Product positioning: What can startups learn from Salesforce.com’s Chatter?

Most startups don’t spend too much time thinking about product positioning. It’s a crucial part of product marketing and has to do with presenting your product in a unique and differentiated way in the minds of your buyers. It’s important for you to be in control of your product positioning, because in the case that you aren’t, your customers, the media and (worse) your competitors will!

I recently read a blog about Salesforce.com’s Chatter – a collaboration tool that is positioned very well and carries powerful messaging targeted to a specific audience. Below is a list of Chatter’s key product positioning steps that every startup can learn from:

Positioning is not about the product itself. It is not about ranting about how great your technology is. Positioning has to do with your target buyer. It has to do with how well your product can connect with your target audience.
Positioning is not about having a ground-breaking product or creating a new category all together. This means that you do not need to have something that is brand new. It’s actually comforting for the customer if they are already familiar with the use and category for the product. Accept that your customers are familiar with your product and like Chatter, all you need to do is make it simple, useful and manageable.
In your marketing, position yourself well against your biggest competitors. Salesforce.com’s Chatter chose IBM Lotus and Microsoft Sharepoint. In a table, Chatter visually shows features that it has or is better at compared to the other two. This suggests that Chatter is good enough to compete with Lotus and Sharepoint and that it is a “big league” product. It also shows customers what they can expect from Chatter that they can’t from Lotus or Sharepoint!
Positioning against the biggest competitors will also let you manage your reference price. Lotus and Sharepoint, the two more expensive software products, would anchor the customers’ minds at a higher price point. This enables Chatter to price itself at a premium, but still find customer acceptance because of higher anchors.

Pick one or two things as your key differentiators and position them along specific customer personas. For Chatter, the target customers are CIOs and decision makers in medium and large enterprises, who by default are attracted to bigger, more established brands. Chatter’s key differentiating factor is – in the cloud. IT people know how costly and wasteful it is to host, maintain and run software and Chatter uses this as one of its key selling attributes.

Focus on your strengths that are relevant to your customers. Many products have tag lines such as “change the way you do XYZ”. Does that say anything concrete? Is it valuable and/or relevant to your customers when they are making their purchase decisions?
Make your positioning credible. Yes, your product can compete with Sharepoint or Lotus, but why should your customers believe you? As a startup, rely on your beta customers, patents, benchmark results, partners, investors and other linkages that can support the credibility of your product’s offerings.
How does your startup position itself?