Positioning and messaging

Positioning is upstream of everything. A campaign built on unsettled positioning optimizes the wrong sentence.

The five decisions

1. Competitive alternative — what the buyer does today if you do not exist. Often a spreadsheet or an intern, not a competitor.
2. Unique attributes — what you have that the alternative does not. Features, factual.
3. Value — what those attributes let the customer do that they could not before. Not the feature; the consequence.
4. Who cares most — the segment for whom that value is urgent rather than pleasant. Narrower than comfortable.
5. Market frame — the category you ask to be judged in. This sets every expectation the buyer brings, including on price.

Get these in order. Most positioning failures are step 5 done first: picking an exciting category and reverse-engineering the value.

Messaging that inherits from it

• One-liner — what it is, for whom, instead of what. No adjectives that a competitor could not also claim.
• Three pillars — the value claims, each with proof attached. A claim with no evidence is a slogan.
• Objection handling — the four things prospects actually push back on, answered plainly.
• Words to avoid — including the category terms that would frame you wrongly.

Testing it

Read the one-liner to someone in the target segment and ask what they think it does and who it is for. If they answer with your category but the wrong use case, the frame is wrong. If they answer with a competitor's name, the differentiation is not landing.

Never

• Position against a competitor the buyer has not heard of.
• Widen the segment because the narrow one feels small. Diffuse positioning converts nobody.
• Change the one-liner per channel. Channels change format, not meaning.