Positioning And Messaging

Positioning and Messaging

Positioning is a decision. Messaging is the expression of that decision. Most bad messaging is not a writing problem — it is an undecided or unevidenced positioning problem being papered over with adjectives.

This skill runs a four-stage sequence drawn from four practitioners, each covering the others' blind spots. Run them in order. The order is the method.

The sequence

Why this order matters. Narrative is the most enjoyable stage and the most dangerous starting point. A team that begins with the story invents a world, names a category, and writes a manifesto — and then discovers none of it maps to a real buyer, a real shortlist, or a real reason anyone switched. That team ends up with several competing heroes and no differentiation that survives a competitor's feature page. Evidence constrains the decision; the decision constrains the words; the words constrain the story. Each stage should feel like it narrows options, not opens them.

Announce which stage you are in and what would have to be true to move on. If the user wants to jump ahead, say what is being skipped and what risk that carries, then do what they ask. The sequence is a default, not a cage.

The deliverable

All four stages feed one artifact: the Messaging Framework document. Read references/framework-document.md for the full annotated outline, and read it early — knowing what the document needs makes each stage collect the right things rather than requiring a second pass.

The document has three layers, ordered by how often they are read:

1. The decision — short and stable. Problem, alternatives, what only we can claim, who it's for, category, what we are not.
2. The expression — applied and living. Narrative, copy by surface, proof library, quote bank, objection handling, vocabulary.
3. The evidence — reference. Demand research, competitive scan, sources, change log.

In front of all three sits the one page — the one-liner, the category, the segment, the three claims, the real alternative, and the strongest proof. Write it last, from everything else. It is what the team actually memorizes and the single most commonly missing section.

The test of the artifact is not whether it is well argued. It is whether a salesperson who missed the workshop can open it and write an on-message email in five minutes.

Before starting

New users: point them to GETTING-STARTED.md, which covers inputs, time, who to involve, and what to do if they have no transcripts. Don't make them read it before you begin — establish the three things below in conversation instead.

1. Scope. Whole company, one product, or one segment? Positioning for a portfolio is a different and harder exercise than positioning for a product. Say which you are doing.
2. What already exists. Ask for current homepage, decks, any messaging document, win/loss notes, recorded sales calls, customer interviews. Read them before proposing anything. If a prior framework exists, run the audit in references/audit-mode.md first — inherited language is the main source of drift.
3. Who decides. Positioning that marketing writes alone does not stick. Identify who has to agree — usually the CEO plus sales and product leadership. Raskin's point is worth repeating to the user: leadership must own the story, or it becomes a marketing artifact that goes nowhere.

What the work needs

Ask for these early, and say plainly what is missing and what that costs:

• Recorded customer conversations, 6–12, transcribed. The highest-value input. Weighted toward losses and stalls, not wins — wins explain why people who already agreed with you agreed with you. Full transcripts, not summaries; the exact words are the point.
• Web search access. Required for the table-stakes test in Stage 1. Competitor claims must be checked live, never from memory or training data.
• Existing materials with their dates. Vintage explains most contradictions.
• Loss and stall reasons, however messy. Patterns across ten opportunities beat any single call.
• Constraints — runway, team size, whether product-market fit is proven. These determine which positioning strategies are actually available. Do not recommend category creation to a company that cannot fund it.

If the user has no transcripts, do not stall. Offer the fallbacks in GETTING-STARTED.md — switch interviews they can run now, review-site mining, structured sales debriefs, support tickets — proceed with what exists, and label the evidence as weak in the final document rather than presenting assumptions as findings.

When evidence comes from sales calls rather than switch interviews, say so in the demand brief: the customer is reacting to a pitch, so push and pull are partly contaminated, anxiety is well captured, and habit is weakest.

Stage 0 — Evidence (Moesta)

Read references/moesta-demand.md.

You are reconstructing real decisions, not collecting opinions. What people say they want is unreliable; what they did is evidence.

Do:

• Identify recent switchers — people who adopted in the last 90 days — and reconstruct the timeline of their decision: first thought, passive looking, active looking, deciding, first use.
• Map the Four Forces for each: push (frustration with the old way), pull (attraction to the new), anxiety (fear of the new), habit (inertia of the present). A switch happens only when push plus pull outweighs anxiety plus habit.
• Harvest verbatim language. Record the exact nouns and verbs customers use for their problem, their current workaround, and the outcome they want.
• Include the people who did not buy. "No decision" losses are the richest source of anxiety and habit data, and they are the forces most teams ignore.

Output a demand brief: the struggling moment, the forces, the language inventory, and the top three anxieties and habits blocking a switch.

Gate: you can state, in a customer's words, what made someone switch and what stops the rest. If all you have is what the company believes the problem is, you are not through this stage.

Stage 1 — The positioning decision (Dunford)

Read references/dunford-positioning.md.

Assemble the components in this order. Each one constrains the next:

1. Competitive alternatives — what customers would actually do if you did not exist. Usually a spreadsheet, a manual process, or doing nothing, not the vendor your CEO names. Only what shows up on real shortlists counts.
2. Unique attributes — capabilities you have that the alternatives do not. Features and facts, not adjectives.
3. Value — the "so what?" of each attribute, laddered until it reaches something a buyer would pay for. Spend more time here than anywhere else; this is where positioning is won or lost.
4. Best-fit customers — the characteristics that predict who cares intensely about that value. Not a demographic, a trigger.
5. Market category — the frame that makes the value obvious. You are choosing a context, not inventing a word.
6. Trend (optional) — only if it genuinely connects. Force-fitting a trend is worse than ignoring one.

Apply the table-stakes test to every claimed differentiator: search the top two or three competitors' current marketing and check whether they already claim it. If they do, it is not differentiation, however true it is. Do this live with web search; do not rely on what you or the user remembers about competitors.

Output a positioning decision in the template at the end of this file.

Gate: every differentiator has survived the table-stakes test, and the value ladder terminates in something a budget owner cares about.

Stage 2 — Expression (Fletch PMM)

Read references/fletch-execution.md.

Compress the decision into language a stranger understands immediately. The formula:

For [segment] trying to [job], we're better than [alternative] because [differentiation].

Enterprise buyers are not served by abstraction. If a reader cannot tell what the product does from the headline, the copy has failed regardless of how senior the audience is. Aspirational abstraction only works for companies whose brand awareness already answers the question.

Run every line through the specificity tests in the reference file — the stranger test, the competitor-swap test, the inversion test. Any sentence a competitor could put on their own site unchanged is dead copy.

Output the messaging set: headline, subhead, three value props with proof, the "what it is" line, differentiation section, and objection handling.

Gate: someone outside the company can read the headline and subhead and correctly say what the product does and who it is for.