Dunford's Five-Part Positioning Framework

April Dunford's positioning framework (from Obviously Awesome, 2019) defines positioning as: how our product is the best in the world at delivering something a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. It has five parts, worked in this order:

Competitive alternatives — what the customer would do if the vendor didn't exist, including the status quo (do nothing, build in-house, use a spreadsheet) and the actual shortlist competitors, framed from the customer's point of view rather than the vendor's.
Distinct capabilities — an exhaustive list (often 50-100 items from a whiteboard exercise) of what the product actually does that competitive alternatives don't.
Differentiated value — each capability is pushed through a "so what?" question until it resolves into customer value, then compressed down to just 1-3 value themes, because "nobody can keep all that in their heads."
Best-fit customers — the ICP is reverse-engineered from which target accounts care most about the distilled value themes, not chosen up front.
Market category — chosen last, after the first four are set, as the frame that makes the value obvious to that best-fit customer.

Dunford's claim (as of a 2026 #mtpcon talk) is that after applying this process with roughly 60-70 companies through the AI disruption, the framework itself hasn't needed to change — see Point of View on the Market's Future as a Positioning Requirement and Four New Ways AI-Era Markets Break Positioning Execution for what AI did change: execution risk, not fundamentals.

Positioning as the Opening Scene of a Movie

Dunford's own framing for what positioning does: it functions like the opening scene of a movie, orienting an audience that has no prior reference point for what they're about to watch. A customer arriving at a product for the first time is in the same position — positioning gives them the frame ("the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about") before any feature detail can make sense.

Core Definition, Opening-Scene Analogy & Formal Workshop Process

Core definition. Positioning defines how a product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. Use this as the explicit test for any product or company messaging decision — if the definition doesn't survive being spelled out this literally, the positioning isn't done yet.

Opening-scene analogy. Positioning is like a movie's opening scene: its job is to answer the basic orienting questions an audience with no reference point needs answered before they can settle in — what is this, where does it sit, who should I compare it to, why should I care, is this for me. When introducing something new, answer these proactively rather than leaving customers to infer them.

**Formal workshop process (vs. Vibe Positioning).** A repeatable process, run as an actual workshop rather than left to drift into competing personal opinions: (1) identify competitive alternatives — see Competitive-Alternatives Mapping (Status Quo vs. Shortlist); (2) identify differentiated capabilities; (3) map those capabilities to value themes; (4) map value themes to who cares (the market category). Steps 1–2 — defining what you compete with, how you differ, and the value only you can deliver — are the hardest and most foundational step: difficulty later writing a future-facing narrative usually traces back to this being unresolved among the executive team. Re-run or re-check the process periodically so positioning doesn't silently decay into vibe positioning.

Из тем: Positioning, Marketing, and Go-to-Market