“Avenues and Cul De Sacs” or, How to Nail Your Product's Positioning
There’s nothing more important than how you position your product.
Caraway Home isn’t just pots and pans, it’s “cookware without the chemicals.”
JUDY is not just an emergency kit, it’s a kit “designed by experts.”
Hydrant isn’t just a supplement, it’s “the fastest way to hydrate.”
All of these brands have two things in common:
They have strong, clearly defined positioning
They work with Nik Sharma’s @sharmabrands
Lucky for us, Nik shared his approach to positioning every product he launches on a recent episode of David Perrel’s North Star podcast.
He calls it “avenues and cul de sacs.”
Avenues
Positioning your product is hard. You have to think about how you stack up against competitors and what problem your product really solves. You may think you know, but the challenge is, every problem is fractal. There are problems within problems.
Take Hydrant as an example. Sure it hydrates you, but so can an IV drip or a gatorade. The meta-problem is hydration. But there are problems with other hydration methods. IVs are invasive and expensive, and gatorade is filled with sugar. Hydrant solves both of these problems, too.
So, should Hydrant position themselves as the ‘easiest way to hydrate’ or the ‘sugar-free way to hydrate’. What about both?
These different positioning statements (or value propositions) can be thought of as Avenues. Each option is a different direction you can choose to go.
How to Find Your Avenues
I recently audited my friend Tim’s website – Broya Living.
He’s positioning his product as “Canada’s most delicious bone broth.”
The avenue he’s chosen to go down is “our bone broth tastes better than competitors’.” But, that’s not the only avenue he has available to him.
To find more avenues, Nik recommends doing qualitative research, aka talking to your customers. My favorite shortcut for this is to read reviews:
Here’s a customer talking about being able to take it on the go.
Here’s a customer talking about how it saves them time.
Here’s a customer talking about the great taste.
If you read these, you’ll see Tim’s customers are telling him what they find valuable in the product.
Tim now has 3 different avenues his messaging could take.
He’s got the:
taste avenue
On-the-go avenue
Save time avenue
Our job is now to determine which of these avenues resonates most with customers.
Choosing The Right Avenue
This is where Nik turns to Facebook:
“What we typically recommend, and often do, is we will use Facebook because it's so easy to use. It's fairly cheap to run media on Facebook and really test and learn well.”
For each avenue you can create a Facebook ad campaign that centers around its specific message. You can then compare CTR, CPC, and CR on the various campaigns to learn which resonates with your customers.
CUL DE SACS
After running our tests, we’re now on the right avenue but we’re not home yet.
At the end of each avenue is a cul de sac with potentially dozens of homes. Each of these homes is a different way to carefully word your core value proposition.
Let’s imagine Tim’s winning avenue was ‘saving you time’. Just think of how many different ways you could say ‘our product saves you time’.
Here’s 3 I came up with for Broya Living in 2 minutes:
Ready-to-Serve bone broth delivered to your door
Organic bone broth prepared for you
The easiest way to get organic bone broth
You can come up with different variations through brainstorming, but a powerful tactic is to return to your qualitative research. If you have transcripts of customer interviews, surveys, or reviews, you can find the words your customers are using.
Looking at Broya Living, check out this review:
There’s a ton to unpack here but “it took me 32-48 hours to render 2 cups of bone broth” is pretty powerful. Another is “I can save my time and get a [great product].”
You can mine your reviews in this way for tons of copy ideas. Narrow these down to your top 7-10 ideas and go back to Facebook for your second round of testing.
In the end, you’ll have the specific value proposition that you know resonates with your customers.
Alright, that’s it for this issue! I highly recommend you go and check out the full interview with Nik.
If you enjoyed this, please give the thread on Twitter some love:
P.S - I recently had a large project get postponed until 2021 so I’ve got some time available to work with new brands. If you’re interested, my DM’s are open.