this tool over another tool.

Second, the buyer: these are pragmatic owners, deep on the mainstream side of the chasm. They don't want "optimisation"; they want to stop redoing the roster every time someone calls in sick. The proof they trust is another café owner down the road, not a feature list.

Third, the value proposition canvas. Top job: cover every shift. Top pain: an hour lost each week re-juggling the roster when someone drops out. Top gain: get the night back. The rewritten core message becomes: "Fill a dropped shift in two taps, and get your evenings back." Underneath sit three pillars (fast re-fills, staff pick up shifts themselves, no double-booking), each with a named pilot café and a number.

The relaunch is sized as a modest, targeted push rather than a company event, the product is real but the market is one segment, so a full campaign would be over-launching. Sales gets a one-pager they can read aloud. Conversations stop being about AI and start being about Friday nights. (Figures and outcomes here are illustrative.)

flowchart LR
  J(["Customer job
cover every shift"]) --- P(["Pain
an hour lost re-rostering"])
  P --> R(["Pain reliever
two-tap shift re-fill"])
  R --> M(["Message
'Fill a dropped shift in two taps'"])
  G(["Gain
get the evening back"]) --> M
From the customer's world to the message: relievers answer pains, and the line names the gain. Leaders Loop

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between positioning and messaging?

Positioning is the strategic decision, who the product is for, what it competes with, and why it wins. Messaging is how you express that decision in words a customer reads or hears. Positioning is chosen in a room with the leadership team; messaging is written afterwards. Skipping straight to messaging is why so much copy sounds confident and means nothing.

Do I need a launch tier system?

If you ship often, yes. A simple ladder, from a quiet release with no marketing, up through a targeted launch to a segment, to a full multi-channel campaign, to a rare company-defining moment, stops two common failures: throwing a campaign at a minor update, and letting a genuinely new product slip out with a changelog note. Match the noise to the news.

How do I find my real competitive alternatives?

Ask recent lost deals and recent wins what they would have done if your product hadn't existed. Sales teams are usually the most reliable source. The answer is often "nothing", "a spreadsheet", or "an intern", and that, not the rival on your slide, is what your positioning has to beat.

How long should a value proposition be?

The core line should fit in a breath, short enough that a salesperson repeats it without checking the deck. Underneath it you can carry three supporting pillars and the proof for each. Length isn't the enemy; a buried headline is. Lead with the one outcome that matters most to your sharpest segment.

Who owns product marketing, product or marketing?

It bridges both and reports either way depending on the company. What matters less than the reporting line is the mandate: someone has to own the answer to "who is this for and why should they switch", and own it across the product, the launch, and the sales enablement so the story stays consistent end to end.

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