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Chapter 5Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product

Remember how the Word team talked about feature improvements focusing on how people actually used word processors? Or how Pocket showed how saving content to view later was part of a bigger behavior shift driven by the rise of mobile devices? Both are examples of positioning through a bigger story narrative.

Building a great product isn't enough to succeed if you don't also take the time to position it in the market. Don't make the mistake of assuming the world knows how to think about your product and why it's valuable. You must frame its value. If you don't do it, other market forces will.

That said, positioning a product well is much harder to do than it looks. It's more than just data, stories, claims, or a positioning statement. It's the collective outcome of everything you do to bring your product to market over time.

Positioning and messaging are both important and often get conflated with one another. The differences are:

• Positioning is the place your product holds in the minds of customers. It's how customers know what you do and how you differ from what's already out there.
• Messaging includes the key things you say to reinforce your positioning, making you credible so people want to learn more.

Positioning is your long game. Messaging is your short game.

Part of the confusion between the two comes from a formula that was popularized for writing positioning statements. You can find it easily if you ...