Positioning Statement

What it does

Positioning fails when the alternative is unnamed, because a claim to be better is meaningless without a stated comparison, and the honest alternative is usually not a competitor but doing nothing or doing it manually. This skill forces the alternative into the statement and tests the result against the objection it invites.

When to use it

• our messaging is vague
• position this product
• what do we actually do
• write our positioning
• one sentence pitch

What it needs from you

• product: what it does mechanically
• customer: who it is for, narrowly
• alternative: what they do today instead, including nothing

How it works

1. Name the alternative first, honestly. For most products it is a spreadsheet, a person doing it manually, or nothing at all, and positioning against a competitor when the real alternative is nothing produces messaging that does not land.
2. Write the statement: for a specific customer, who has a specific problem, this does a specific thing, unlike the named alternative, which fails in a specific way.
3. Test the specificity by inversion. If no sensible company would claim the opposite, the statement is a platitude and needs to be narrower.
4. Write the objection the positioning invites. Strong positioning always invites one, and a positioning statement with no objection is too broad to be useful.
5. Check it against the customer language from research, if any exists. Positioning written in internal vocabulary does not survive the first sales call.
6. Test it as a first line in an email and as a headline. Positioning that cannot survive those two uses will not be used.
7. Write the result into BRAND.md with the disallowed claims that follow from it.

What you get back

The named alternative, the statement, the inversion test result, the invited objection, the email and headline tests, and the BRAND.md block.

The quality bar

• The alternative is named and may be doing nothing
• The inversion test is applied and reported
• The invited objection is written down
• The statement is tested as an email first line and as a headline
• The result is written back into BRAND.md

Where it runs

• Claude Code
• Codex CLI
• Cursor
• MCP-compatible agents