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

Stage	Question	Source	Output
0. Evidence	Why did people actually switch — and what stopped the ones who didn't?	Bob Moesta	Demand brief
1. Decision	Where do we compete, and what can only we claim?	April Dunford	Positioning decision
2. Expression	Can a stranger tell what this is in five seconds?	Fletch PMM	Messaging and homepage copy
3. Narrative	What changed in the world that makes this urgent?	Andy Raskin	Strategic narrative

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.

Stage 3 — Strategic narrative (Raskin)

Read references/raskin-narrative.md.

Now expand the same decision into a story for the deck, the keynote, and internal alignment. Five elements, in order:

1. Name the shift — an undeniable change in the world creating stakes and urgency. The old game and the new game.
2. Show winners and losers — there will be winners and losers under the new rules.
3. Tease the promised land — the desirable future state, described as an outcome, not as your product.
4. Position capabilities as magic gifts — features presented as what gets the buyer to that future.
5. Present evidence — proof you can deliver it.

Never open with your product, your company, your funding, or your logo wall. And never tell the buyer their current approach is stupid; that puts them on the defensive and ends the conversation. Name the shift that made their approach stop working. The shift did it, not them.

Gate: the narrative and the homepage say the same thing at different altitudes. If they contradict, the narrative is wrong, because the decision came first.

Standing guardrails

These are the failure modes this skill exists to prevent. Check for them at every stage.

• Category invention. Creating a new category is expensive and slow. Only entertain it with real capital, patience, and no existing frame that fits. If the team has limited runway, no proven product-market fit, or an existing category with real demand, choose the frame rather than invent one. Say this out loud when a user drifts toward a coined platform name.
• Narrative-first drift. If a document opens with a manifesto and gets to competitive alternatives on page nine, it was built backwards.
• Internal vocabulary. Coined terms that only employees use. Test every term against the Stage 0 language inventory. If no customer said it, it is house language — fine for internal alignment, poison on a website.
• Multiple heroes. One protagonist, one category, one primary claim. If an audit turns up several, resolve it before writing anything.
• Unsourced statistics. Every number needs a real source and a date. Internal estimates must be labeled as estimates. A stat that collapses under a buyer's question costs more than it gained.
• Value claims that stop at features. "So what?" until you reach money, risk, or time. Most drafts stop one or two rungs short.
• Positioning against the wrong enemy. The alternative is usually the status quo, not the vendor in the analyst quadrant.
• Over-serving pull. Teams over-invest in making the new thing attractive and ignore anxiety and habit. If the messaging has no answer to "what do we have to give up, migrate, or relearn," it will lose to no-decision.

What good looks like

• The best operator weights the evidence toward losses and stalls, not wins. Wins explain why people who already agreed with you agreed; the stalls and no-decisions hold the anxiety and habit that actually block revenue. A framework built only on wins is confident and wrong.
• Value ladders all the way to money, risk, or time. The mediocre version stops at a feature ("real-time sync") or one rung above it ("saves effort"); the good version reaches the number a budget owner defends out loud ("closes the month two days faster").
• Every differentiator has survived the table-stakes test against competitors' live marketing. If a rival could paste the sentence onto their own site unchanged, it is table stakes, not differentiation — however true it is.
• A stranger outside the company reads the headline and subhead and correctly says what the product does and who it is for. If they can't, the copy has failed, no matter how senior the intended audience.
• The one-page summary exists and was written last. It is the part the team memorizes, and its absence is the single most common gap in an otherwise thorough document.
• The failure mode to watch for: a framework that reads as well-argued and complete but that nobody can act on. The bar is not elegance — it is whether a rep who missed the workshop writes an on-message email in five minutes.

Rules

• MUST run the stages in order — evidence, decision, expression, narrative — and state which stage you are in and what has to be true to move on.
• MUST check competitor claims live with web search, never from memory or training data, before calling anything a differentiator.
• MUST label evidence as weak in the final document when it comes from thin or secondhand sources, rather than presenting assumptions as findings.
• MUST ladder every value claim to money, risk, or time before it goes in the framework.
• NEVER open a narrative or deck with your product, company, funding, or logo wall — name the shift in the world first.
• NEVER recommend inventing a new category to a team without the capital, patience, and evangelism budget to fund it; choose an existing frame with real demand.
• NEVER let coined internal vocabulary that no customer used reach a homepage or website.

Output templates

The two templates below are working artifacts produced during the stages. They are inputs to the Messaging Framework document, not substitutes for it — see references/framework-document.md for how they fold into the final deliverable.

Positioning decision (end of Stage 1)

Competitive alternatives — what customers do if we don't exist, ranked
Unique attributes — capabilities the alternatives lack, facts only
Value — laddered "so what?", ending in money, risk, or time
Best-fit customers — triggers that predict intense care, plus disqualifiers
Market category — the frame, and why it makes our value obvious
What we are not — explicit boundaries
Table stakes — true things competitors also claim, labeled as such

Messaging set (end of Stage 2)

The one-liner — segment + job + alternative + differentiation
Homepage — headline, subhead, what it is, three value props with proof, CTA
By surface — outbound, social, deck, demo, with one worked example each
By audience — only where the value genuinely differs
Objection handling — one per real anxiety or habit from Stage 0
Words we use / words we avoid / words we are retiring

Reference files

• GETTING-STARTED.md — user-facing setup guide: what inputs are needed, what to do without transcripts, time and people required
• references/framework-document.md — the Messaging Framework document itself: full annotated outline, evidence standard, quote and proof handling, maintenance
• references/moesta-demand.md — switch interviews, Four Forces, interview question bank, language inventory
• references/dunford-positioning.md — the components, the ten-step process, positioning styles, the table-stakes test
• references/fletch-execution.md — the formula, homepage structure, specificity tests, common copy failures
• references/raskin-narrative.md — the five elements, deck structure, alignment guidance
• references/audit-mode.md — how to critique an existing framework, deck, or homepage against all four methods

Attribution

This skill synthesizes publicly published methods. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by any of the practitioners named. Any errors in these summaries belong to the skill, not to them. Always point users to the primary sources, which go far deeper than any summary:

• April Dunford, Obviously Awesome (2nd edition), Sales Pitch, and the Positioning podcast — aprildunford.com
• Bob Moesta, Demand-Side Sales 101; Moesta and Chris Spiek on the Four Forces — jobstobedone.org
• Anthony Pierri and Rob Kaminski, Fletch PMM — fletchpmm.com
• Andy Raskin, "The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen" and subsequent writing — andyraskin.com

Represent each method accurately. Where they disagree — for example, Fletch deliberately keeps jobs-to-be-done language out of its own framework — note the disagreement rather than blending it away.