Positioning Jiu-Jitsu for B2B Marketers: April Dunford’s Strategic Playbook
Let’s be honest: most B2B marketers spend their days feeling like the underdog in a Marvel movie. You’re scrappy, you’ve got heart, but you’re up against a competitor with a budget that could buy a small island and still have enough left over for a Super Bowl ad. You’re not going to win a bench-press contest against the market leader. But what if you could use their own weight against them? Enter April Dunford’s “Positioning Jiu-Jitsu”—the marketing equivalent of flipping the 800-pound gorilla onto its back using nothing but leverage, timing, and a little strategic mischief.
Here’s the play: Instead of trying to outspend, out-feature, or out-shout the competition, you reframe the game. You take what looks like their greatest strength and—ta-da!—turn it into a weakness, at least in the eyes of your ideal customer. It’s not magic. It’s not even marketing alchemy. It’s just really, really good positioning.
The News, Minus the Hype
April’s approach is all about context. She tells the story of selling a simple tool against IBM’s sprawling, complex platform. For some customers, IBM’s “comprehensive solution” was a godsend—flexible, robust, and enterprise-ready. For others, it was a bureaucratic nightmare. The same “strength” (complexity, breadth) was a “weakness” for buyers who wanted speed, simplicity, and a product that didn’t require a PhD to implement.
This is the heart of Positioning Jiu-Jitsu: you don’t attack your competitor head-on. You sidestep, redirect, and let their momentum work in your favor. If you’re the nimble startup, you highlight how the big guys are slow to innovate. If you’re the specialist tool, you point out how the “all-in-one” platform is really just a Frankenstein’s monster of half-baked features. If you’re the premium solution, you remind buyers that “free” often comes with hidden costs—like support that ghosts you when things go sideways.
It’s not about trash-talking. It’s about teaching your customers how to buy—on your terms, in your weight class.
Why This Matters for B2B Marketers
Let’s zoom out. The B2B landscape in 2025 is a crowded, noisy, anxiety-inducing place. Every category is saturated. Every buyer is overwhelmed. And every marketer is one bad quarter away from a “strategic realignment.” In this world, the old playbook—“build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”—is about as useful as a fax machine at a TikTok convention.
Positioning is your survival strategy. It’s how you make sense of chaos, align your team, and give your salespeople something better to say than “we’re just like Salesforce, but cheaper.” It’s not just about differentiation—it’s about relevance. If you can’t answer “why us, for whom, and why now?” in a way that makes your ideal customer’s eyes light up, you’re toast.
April’s Jiu-Jitsu isn’t just a clever metaphor. It’s a practical toolkit for marketers who are tired of losing to inertia, confusion, or the gravitational pull of the market leader. It’s about finding your “beachhead”—the niche where your strengths are actually strengths, not just features on a slide deck. It’s about teaching your customers to see the market through your lens, not Gartner’s.
Jon’s Take: Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Look, I’ve been in enough boardrooms to know that most positioning exercises end up as expensive wallpaper—PowerPoint decks that gather digital dust while sales keeps pitching the same tired story. The magic of Positioning Jiu-Jitsu is that it’s actionable. It’s not about inventing a new category every time your competitor sneezes. It’s about understanding the real alternatives your customers are considering (hint: sometimes it’s “do nothing” or “stick with Excel”), and then making your value so obvious that the choice feels inevitable.
Here’s where most marketers blow it: they try to win on every front. They want to be the fastest, cheapest, most innovative, most secure, and most user-friendly solution on the planet. Spoiler alert: you can’t. And when you try, you end up sounding like a dating profile written by ChatGPT—technically accurate, emotionally vacant, and instantly forgettable.
Instead, get specific. Find the segment where your “weakness” is actually a superpower. Maybe you’re not the platform for Fortune 500s—but you’re the only tool that integrates seamlessly with the weird legacy system every mid-market manufacturer still uses. Maybe you’re not the cheapest—but you’re the only one with white-glove onboarding that saves IT teams from existential dread.
And don’t be afraid to name names. Position your competitors as the right choice for someone else, not your buyer. Let them win the “biggest” patch of the market, but make sure they never touch your patch. As Warren Buffett (and April) would say: “Don’t play Bobby Fischer at chess. Play him at anything else.”
The Punchline: Smart Positioning Wins
If marketing is a street fight, most of us are out here swinging wildly, hoping to land a lucky punch. Positioning Jiu-Jitsu is about stepping back, reading the room, and letting your opponent’s bravado do the work for you. It’s not about being the loudest, flashiest, or even the most innovative. It’s about being the most relevant—right product, right customer, right moment.
So next time you’re tempted to envy the market leader’s war chest or the platform’s endless feature list, remember: in the right context, Goliath’s armor is just a bigger target. Find your leverage, flip the script, and make your own rules.
Because in B2B marketing, the winners aren’t the ones who fight the hardest—they’re the ones who fight the smartest. And if you can make your audience laugh while you’re at it? Well, that’s just good positioning.