In this issue (5 min read)

 🛒 How Trader Joes carved their niche

2. A clear position, brand, and audience

TJ’s started to establish their brand as “The Affordable Whole Foods”.

I love Whole Foods! But I hate paying $27 for a baguette.

As a marketer, I'm biased toward brand building. It doesn't solve everything, but puts you in a damn good position within a crowded space.

And the brand isn’t just wonky fonts, funny copywriting, and Hawaiian vibes. 

Their website is a masterclass in product marketing. They help their audience solve relevant problems while weaving in their unique value:

• Meal recipes you can cook with — yep, you guessed it! — their unique items.
• A flyer that showcases their newest releases each month.
• A podcast walking through their pricing strategy, how they build their products privately, hacks, and customer-voted awards.

These are all simple, but effective marketing tactics that nudge your target audience to know, like, and trust you.

(This segment was written with a bag of organic corn chip dippers on my lap. I swear it wasn't a paid placement, I'm just weirdly obsessed).

How to find your own unique angle

If you're also finding yourself in a saturated market and are struggling to stand out, then dig for these three things:

1. Your buyer's needs

2. Your competitor's offerings

3. Your unique value

With these ingredients you can start to build your value wedge.

You can read more on it here, or watch Q's explainer below 👇

Why you should speak with your competitors

On Friday, I chatted with a competitor in our space.

*GAASSSSPPP* now why on earth would you do that, Adam?!?

Well, two reasons:

1. Contrary to popular belief, your competitors aren't actually evil.

2. You learn a lot!

In fact, within a thirty minute chat I learned:

• How they differentiate against one of the bigger competitors in the space
• How they perceive Klue as a new, larger entrant into the win-loss category
• The biggest pain points they've heard buyers have with the big competitor.

If you get a chance to talk with someone working in your category, especially if they're an adjacent competitor that you're not seeing in every single deal, do it. Do it now.

Thank me later ✌️

New on the network

The best AI product launch | Ready for Launch

Andy, Oaks, and Tamara compete on the best AI product launch — and they're pitting Canva, Github, and Notion against one another.

How to sharpen your homepage positioning & messaging | The Marchitect

FletchPMM join Rowan and Morgan to walk through tactics you can use to improve your most important sales asset: your homepage.

Nailing your first three months as a PMM | Positioning for Growth

Yi Lin walks through what you have to do in order to hit the ground running in a new product marketing role.

Entire home, every time

When you think of short-term rentals, you think of AirBnB. They were the first-movers that disrupted the hotel industry.

But when you build a viable category, competitors follow. And they will position themselves around how they're different to you.

Enter VRBO's latest campaign: focusing on the fact that AirBnB often relies on shared spaces.

(If you want even more examples of competitive positioning, I wrote about them here.)

Get the truth from your buyers

Businesses rely on guesswork, gut feel, and the 'loudest voice in the room' to understand how they're different than the competition.

You need the truth as to how really you stack up, directly from your buyers. 

If you wanna learn how, then check out the latest product from the folks who make this newsletter possible, Klue Win-Loss.

New jobs in the community

A TON of new roles have been added to our jobs board! Here's just a few:

P.S. This edition took me 3.5 hours to write. If it was worth your time, it'd mean the world if you shared with a product marketer in need 🙏

P.S.S. Wanna binge hours of on-demand content, connect with others, and learn from some of the best in the industry?

Join the 3,000+ other product marketers, compete pros, and GTM leaders in the Compete Network community.