Obviously Awesome

1. What is the book about as a whole?

It's a practical book about positioning a product. The book explains the importance of correct positioning and gives a plan that helps with the steps.

2. What is being said in detail, and how?

Positioning is important as it makes a product easier to understand and, consequentially, easier to buy. A product might fail to sell just because of incorrect positioning - and the author shows various examples.

Here is a 10-step plan on how to position:

1. Find out who the most enthusiastic customers are - and what unifies them. Those are the customers that converted quickly, didn't need much persuasion to buy and are genuinely excited about the product.
2. Form a small team of stakeholders to decide on positioning
3. Make sure you are aware of your current positioning and priors
4. Answer "if my product didn't exist, what alternative would my best customers find?"
5. List as many distinctive features/capabilities that your product has and the alternatives don't
6. Match the distinctive features to the value they bring
7. Answer who would care deeply about those values - as specific as possible in terms of "who"; segmentation
8. Map the current findings to an existing market. Usually, this means the "big fish, small pond" method - find a niche of the existing market where the current leader is not addressing the needs as well. Entering a market where the leader is established is not advisable and creating a new market is difficult and dangerous, albeit possible and with a huge upside.
9. Use current trends if applicable
10. Write the positioning in a single document

3. Is the book true, in whole or part?

The book is a guideline on how to position an existing product. The theory and examples work in hindsight with the examples that the author has picked. It comes from practice and is based on experience - it can't be validated scientifically and that's inherent to positioning and the marketing domain.

I think the definition of "most enthusiastic customers" is handwavy and idealistic; real-world products, especially startups are messy and likely struggle in finding those.

I'm also not clear on how to match values to a market, but I guess that's why people learn marketing.

4. What of it?

I should apply the lessons from this book on the 'read the room' game I'm currently working on. The project clearly struggles with positioning. I should map distinctive features to customer value and then figure out who cares about that value.

The "big fish, small pond" method seems similar to what "Crossing the Chasm" talked about, so this could be useful to revisit if I ever work in a startup.