What Positioning Is (and Isn't)

Why this matters

Positioning is not a tagline or a brand aesthetic — it is the specific slot in a buyer's mind your product occupies relative to everything else they could choose. Confusing positioning with branding means you can spend months on visual identity while customers remain unclear on why they should care.

Try it yourself

1. Write one sentence describing what your product is and who it is for without using the words 'best', 'easy', or your company name — then check whether a stranger could name a direct competitor from that sentence alone.
2. Pull three competitor homepages and underline the first sentence on each — identify whether each sentence names a category, a customer, and a differentiated benefit or just states a feature.
3. List the last five times someone asked 'what does your company do?' and score each answer you gave: did you describe the product, the customer problem, or the alternative you replace?

Prompt your AI

Use these three in order. Each builds on the one before.

1. Basics & terminology

In one paragraph, explain what positioning means in marketing and how it differs from branding.

2. Why it works (the mechanism)

Walk me through how a B2B SaaS company would develop its positioning from scratch — what questions do they ask and in what order?

3. Advanced — application & what's next

Given a project management tool entering a market dominated by Asana and Monday.com, explain how positioning choices affect which features to build, how to price, and what channels to use.

References

• April Dunford — Obviously Awesome (positioning method)