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

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:
- Find the “Spicy Spot” between your solution, market context and trends.
- 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.
- 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”.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- How do you market before you have customers?
- Evangelize the problem
- Validate your customer’s buying process
- Then, have your customers validate your business
And, just for fun, here’s a few more:
“Marketing can polish a turd. Positions can turn turds into fertilizer.” – April Dunford #accelerateOTT pic.twitter.com/KAW0li5Kv4
— Jaimie Wistaff (@JaimieWistaff) May 11, 2017
The art of product positioning #AccelerateOTT #ScaleorFail @Invest_Ottawa @AccelerateOTT @aprildunford #TrendifyLive #AI #Analytics real-time monitoring software pic.twitter.com/Te68sYCnmQ
— TrendifyLive (@TrendifyLive) June 13, 2018
Pay attention to both the market and trends to find that “spicy spot”. Find the right position in the market and take advantage of industry trends. @aprildunford @AccelerateOTT #AccelerateOTT #marketingtips pic.twitter.com/zJyXr1Hm6S
— TrueCourse (@TrueCourseComm) June 13, 2018
Don’t mess it up…no Uber for cats! @aprildunford gives @AccelerateOTT attendees some tough marketing love here at Landsdowne – all in the name of scaling successfully! @Invest_Ottawa #accelerateott #ScaleorFail #killingit pic.twitter.com/UWgnHbw1ri
— Sonya Shorey (@sshorey) June 13, 2018
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”.
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