Dunford spent twenty-five years as a B2B marketing and product executive (Janna Systems, Siebel Systems, IBM, four startups acquired) before becoming the most-cited positioning consultant working with venture-backed software companies. "Obviously Awesome" is the codification of the positioning method she developed and now teaches: a five-step process that takes a confused product (one whose target customer cannot articulate what it is or why they should buy it) and produces a positioning statement that makes the product obviously valuable to the right buyer. The book replaces the old Ries-and-Trout positioning vocabulary (which was built for consumer advertising in the 1980s) with a B2B-software-native framework. Dunford's central argument is that positioning is not slogans or taglines; it is the deliberate choice of context that makes a product's value visible. Change the context and you change what the buyer sees. For a CMO inheriting a product whose marketing is failing because customers cannot situate it in their mental category, this book is the working manual. It is also short (under 200 pages), practitioner-direct, and the most operationally useful positioning book on the market. Read it before you write any value-prop, before you brief any agency, before you redesign any homepage.
Core frameworks
1. The five components of positioning
Dunford codifies positioning as five distinct components: competitive alternatives (what the customer would use if your product did not exist), unique attributes (what your product has that the alternatives do not), value (what those attributes enable the customer to do), best-fit customer characteristics (who experiences the value most strongly), and market category (the context in which the value makes sense). Most positioning failures are failures to define one or more of the five components.
Walking through a worked example shows how the five components interact. Consider a hypothetical workflow-automation tool positioned as "Zapier for the enterprise."
Competitive alternatives: what the customer would use if this product did not exist. Manual integration via junior engineers writing scripts. Expensive enterprise iPaaS platforms (Workato, MuleSoft, Boomi) that require dedicated administrators. Consumer iPaaS like Zapier or Make that lack enterprise security. The "do nothing" alternative of accepting the bottleneck.
Unique attributes: what this product has that the alternatives lack. Low-code interface that business analysts can use without engineering support. SOC2 Type II compliance and SAML SSO that consumer iPaaS lacks. Audit trails that regulated industries require. Pricing structure that scales linearly with usage rather than per-seat.
Value: what those attributes enable. Faster integration delivery without engineering bottleneck. Compliance posture that passes enterprise security review. Predictable cost scaling. Audit-ready evidence for SOX, HIPAA, or PCI contexts.
Best-fit customer: enterprise IT teams at companies with 500 to 5,000 employees, regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government), engineering backlog of 6-plus months, current iPaaS spend over $50,000 annually.
Market category: low-code enterprise automation, distinct from both consumer iPaaS (which is the wrong frame because it suggests the product is cheap and insecure) and traditional enterprise iPaaS (which is the wrong frame because it suggests the product requires dedicated administrators).
The five components fit together; they are not independent. Change the category, and the alternatives shift. Change the best-fit customer, and the value claims need to shift to match. Dunford's discipline is to keep the five components consistent and to surface where they are not.
If you only remember one thing: positioning is five linked choices. Get them aligned and the marketing writes itself; let them drift and no creative will fix the disconnect.
2. The ten-step repositioning process
Dunford's working method: gather a cross-functional team, list competitive alternatives, isolate unique attributes, map attributes to value, identify customer characteristics that amplify value, define the market category, test the positioning with customers, capture it in a positioning canvas, brief the rest of the company, then run the positioning through every marketing artifact.
The process is meant to take a working session of a day or two, not a quarter-long initiative. Dunford emphasizes speed because the alternative (positioning by committee over months) produces compromise outputs that fit no one. The cross-functional team matters: sales has direct exposure to alternatives the customer mentioned, product has the attribute list, marketing has the messaging history, customer success has the value evidence. Each function holds part of the picture; the working session integrates them.
Dunford's case study with a security company is the book's clearest worked example. The product was technically excellent but positioned as a "next-generation firewall." Customer interviews revealed that "firewall" framed the product against incumbents (Palo Alto, Fortinet) that the product could not realistically out-feature on traditional firewall criteria. The repositioning moved the product to a new category centered on the post-perimeter security frame, where the alternatives were CASBs and zero-trust networking platforms rather than firewalls. The new category matched the product's actual unique attributes, and the best-fit customer profile (companies that had moved most of their workload to cloud and SaaS) was easier to identify. Inbound demand tripled in six months without changing the product. The category change did the work the previous marketing budget had failed to do.
How to operate: run the ten-step process in a focused session, not as a permanent meeting. Bring representatives from sales, product, and customer success. Use customer interview data, not internal opinion. Test the candidate positioning with prospects before rolling it out broadly.
If you only remember one thing: positioning is a working session, not a committee. Get the cross-functional team in a room, run the steps, leave with a draft, test it.
3. The frame of reference
The market category determines the comparison set and therefore the expectations and the success criteria. A product positioned in the wrong category gets judged by the wrong criteria.
The book's clearest case is a hypothetical video editing tool. Positioned as "Photoshop for video," the product gets compared to Adobe Premier Pro and Final Cut Pro. The buyer's evaluation criteria become: professional color grading, multi-track timeline editing, support for high-end codecs, integration with audio mixing tools. The product almost certainly fails on those criteria because it was not designed to compete in that category.
The same product, positioned as "your first video editor" or "creator's video tool," gets compared to iMovie, the iPhone Photos app, and CapCut. The buyer's evaluation criteria become: easy onboarding, social-ready output formats, music library integration, one-click effects. The product likely succeeds on those criteria because it was designed for the creator workflow.
The product is identical in both cases. The frame of reference determines whether the buyer concludes "this is missing essential features" or "this is exactly what I needed." Positioning is the frame choice.
How to operate: examine which category your product currently sits in. If the comparison set is unflattering and the product is being judged by criteria it was not designed to meet, the right move is often a category change rather than a feature change. Repositioning to a different category can produce more lift than any creative or channel change.
If you only remember one thing: the category determines the judgment. Pick the category before you accept the judgment.
4. Best-fit customers and the segment of one
Dunford rejects the broad segmentation that consumer textbooks teach. For B2B products, the best-fit customer is often a narrow specific archetype defined by characteristics that predict whether the customer will experience the value. The positioning is then aimed at that archetype, even if it leaves money on the table from adjacent buyers who would also buy.
The sales-engagement tool example is the book's working case. A sales-engagement platform positioned for "outbound SDR teams of ten to fifty at Series B SaaS companies" outperforms the same tool positioned for "sales teams" because the narrow archetype both qualifies in the right buyers and pre-disqualifies the wrong ones. The narrow positioning produces three effects.
First, the buyer who matches the archetype recognizes themselves immediately. "Series B SaaS company with an SDR team of 30" is a specific identity that triggers self-recognition. The buyer reads the page and thinks "this is for me." The broad positioning ("for sales teams") triggers no such recognition.
Second, the buyer who does not match the archetype self-disqualifies. The Series A founder with no SDRs reads the page and recognizes the product is not for them yet. The enterprise sales team with hundreds of reps recognizes the product is too small for them. Both of those buyers were going to be wasted spend on inbound; the narrow positioning saves the sales team from working bad-fit leads.
Third, the narrow positioning produces clearer product decisions. Building for "Series B SaaS with 30 SDRs" produces feature choices that fit that customer. Building for "sales teams" produces feature choices that fit no one because every team's needs conflict.
Dunford emphasizes that the narrow positioning is intentional, not just a starting point. Many teams resist narrow positioning because it feels like leaving money on the table. The book's argument is that adjacent buyers either buy anyway (because the narrow positioning still resonates) or they should not be customers in the first place.
If you only remember one thing: narrow positioning self-qualifies and self-disqualifies. Broad positioning does neither.
5. Trends as positioning context
A product can ride a trend that gives buyers a reason to act now. The trend is part of the positioning. The product existed before the trend; the positioning makes the trend explicit and gives the buyer the reason to evaluate now rather than later.
A workforce-analytics product gains positioning power from the post-2020 remote-work trend. The product existed before the pandemic, when its value proposition was about understanding team productivity. The pandemic created a new buyer urgency: employers needed to rethink productivity measurement because they could no longer observe behavior in person. The positioning that ties the product to the trend ("understand productivity in a remote-first world") gives the buyer permission to act now rather than next year, because the trend creates the urgency.
The trend has to be real to function as positioning. A manufactured trend ("AI is changing everything") that does not connect to the buyer's actual pressures will read as marketing fluff. A real trend (the buyer's company just went remote, the buyer's industry just got new regulation, the buyer's leadership just demanded productivity measurement) gives the positioning teeth.
How to operate: identify the trends in your buyer's environment that create urgency for your product. Bake the trend into the positioning. Update the positioning when trends shift; positioning that rode the 2020 remote-work trend needs different framing in 2024 when return-to-office reshapes the buyer pressures.
If you only remember one thing: trends create buyer urgency. The right trend in the positioning gives the buyer permission to act now.
Actionable takeaways
- Run the five-component audit on every product you market. If you cannot fill in all five components in one sitting, the positioning is broken and the marketing will leak.
- List the real competitive alternatives, including "do nothing" and "use a spreadsheet." Most positioning exercises skip the non-software alternatives that actually take share.
- Define the best-fit customer narrowly enough that adjacent customers self-disqualify. Broad targeting in B2B positioning is a tell that the work was not finished.
- Choose the market category deliberately. The default category your product fell into is often the wrong category. Repositioning to a different category can produce more lift than any creative or channel change.
- Test positioning with customers before rolling it out. Read the positioning aloud in a sales call and watch the buyer's reaction. If they nod, you have positioning. If they ask "wait, what is this exactly?", you have not.
What this book is NOT about
This book is not a consumer-brand positioning text. The frameworks are built for B2B software and B2B services. For consumer-brand positioning, pair with Aaker's "Building Strong Brands" (1996) and Sharp's "How Brands Grow" (2010).
Two specific misreads to avoid. First, "positioning" is not "tagline." Many readers extract the positioning canvas and immediately try to compress it to a single line of marketing copy. The positioning informs the tagline but is not the tagline; the positioning is the strategic choice underneath all marketing decisions, including the tagline. Second, "best-fit customer" is not "first customer." The best-fit customer is the archetype for whom the value is sharpest, not the customer you happen to have signed first. Teams that confuse these end up positioning around their accidental customer base rather than around the archetype that produces the strongest fit.
Field updates since publication: the framework has been widely adopted in venture-backed B2B software companies and has held up well in subsequent use. The book is occasionally critiqued for being lighter on consumer brand positioning than its title implies, which is fair; Dunford is upfront that the methodology is B2B-focused. The repositioning method works best when the company has at least some real customers (so the value and best-fit characteristics can be observed) and is less applicable to pre-launch products with no traction. For pre-launch positioning, pair with Osterwalder's "Value Proposition Design" (2014) for the hypothesis-and-test approach. Dunford's follow-up "Sales Pitch" (2023) extends the positioning method into the sales conversation and is worth the read for any CMO partnering with a sales leader.
Want more?
Borrow the full book on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/obviouslyawesome0000dunf
The original is about 200 pages and reads in a sitting. The summary above captures the operator-relevant frameworks. Read the full book if you want the full ten-step process detail, the worked examples, or Dunford's voice (she is funny and direct). Dunford's follow-up "Sales Pitch" (2023) extends the positioning method into the sales conversation and is worth the read for any CMO partnering with a sales leader. Pair with Osterwalder's "Value Proposition Design" (2014) for the pre-launch positioning approach.