Positioning: Beyond the Statement

Rita McGrath
7 min readOct 14, 2021

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…

--

--

Rita McGrath

Columbia Business School Professor. Thinkers50 top 10 & #1 in strategy. Bestselling author of The End of Competitive Advantage & Seeing Around Corners.