April Dunford
April Dunford is a Canadian B2B marketing executive and consultant who spent two decades as a VP of Marketing and VP of Product at companies including Sybase, IBM (via acquisition), and multiple venture-backed startups. She has launched over 16 products and led positioning projects for hundreds of tech companies. She is the author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, and runs a consulting practice focused exclusively on product positioning for B2B technology companies.
Core Ideas
Positioning as the Foundation of Everything
Dunford’s central thesis: positioning is not a marketing tactic or a messaging exercise — it is the strategic foundation that every other go-to-market activity rests on. Bad positioning means bad marketing, bad sales, and eventually business failure:
“Positioning is a fundamental input into every tactic we execute, every campaign we launch, every piece of content we create, every sales pitch we make.”
— Obviously Awesome
“If we fail at positioning, we fail at marketing and sales. If we fail at marketing and sales, the entire business fails.”
— Obviously Awesome
Context Creates Value
Dunford’s most important insight is that value is not intrinsic to products — it is contextual. The same product can be perceived as worthless or priceless depending on the frame around it. Her favorite illustration: Joshua Bell (world-class violinist) playing Bach in a DC Metro station for tips, versus the same performance in a concert hall for which tickets cost hundreds of dollars. The music is identical. The context — and therefore the perceived value — is entirely different:
“Even a world-class product, poorly positioned, can fail.”
— Obviously Awesome
Products need to be positioned in the context that makes their unique value obvious to the customers who need them most.
The Five Components of Positioning
See product-positioning for the full framework. Briefly:
- Competitive alternatives — what customers do if you don’t exist
- Unique attributes — what you have that alternatives lack
- Value — why those attributes matter, with proof
- Target market — who cares about that value most
- Market category — the frame that triggers the right assumptions
Starting with Best Customers
Rather than starting with a clean-sheet positioning exercise, Dunford recommends starting by deeply understanding your best existing customers. They are the proof of concept for what your product actually is (as opposed to what you think it is):
“Your best-fit customers hold the key to understanding what your product is.”
— Obviously Awesome
Market Category as a Forcing Function
A product’s market category is one of the most powerful positioning levers — and one of the most neglected. Category choice triggers implicit assumptions about competitors, expected features, appropriate pricing, and evaluation criteria. Choosing the wrong category means competing on the wrong terms:
“Declaring that your product exists in a market category triggers a set of powerful assumptions. Your market category can work for you or against you.”
— Obviously Awesome
The Three Positioning Styles
Dunford’s taxonomy of how to position relative to the market:
- Head to Head: Win an existing market against an existing leader
- Big Fish, Small Pond: Dominate a subsegment of an existing market
- Create a New Game: Define a new category
“Category creation is about selling the market on the problem first, rather than on your solution.”
— Obviously Awesome
Positioning Is Not a Marketing Function
One of Dunford’s strongest positions: marketing cannot own positioning. It is a business strategy exercise that must be driven by whoever owns the business strategy (typically the CEO or founder). Marketing can execute positioning, but it cannot define it alone:
“But marketing can’t ‘own’ positioning, in the same way marketing can’t ‘own’ the overall business strategy. It’s simply too broad and too important to live in one silo of the overall company.”
— Obviously Awesome
The Positioning Review Cadence
Positioning must be reviewed regularly — every six months as a baseline, and immediately after significant competitive events:
“I recommend checking in on your positioning every six months or when there has been a major event that could impact the competitive landscape or the way customers perceive and evaluate solutions.”
— Obviously Awesome
Practical Output
Dunford’s work produces concrete artifacts: a messaging document (the agreed-upon baseline for all copywriting), a sales story (how the positioning translates into a sales conversation), and — optionally — a positioning statement for internal alignment. All of these flow from the five-component positioning exercise done as a cross-functional team.
Key Book
Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It (2019) — A compact, practical guide to product positioning. Remarkably free of fluff; nearly every page contains an actionable framework or diagnostic. Widely regarded as the definitive modern text on B2B product positioning.