Workshop Overview

Whether you need to change your current product positioning or to select the best position for a new product idea, our training workshop will improve your strategic positioning skills and results.

In this intensive, one-day workshop, you'll learn how to use a step-by-step method and outside-in techniques to analyze, select and design a competitive positioning strategy for your product, service or solution. Unlike other positioning techniques that focus on crafting the words in a positioning statement, you will learn how to gain the insights you need to act strategically on where you want to be and how to get there.

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is designed for the practitioners who develop, manage, or approve a product positioning strategy or research the customer's needs and perceptions, and the competition. This includes:

• Product managers
• Product marketing managers
• Product planners
• Marketing managers
• Brand managers
• Product innovation managers
• Business development managers 
• Market analysts
• Directors and vice presidents of product strategy, product management, product marketing, marketing, market research and competitive intelligence

Attend this workshop, and you will be able to: 

• Clarify the customer's choices, perceptions and buying criteria
• Analyze the positions of your direct and indirect competitors
• Select the most advantageous position for your product
• Set forth the product and marketing strategies to achieve it
• Clearly communicate your targeted position, strategy and rationale

How Will You Benefit?

• Get an attractive, differentiated product for your target market 
• Gain key insights about how your target customers perceive your product and your direct and indirect competitors
• Understand the best available positions in the market
• Drive your product and marketing strategy to achieve a differentiated, valued position in the market
• Decrease time spent debating the right words to use and increase your time spent on discussing how to move your product and market to the target position
• Have a clear, specific and defensible product positioning
• Improve communications across the team and organization

Learn by Doing! 

Throughout the workshop, you will have an opportunity to directly apply the approach and templates to analyzing and designing a positioning strategy for your product, service or solution. We recommend that you bring your notebook computer!

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Workshop Topics 

I. Getting started with Product Positioning Strategy

In this section, we will introduce the PSN Symphony™ Method for Positioning Strategy and establish what you need to get started. The approach applies for new product concepts, products in development, products to be launched, and existing products that need their positioning optimized. This Symphony method was created from our research and codification of the proven practices used by experienced practitioners and general positioning techniques.

• What product positioning strategy is and how it is different than product positioning for messaging
• Why developing product positioning early in the new product planning cycle is powerful and important
• The information and decisions you need to begin developing a product positioning strategy effectively

II. Defining, mapping and analyzing the customer's perspective of their choices

The key to effective product positioning is to understand the market from the customer's perspective.

• Identifying and organizing the customer's view and perceptions of the direct and indirect competition
• Capturing the key purchasing dimensions that customers have for products like yours
• Creating, analyzing and using positioning maps 
• Identifying unique, desirable and available positions in the market for your product

III. Determining a Product Positioning Strategy and its Implications

The strategy begins with selecting the best position for the product and then deciding how to align your product and marketing with this position in the minds of your target customers.

• Analyzing your product's positioning versus the best available positions
• Make decisions to keep your product position or to target a different, more attractive position
• Matching positioning choices to the stage of the market
• Determining the implications of your decisions on your product and marketing strategy

IV. Fulfilling the Targeted Position with your Product and Marketing 

Product positioning involves using elements of the product-marketing mix - especially product definition and communications efforts - to gain desirable product perceptions compared to alternative products. 

• Determining how to change your product definition to be more aligned with your targeted position
• Identify the specific needs and perceptions of different purchasing roles in complex sales and analyzing their impact on your product positioning strategy
• Aligning your positioning with each of the purchasing roles
• Identifying your key differentiators from the customer's perspective
• Deriving a product positioning statement from your strategy to communicate the targeted position internally
• Deriving product positioning statements for each of the different purchasing roles in a complex sale
• Gaining independent validation of your product positioning strategy

Registration Fee

$795.00 – per person, early registration rate
(This rate expires 2 weeks prior to the workshop date.)

$895.00 – per person, regular rate

Save $100 per person when registering 3 or more together

The workshop fee includes a workbook, case materials, Microsoft Excel-based templates, and continental breakfast, lunch and refreshments. 

We recommend that you bring a notebook computer to the workshop as you'll have an opportunity to use the templates and method to work on your product positioning strategy.

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Next Workshop Dates:

December 4
Boston

December 5 Pittsburgh

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Attendee Testimonials:

"A great workshop!  One of the best that I have attended. Real, workable solutions to a very subjective area.  Great take-home results and materials." 
--- Steve Warner
Vice President - Sales & Marketing
NOVOCELL Semiconductor

"Other positioning methods that I've used in the past are simply too subjective, making finalizing anything a battle of wills, instead of a strategic decision. This workshop gave me a practical method for creating a defensible positioning that will help us reach our business goals."
---Wendy Armstrong
VP Product Strategy and Marketing
Sim Ops Studios

"This workshop provided me with useful tools that help remove emotion and ego's from the process, which will allow us to concentrate on the product or service in a more quantitative manner and achieve a final decision that is completely defensible."
--- Jim Jeffrey
Product Manager
Darco International Inc

About Our Instructors

The Product Strategy Network instructors are highly experienced managers and executives who have a unique blend of practical business experience and teaching experience. The instructor for this workshop will be either Tom Murray or Erin Cosgrove.

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