Positioning: Beyond the Statement

Developing a positioning statement is often done as a fill-in-the-blank “Mad Libs” exercise. The power of insightful positioning, however, goes right to the heart of how you are creating value, and for whom.

In marketing 101, you’re often instructed to create a positioning statement. It often looks something like this one, provided courtesy of the good people over at Zendesk (they have some excellent examples of positioning statements on the website referenced here.

Here’s the problem, as world-class positioning expert April Dunforth points out: This isn’t doing much to help you define your positioning, which needs to be at the very center of how you want your offering to be present in the world. Much of this article is based on April’s work, and I’d like to give her full credit for that.

Your initial positioning hypothesis is probably wrong

When you are launching something new, you are basically making hypotheses about what value your offering will create, for whom, and what you should get paid for doing that. As I have written about elsewhere, a huge part of the discovery driven planning process is testing as many of these assumptions as possible as you are building out…