5 steps to create a perception of your product that your customers will love
A step-by-step guide to nail product positioning on your landing page.
Hey friends,
First off, apologies for not publishing my essays these last few weeks. It was a super hectic and stressful time for me. I’ll give you the TLDR version of what went down:
- My agency Market Curve hit 1k in monthly revenue for the first time!
- A cyclone hit the Eastern coast of India and caused a lot of panic in my area.
- I got my first vaccine shot after which I fell very ill.
- My laptop crashed and I had to buy a brand new laptop.
- My friend’s mother passed away giving me an opportunity to reflect and be close to my family.
It was a rough time, for sure, but I’m back up now and excited about the future. However, moving forward, I will be reducing the cadence of my essays to a bi-weekly one rather than a weekly one.
That way, I can manage my workload in a better way, and write on things in a more novel and innovative manner. God knows this marketing space is crowded!
With that out of the way…
Welcome to Issue #22 of Market Curve - a weekly newsletter exploring the intersection of marketing with consumer psychology and behavioral economics. Through Market Curve, I hope to offer marketers and founders a different perspective on how to better understand their customers - one that is rooted in science.
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Today on Market Curve, I will be talking about product positioning on your landing page. I’ll show you the 5 step- way in which you can create a perception of your product that is unique and one that your customers will love.
All in less than 10 minutes.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
Product positioning is creating a perception of your product showing its most powerful benefits to the customers that care most about it.
But why is this narrative important?
Positioning helps your customers perceive your product in a way which is defined by you. It's you who calls the shots and dictates how your product should be perceived. In other words, you give your customers a frame of reference using which they can judge your product.
But first, let us understand what we mean by perception.
Perception is vision. Perception is the way we "see" reality. What we see is objective. The way we see is subjective. The way we see any object defines its reality.
Let me explain by a simple example.
I see a bird flying in the sky. It's an objective reality. But what is my perception of it? It could be that the bird is flying from tree to tree to build a nest for her babies. If we believe that perception, we will label/judge that experience as "that is a hardworking bird".
But what if I perceived it as "even this bird has to fly around from place to place to fend for herself". I would then label that experience as "that bird is bound by the same rules that govern us humans".
The act in both situations is the same, the perception wildly different. Therefore, the same act could be perceived in infinite ways. The only limit is our imagination.
If creativity and imagination is infinite, then so is the number of perceptions we can create for any isolated act.
The same is true for your product.
You can create multiple perceptions of your product and the market you're in.
For now, we will focus on 9 such factors on which you can create your product perception.
These 9 factors are:
Pricing (Eg: High pricing or low pricing)
Quality (Eg: GPT-3 powered AI tool)
Convenience (Eg: get a free trial without signing up)
Customer Service (Eg: 24 hour service)
Strategy – e.g. Integrated systems
Structure – e.g. Service adds value to SaaS
Systems – e.g. Headless CMS improves flexibility
Shared Values – e.g. Customer support should be free
Style – e.g. Easier to use.
But why is setting up these factors important? Can't you do without them?
The short answer? No.
The long answer is that it’s important to grade the market and the players within it across these 9 themes to zero in on the gaps within the market.
So you can take advantage of those gaps and get a leg up over your competitors.
For example, maybe there is a product in your market that is high in quality but low in customer service. Maybe there is another product that is great in customer service but low in convenience.
Now you know where they fall short.
Creating this structure allows you to find out which of these themes are most important to your customer so you can study how your competitors fare against these metrics.
Once you do that, you are well on your way to finding out how you're better than your competitors.
Although you can create infinite perceptions of your product, there can only be one primary perception. You will need to create nested sub-perceptions to support your main perception.
These nested sub-perceptions will be a total of 4-5 in number.
And you will be sprinkling them throughout your positioning exercise.
We narrow it down to 4-5 because we don't want to overwhelm our prospects with too many ideas. They are already bombarded with enough info as is.
So how do you go about building the perception of your product and find one that is unique and most reflects your vision?
There are 5 steps in the process.
Step 1: Grade your competition + market demand
Create 2 columns where you grade all of these 9 themes on (a) competitor offerings and (b) customer demand. The highest customer demand gets 10 points while the lowest competitor offerings get 10 points.
Let's break this down.
What are competitor offerings and customer demand?
These are the offerings that your competitor provides across the 9 themes above.
Customer demand is the value that customers within your market pay importance to the 9 themes above.
When you build out your columns, give 10 points to a theme that has highest customer demand, where 1 is the lowest.
For competitor offerings, grade 10 points to the lowest competitor offering across that theme, and 1 being the highest.
Add up the two grades.
Step 2: Rank the highest scorers
Find out which 4 score the highest. These are your themes along which you will differentiate your product.
Let's call this Set A.
Step 3: List out your value props
Here's what you put in the 1st column: List all the non-desirable alternatives people resort to when they don't have your product at all. Next, describe what makes each alternative bad.
Here's what you put in the 2nd column: Write out how and why your product is better than the bad alternative. Let's call this Set B.
Step 4: Narrow down the Value Props from the result in Step 2
Use the result of Set A as a filter to narrow down the choices in Set B. These are your final value props for your product positioning.
Use these on your landing pages, ad campaigns, ad groups etc. These are your sub-perceptions.
Step 5: Compress the info in a single statement
Use these 5 inputs to write a single statement. Essentially, what you want to do is compress the remaining value props to a single sentence. One that is concise, clear and easy to understand.
This will be your product's main perception.
Pin this sentence on your whiteboard, sticky notes, your laptop screensavers, whatever you use. Go through it everyday, and make sure that this idea is presented across all your work. Be it sales, marketing, or customer service etc.
Keep in mind, that today's markets are constantly evolving, and so you need to update your product's perception at occasional intervals. Set up a time every 12 weeks to assess your positioning and your product perception, and see how well it fares. Can it be improved? What worked? What did not work? Ask yourself these questions and get to the root cause from a first principles perspective.
Thank you so much for reading! If you want to get in touch, you can respond directly to this email or reach out on Twitter.
If you want to hire the services of my agency, or just want to jam out some ideas, feel free to email me. Always excited to meet like-minded people!
Or you can just buy me a nice cup of coffee.