AccelerateOTT: Finding Your Marketing “Spicy Spot”

Posted in AccelerateOTT, Blog
Jun 23, 2018

This blog is part of our AccelerateOTT: Scale or Fail Speaker Series. View the full series here.

April Dunford presenting at AccelerateOTT

April Dunford, consultant and CEO of Ambient Strategy

Speaker: April Dunford

Title: Wind at Your Back: Making Your Market Work for You

Her presentations are more commonly described with the fire emoji ???? – and did she ever bring the heat! June 13, April Dunford took over the stage and won over the crowd with her high-value talk “Wind at Your Back: Making Your Marketing Category Work For You”, which she confessed was something brand new, “a talk still in the testing phase.” Well, April, we’ve done the analysis, and this keynote speech is go-to-go!

One AccelerateOTT’er describe April as an “amazing presenter who knows how to give an audience when they need,” and  another claimed, “After April’s talk, people are leaving this event ready to make a real difference in their business.”

With a jam-packed presentation like April’s we couldn’t include it all, so we’ve narrowed it down. Here are our top 7 takeaways from #AcceleratOTT: #ScaleorFail with April Dunford:

  1. Find the “Spicy Spot” between your solution, market context and trends.
  2.  Positioning is hard, value-prop is easy. Positioning is a point-of-view of how you intend to be a winner in a defined market. Make it a tight definition.
  3. When positioning your product or service, start with the macro idea and shift to the micro idea so that they can place you in the “solution context”.
  4. Don’t fight the market. When marketing, understand the communicated context and uncover the assumptions that will be made. A shift in context can completely change what consumers assume about your product or service.
  5. Draw the market boundaries around what you’re good at. You can shift market context and in the mind of the audience, change how you’re labelled (good or bad) by how you define yourself.
  6. Being on-trend is essential when you’re trying to sell your product (especially in B2B). Align your product with how it related to what’s happening in your market now.
  7. How do you market before you have customers?
    1. Evangelize the problem
    2. Validate your customer’s buying process
    3. Then, have your customers validate your business

And, just for fun, here’s a few more:

 

About April Dunford:

April Dunford is a consultant and CEO of Ambient Strategy. She is an expert in Market Strategy and Positioning with a particular focus on B2B tech companies with complex sales models. April has spent 20 years in the technology at a series of successful startups and global companies including Sprintly, Tulip Retail, IBM, and Siebel Systems. April is an angel investor, board member, and advisor to dozens of startups and is the author of the upcoming book on Positioning titled “Obviously Awesome”.

AccelerateOTT brings together the city’s innovators, creators and inventors. Work in tech? Starting a business? Just want to dip your toes in the proverbial entrepreneurial waters? You’ll be surrounded by founders, mentors and venture capitalists (some from as far as Silicon Valley) providing strategic and sage advice.

Since 2012, Invest Ottawa has ignited the Accelerate series in Ottawa, providing a conference that truly fuels the entrepreneurial fire. The day is packed with world-class speakers, power networking breaks and an epic after party!

Stay on top of all the latest AccelerateOTT and Invest Ottawa news by subscribing to our newsletter, or by visiting our website, www.accelerateott.ca. 

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