In the realm of marketing, few elements are as critical as product positioning. Today, we have the privilege of diving deep into this topic with Praveen Krishnamurthy, a seasoned Product Marketing Manager at Adobe based in San Francisco. Praveen’s expertise is enriched by his previous role in leading Marketing and Growth at a VC-backed ecommerce startup that boasted over 100,000 customers. Through this interview, Praveen shares invaluable insights drawn from his extensive experience in the field.
How do you gather the insights to inform your product positioning?
I leverage several avenues to gather both qualitative and quantitative customer insights. Firstly, I read comments and product reviews left by customers on different forums online to better understand their sentiments. Also, customer interactions captured in support tickets is another treasure trove of direct feedback for me – you can glean a lot from these tickets in terms of triggers and ease of use for customers. Lastly and most importantly, I conduct customer interviews to ask targeted questions, identify new use cases and get direct feedback. Some of these exercises can be time and resource consuming, but they provide an in-depth understanding of your customers’ preferences and pain points.
From your experience, tell us about an impactful positioning you crafted for a product?
As mentioned, I previously led marketing for a VC-backed menswear e-commerce start-up. Though that company was over three years old, it specialized in a single product – chinos. A chino isn’t a unique product. On the contrary, the company faced immense competition and we needed to differentiate ourselves. I started by focusing on what we did differently as a brand. Our product’s fit was universally liked and had a pretty high repeat order rate but there was an especially unique aspect about our fit: we had never changed it during our years of business. A thorough scan of our competitors told me that everyone else meddled with their fit once or twice a year. I then conducted customer research that revealed that men didn’t like having to shop repeatedly for staples like chinos; in fact, they felt that they were forced to shop at different brands since the brands they liked repeatedly changed their products’ fit. They wanted to be able to stick to one brand and keep ordering their favorite chinos. I had arrived at our holy grail – something that our customers really wanted, and we offered but our competitors didn’t. This insight was extremely powerful, and we built our brand narrative around it.
What difference did that make to the firm?
We were in the process of raising additional venture funding but were struggling to get traction. One of the primary reasons was that we didn’t have a good brand narrative. My positioning work dramatically changed that as the investors we spoke to were often able to relate to the need that we had identified our customers as having. It played a big part in us receiving over $500,000 in funding commitments.