Inside Olivine #7
🎯 Positioning: Just Do It (or at least try) with Jadon Thomas
Wah gwarn!
Jadon Thomas here, Product Marketing Associate at Olivine, and that’s how we say “what’s going on!” in the Caribbean. This month we’re talking One Direction concerts, Air Jordans, and moms driving Jeep Wranglers, which can only mean one thing—positioning.
But first, here’s a little about me: I live on the sunny island of Antigua, home to hundreds of white sand beaches that I should be visiting more often. My wife and I love the island life—the slower pace, music, and good food—but since this isn’t a travel blog, let’s talk about marketing.
Hot topic: How positioning works in real life
TL:DR: If you don’t take a stand with your positioning, no one will join you. Making a choice is more important than making the right choice.
Black, White, or Gray?
The theory of positioning says, to be successful you should pick one person to go after for your one product. That seems like it makes sense. What stops you from following through is your mind often takes that to mean: less people = less money. So to combat that, we try to rope in as many people as possible in an attempt to get more revenue.
But that’s not the best option. At a One Direction concert, how many non-teenage girls are in the crowd? Or how many people who have never bounced a basketball in their life wear Air Jordans? This isn’t something new. There are countless times when you’ve purchased something that clearly wasn’t meant for you.
That’s because positioning in real life isn’t black and white, it’s a whole lot of gray. You enter the world of feelings, emotions, and aspirations. So your goal with positioning is to become as relevant as possible to your target market.
That’s what One Direction and Jordan do well. They focused on creating the best product or experience for a specific type of person. But when you widen your positioning, perhaps to increase revenue, you actually end up with the opposite effect because your positioning is being watered down. You're becoming less and less relevant to the people that matter.
Remember that the next time you have to make a positioning decision. While you might be hesitant to call out a specific persona for your product, do it anyway. Chances are, that won’t stop someone who sees the value for themselves. Here’s another real-world example: Pavement Princesses.
Pavement Princesses
Think of the type of person that drives a Jeep Wrangler. Who does that look like? Try to imagine them.
My guess is that you thought of a young man with an epic beard, probably early 30s, who likes the outdoors, off-roading, and might need to tug a boat or a couple of ATVs. That’s a solid guess at that persona. But while Jeep Wrangler screams tough dudes driving through mud or up mountains, it’s not uncommon to see middle-aged moms dropping their kids off at school in a Jeep Wrangler. They call those moms “pavement princesses” in the Jeep community.
What causes that phenomenon? It’s that positioning isn’t just about who a person is, it also speaks to who a person aspires to be. For those moms, they want to feel that they are still tough as nails and down for adventure, even if they never actually take the vehicles off-road. That’s what the Jeep Wrangler does for them.
That’s the same thing that is happening to your product. Even though you take a stand and position your product as one thing for one person, anyone who finds it relevant will join you, especially if they believe your solution overlaps their problem.
No more shadow boxing
You can shadow box a lot and get pretty good, but you don’t actually know how good you are until someone is in the ring with you and you get decked. That’s what narrowing your positioning is like. It’s less about finding the perfect person and more about describing the perfect solution. And sure, you might get knocked out in the first round but at least you know where you stand (or better said, where you’re lying down). And as you lay on the floor, you can reassess, “Ok maybe that was a little too big of a person to try and fight.” But you never know until you make the tough decision.
So whether you’re a founder battling with narrowing your target audience or a PMM wondering how to write to the 15 personas the company is going after, take the stand. Put a foot down, a flag in the ground. Pick your best three personas, make a playbook and close those deals. Sure, narrowing your positioning is scary, but making a choice is more important than making the perfect choice.
Quick plug: Olivine has a rare client opening, so if you’re thinking about getting some outside help with positioning/messaging/go-to-market strategy, check out our portfolio and reach out to us here.
Top Tweet
The Top Tweet for this month fits right into the topic of positioning. A narrow positioning seems risky, but the real mistake is not making a decision at all. Like Harry said, “Be courageous enough to accept it may not hit but it will never hit if you don’t focus.”
Fresh Finds
Tool I love
Hemingway App is software that makes your writing bold and clear. I was just introduced to this and it’s really great. In a bit of a meta-analysis, I ran this newsletter was run through the app. It scored a Grade 6 readability level and you’ve been seeing the types of suggestions it made which, hopefully, made this easier to endure read. (Ok, that last one wasn’t Hemingway)
Shallow dive
Podcast fiend? Al Dea put together a list of 14 podcasts from PMMs that you can check out.
Deep dive
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making. His book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a must read for anyone in marketing. But for those short on time, he shares his best learnings on Talks at Google in this video. (YouTube video, 1 hour)
Inside Olivine
Content Gems
Product Marketing should be using storytelling at every stage of the product life cycle, here’s why
How a product marketing consultancy can help you build alignment & execute faster
Client Happenings
Congrats to ConductorOne on raising $15M of Series A funding. We’re excited to see them continue their vision of building easy-to-use identity security products.
Equals announced the release of their Salesforce integration. They also have their Pivot tables feature in early beta.
Smallstep has been working hard on their Certificate Manager product and we’re happy to say it’s out of Beta.
Stellar Tickets sat down with producer Eva Price — the three-time Tony-winning creative powerhouse, for a conversation about the joys, challenges, and opportunities in producing and marketing streaming content.
See yuh later! (that’s how we write “see ya later!” in the Caribbean). See ya next month.