Diving Deeper into Product Positioning with Praveen Krishnamurthy

Product positioning is a critical element for any company. It involves identifying what’s unique about your product, what your customers want, what they are willing to pay for your product and making sure that your product is positioned, priced and marketed accordingly. To learn more about product positioning, I connected with Praveen Krishnamurthy, a leading global product marketer who is currently working with Adobe in San Francisco. Praveen possesses unrivalled expertise in product positioning and messaging, and a long track record of success.

From Praveen’s experience, there are several aspects that a marketer must pay attention to while devising a product’s positioning. On product marketing best practices that he utilizes, Praveen said “in my work, I have found some aspects to be non-negotiables, specifically, understanding your customer and crafting a concise message are both critical.

For instance, when I led Marketing and Growth at an ecommerce startup, I crafted our brand narrative around ‘predictable fashion’ which enabled us to connect well with our customers. We had insights that customers found it frustrating when clothing brands regularly changed the fit of their staples like chinos and that understanding helped us define our unique positioning. 
In my product positioning work, I also focus on testing and iterating the positioning, as strategies are not relevant for eternity. I do my best to be cognizant of the changes in the market segment, new trends and my competitors’ positioning. You need to redefine your positioning based on any such changes and feedback from your customers. Lastly, I always play to my product’s strengths. Depending on the aspect where your product is the strongest, you can choose between quality, pricing or competitor-based positioning. I focus my positioning on aspects in which my products do better than my competitors’ and those that are also the most valued by my customers.” 

While the idea of getting insights from customers is critical, product marketers often find that this isn’t easy or straight forward. Praveen said “As a product marketer at Adobe, I talk to customers all the time. These interviews are not only an opportunity to learn about the customers’ pain points, but they can also give you a glimpse into the actual on-the-ground impact your work has, which can be very fulfilling. When I interview customers, I begin by building a rapport with them; this involves not speaking about my company or product and instead beginning with things like how their week has gone. 
I then dive into my questions, but I start with broad questions on topics of interest rather than narrow ones. This always helps me capture additional customer sentiments that yields insights we weren’t looking for. I then probe and ask follow-up questions to get the details I am looking for. I let my customers do most of the talking.”

While these are good tips on how to extract customer insights and what helps create strong product positioning, it still doesn’t tell us how we might know whether product’s positioning is working well. Praveen suggested that “Product positioning strategies, just like any other strategy, are tied to success metrics. These metrics include but are not limited to new customer acquisition, customer retention, and conversion rates for an ecommerce company. As part of my work, I look for trends in business metrics to determine whether the positioning strategy is working or not. If I focus my positioning statement on the range of features in my product and it does not lead to the expected new customer acquisition figures, then my strategy isn’t working and needs to be changed.”