Symptom of poor positioning: Churn

Ideally, a customer is going to make some assumptions about what value they will get from your product, as well as what features your product is likely to provide, before they make a purchase. And those assumptions are going to be correct.

If customers often find that their expectations don’t jive with their real-life experience using the product, you get churn.

Some, perhaps most, people assume that their product sucks when there’s high churn. It is possible the product sucks — but it’s also possible to have highly loyal customers who don’t churn even with a product that objectively sucks. Some might prefer a worse but less expensive experience.

I have never worked with a company whose product was complete garbage. Most products have strengths and weaknesses. If they are positioned around the stengths, to a market that cares a lot about those stengths and doesn’t mind the weaknesses, the weaknesses aren’t as important.

If, on the other hand, you position the product to people that do care a lot about the things the product doesn’t do well, they will be disappointed and leave.

High churn simply means:

• You’re not doing a good job communicating who is a good fit for the product and who is not (maybe because you are not so clear on this in the first place)

• The assumptions customers make about your product before they use it are generally not correct

Both of those point to a potential positioning problem. If you have high churn, it’s definitely a good idea to evaluate your positioning to make sure it highlights your stengths, not your weaknesses.