A Deep Dive into Developing Market Positioning. The Foundation of a Good GTM Strategy.

Why Write About Positioning?

Whenever I’ve read about positioning, my first thought has often been, “This seems obvious.” And I know I’m not alone in that reaction. It’s one of those topics that feels straightforward in theory, until you actually try to apply it. 

Every time I’ve finished a book or chapter on communication, positioning, or messaging, I’ve closed it thinking, “Got it. That makes perfect sense.” But then I’d sit down to implement those ideas. To write a headline, tighten a pitch, or reframe a product, and realize how slippery the concepts really are. The clarity I felt while reading quickly evaporated when faced with a blank page. 

That disconnect isn’t just frustrating. It exposes a deeper blind spot in modern marketing. 

Over time, marketing has evolved into a highly technical discipline. We obsess over attribution models, campaign metrics, multivariate testing, and programmatic ads. We’ve turned optimization into an art form.

But somewhere along the way, we forgot the most essential skill: communicating with clarity and resonance. And because it sounds simple when we read about it, we tend to take learning it for granted.

Teams often assume they need more communication, more ads, more email sequences, more landing pages, more blogs. What they usually need is better communication, and better alignment between what they say and what customers actually hear.

That’s where positioning enters the picture.

Positioning, to me, is the invisible skeleton of all marketing communication. It’s the structure that holds every message, campaign, and story upright.

As Ries and Trout put it, “Positioning is what helps a brand get heard in an over-communicated society”.

I think of it as the foundation upon which every effective message rests. To me, positioning is the discipline of deciding how your audience should perceive you.

It’s easy to confuse positioning with taglines or slogans. Actual positioning lives deeper, in the logic and intent that shapes all communication choices. It’s the art of framing your product in a way that cuts through noise, aligns your company’s internal story, and makes it obvious to the market why you exist.

And that, in my experience, is much harder than it sounds.

Defining a strong position and then operationalizing it across the company is one of the hardest things marketers, product managers, and even founders have to do. It’s rarely taught, and even more rarely practiced systematically.

Most teams stumble into their position by accident. They evolve it over time, nudged by A/B tests, customer feedback, and bits of intuition. Some find fragments of truth through trial and error; others mimic what works for competitors. Very few, however, follow a structured process to deliberately construct their position and derive their marketing communication from it.

I’ve been through that journey myself, the slow, frustrating cycle of guessing, tweaking, and re-guessing. Over the years, I’ve built my own process by blending ideas from multiple thinkers and combining them with what’s actually worked in practice for the businesses I’ve helped.

This two-part series is an attempt to document that process. Not as a theoretical overview, but as a guide grounded in real-world application. 

My goal is to give you something practical, part framework, part conversation, that helps you think through your own positioning from first principles. I’ll share examples, exercises, and mental models I use myself, while also demonstrating the same process on this very article.

As you read, you’ll not only learn how to position your product; you’ll also see how I position this piece of writing itself. How I define its audience, frame its value, and choose its context. My hope is that by the end of this series, you’ll not just understand positioning conceptually, but feel what strong positioning looks and sounds like when it works.

Why Positioning Is Important

When Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, the world was already drowning in advertising. They described an “overcommunicated society”. One where consumers were exposed to so many marketing messages that the human mind had no choice but to filter most of them out. Their solution wasn’t more communication; it was clearer communication.

They believed that marketing isn’t a battle of products but a battle of perceptions. The way to win is to claim a simple, specific space in the customer’s mind, a place where your brand can be filed, remembered, and recalled when the need arises.

That was in 1981. If it was true then, it’s exponentially more true now.

Back then, marketers were competing for attention in print, radio, and television. Today, every scroll, swipe, and click delivers another sales pitch. Digital ads, LinkedIn posts, newsletters, chatbots, podcasts, influencer content, product launches - the noise is relentless.

And now, with the rise of AI, the barriers to building products and creating content have lowered significantly. Anyone can spin up a product and publish “marketing” in minutes. AI tools can churn out polished but soulless blog posts, email copy, and visuals at industrial scale.

What that means is simple: the volume of communication is compounding, but the distinctiveness of communication is collapsing.

Now, in the AI age, positioning has become existential.

It’s never been easier to:

• Build a product.

• Copy a competitor.

• Generate marketing messages.

But it’s never been harder to make people care.

The challenge has shifted to “Can we be remembered?”

Good positioning gives you that memory anchor. It helps people mentally tag your product with meaning, something they can recall later when they face the problem you solve.

It forces you to distill what’s essential: who you’re for, what you solve, and why that matters now. It’s what turns communication from a flood into a signal. And it’s what gives your product, your brand, and your message a fighting chance to stick in someone’s mind, not just for a moment, but for good.

Without positioning, your brand becomes a blur, another tab that gets closed and forgotten.

Every new communication technology, from the printing press to social media to AI, has lowered the cost of expression and raised the cost of attention. Positioning is how you bridge that widening gap.

You can’t outproduce the noise anymore. You can only outposition it.

If It Takes a Prospect Many Meetings to Figure Out What Your Product Even Is, You Have a Positioning Problem

When I talk to founders one of the first litmus-test questions is simple:

“How many meetings does it take before a prospect really gets what you do?”

If the answer is more than one, you don’t have a sales problem - you have a positioning problem.

Positioning is the deliberate act of deciding how your product should be perceived, and making sure every signal you send reinforces that perception. It’s the invisible frame that shapes how buyers interpret everything they see and hear about you.

Without that frame, people fill in the blanks themselves. And they rarely fill them in your favor. They compare you to the wrong competitors, misunderstand what makes you valuable, or assume you’re just another version of something they’ve already seen.

When positioning is absent or weak, it behaves like a headwind. No matter how hard you push on marketing or sales, progress feels uphill. You see symptoms like high churn, customers asking for features you’ll never build, or prospects evaluating you against irrelevant alternatives. You might have a great product, a talented team, even plenty of funding, but if your positioning is muddy, you’ll burn effort everywhere. Messages will contradict each other. Prospects will walk away confused. Your roadmap will sprawl in too many directions at once.

Strong positioning, on the other hand, acts like a tailwind. It pulls everything into alignment. Prospects “get it” within seconds. They quickly understand why you exist, what makes you different, and whether you’re for them. And marketing starts to feel easy, not because you’re working harder, but because the story now carries its own momentum.

Positioning isn’t marketing fluff. It’s the lens through which the entire world perceives your product - what people think you do, which problems they believe you solve, who you’re for, and why they should care right now. When done deliberately, it doesn’t just shape your messaging and sales conversations; it quietly influences your pricing, your roadmap, and even your culture.

The essence of positioning is to find the gaps in the mind of your prospect, that you can own, and relate them back to your product

When I first started studying positioning, one line from Ries and Trout stayed with me:

“Positioning starts with a product - a piece of merchandise, a service, a company, an institution, or even a person. Perhaps yourself. But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.” — Al Ries & Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Most people assume positioning is something we do to the product. Tweak the features, change the pricing, redesign the website, add a tagline. But in reality, the battle doesn’t happen in your product; it happens in the mind of your prospect. That’s where every buying decision is made, filtered through layers of existing associations, memories, and mental shortcuts.

For the purposes of this article, you can replace the word product with company, brand, service, platform, or even yourself. The same principles apply. Whether you’re a startup founder, a marketing leader, or a freelancer building your personal brand, positioning is the foundation that makes your communication effective.

The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to use what’s already up there in the mind, and to re-tie those connections to your product.”

Positioning isn’t about forcing your audience to think in an entirely new way, it’s about building bridges to what they already believe.

Our brains crave shortcuts. When people encounter something unfamiliar, they immediately look for a reference point. The brain subconsciously asks, “What is this like?” “Where does it fit?” “How does it compare to what I already know?”

Your job is to answer those questions before the prospect has to make an effort to answer them by themselves.

Positioning sets the right context and frame of reference in which prospects can evaluate your product.

Humans use context to make sense of everything.

Think about walking into an art gallery: white walls, quiet rooms, spotlights precisely aimed, plaques describing each piece. Even before you see the artwork, your brain starts whispering, “This art must be valuable.”

Now imagine the same painting gathering dust in a cluttered garage. The colors are the same, the brushstrokes identical, but surrounded by boxes and junk, it feels ordinary. Only a trained eye, maybe a seasoned collector, would recognize its worth in that chaos.

That’s the power of context. It shapes how we interpret value before we’ve even had time to think.

Products work the same way. When people encounter something new, they instinctively scan for clues; price, design, tone, testimonials, to decide what kind of thing this is and how much attention it deserves. They need a frame of reference to judge whether it’s exciting, trustworthy, or relevant.

If you don’t deliberately provide that frame, they’ll improvise one on their own—and it may not do you any favors. They might compare you to the wrong competitor, underestimate your value, or assume your offer is meant for someone else entirely.

This is why innovative products often struggle at launch. Without a clear reference point, buyers hesitate. They reach for the closest mental box they already have.

Early automobiles, for instance, were first called “horseless carriages.” The name positioned them squarely in the context people already understood, horse-drawn carriages. 

You can see the same pattern a century later with electric vehicles. For years, EVs were associated with compromise: short range, slow performance, dull design. That was the mental box they were trapped in.

It took Tesla’s Roadster, positioned as an electric supercar that outperformed gasoline ones to reframe the entire EV category. By setting a new context. Tesla didn’t just launch a product; it rewired how the world perceived EVs.

Your job in positioning is to do exactly that: give your audience a better box from the start.

When you define the context, you control the comparison. You decide what your product stands next to in the customer’s mind, and, just as importantly, what it stands apart from.

Because people don’t evaluate things in isolation. They judge in relation. And if you don’t choose the frame, the market does.

The Position Created by Default Messaging

Most companies don’t choose their position, they inherit it from the way they talk about themselves. And that usually starts with what I call resume-style messaging.

We explain our products the way we write our résumés: We list features like we list experiences.

We think, “If I just show you everything I’ve done, you’ll figure out how impressive it is.”
That’s inside-out messaging. Communication built from the company’s perspective outward.

At first glance, it feels logical. You know your product best. You’ve poured months (maybe years) into every feature, integration, and metric. So you lead with what you’ve built.

And truthfully, this approach does work, but only under certain conditions.

When Inside-Out Messaging Works

Inside-out messaging performs decently when your audience is already motivated to understand you.

Think of a hiring manager carefully reviewing résumés. They’ll spend hours reading, analyzing, connecting dots, trying to decide which candidate fits the job. That’s effort and attention.

In the same way, inside-out messaging can still close deals when:

• You’ve been personally introduced or referred to.

• You’re responding to a specific Request for Proposal (RFP) or Scope of Work (SOW)

• You’re talking to a captive audience, like at a conference booth.

• You already have trust and permission to explain.

In those cases, prospects want to understand. They’ll give you time. They’ll listen as you walk them through your product, feature by feature. And, crucially, they’ll do the cognitive work of inventing a position for you - connecting your features to the outcomes that matter to them.

But here’s the catch, when a prospect has to invent a position for you, you lose control of the story.

When Inside-Out Messaging Fails

Now imagine a completely different scenario: a prospect skimming your website for ten seconds, scrolling through a LinkedIn post on their lunch break, or seeing one of your ads while half-distracted on YouTube.

They’re not analyzing. They’re not comparing notes. They’re deciding, fast.

In those moments, inside out messaging collapses. Because the burden of interpretation is too high.

Inside-out messaging relies on effort, but modern attention spans don’t offer it. Prospects simply won’t sit there decoding how “multi-source data ingestion” or “adaptive workflow orchestration” helps them achieve anything tangible. They’ll bounce.

And when they do, their mind still files you somewhere, just not where you’d like to be filed. They’ll misclassify you, undervalue you, or lump you with competitors who sound similar but solve entirely different problems.

That’s what happens when you fail to choose your context: the market chooses one for you.

Default Positioning Is Mispositioning

Most teams believe their product’s context is obvious. “Of course people know what we do!” But that’s exactly the trap.

Without deliberate positioning, your audience invents a story to make sense of what they see.
And their story might hide your biggest strengths or exaggerate your weaknesses.

That misrepresentation has real business consequences:

• You burn money on marketing that drives clicks but not qualified leads.

• Your brand feels forgettable — it doesn’t compound mindshare over time.

• Your prospects compare you to irrelevant competitors, forcing you into pricing wars.

• Your team produces scattered messaging because no one agrees on the core narrative.

• And worst of all, your product roadmap starts chasing customer “requests” that pull you away from your true differentiators.

Inside-out messaging doesn’t just make marketing inefficient,  it quietly erodes focus across the company.

The Core Issue: No Context, No Connection

When your communication starts from the inside, you’re forcing your audience to work backward - from what you do to why it matters.

But people don’t buy “whats.” They buy “whys” they already care about.

So while you may understand that context is important, you might still fail to choose it deliberately because you assume it’s self-evident. It rarely is.

A feature-first message might look factual and informative on the surface, but in practice, it’s just noise. A pile of unanchored details without meaning. And in a world where attention is scarce, unanchored detail is the quickest path to invisibility.

If I wrote an inside-out style message to promote this article, what would it read like?

Throughout this article, I’m not just going to talk about positioning, I’m going to apply it to this article itself. Anything you read see in Italics throughout this two-part series, is going to be about developing this running example.

As we move forward, you’ll see how we can position even this piece of writing more effectively, and how that positioning translates into actual marketing communication.

Let’s start with something simple: imagine we’re promoting this very article on LinkedIn.

Before any positioning work, before thinking about audience context, value, or framing, here’s how a Linkedin post might look if I wrote it from the inside out:

Excited to share my new deep dive article series on developing and operationalizing Positioning!!

In this series , I break down the key components of great positioning, why it’s essential for modern marketers, how to develop one, and how to operationalize it across your organization (marketing, sales, product, customer success).

The first article covers:

Understanding competitive alternatives
Identifying unique attributes
Creating value-based messaging
Choosing your best-fit customer segment
Defining your market context
Picking sticky associations
Leveraging relevant trends

Whether you’re a founder, product marketer, or brand strategist, this series will help you sharpen your communication strategy.

👉 Read the full post here: [link]

That’s how most of us would instinctively write - structured, informative, accurate… but ultimately about us.

It describes the content rather than the outcome. It assumes readers will connect the dots between what’s in the article and what’s in it for them.

At the end of this series, we’ll come back to this post and compare it with a version written after we define the positioning for this piece — so you can see, side by side, how the same message transforms once it’s framed from the outside in.

The Key to Positioning is to Think Outside In

Positioning, at its core, is an act of thinking in reverse.

Instead of starting with yourself, you start with the mind of your prospect.

Instead of asking “What are we?” you ask “What position do we already hold in their mind, and what space could we claim there?”

That’s what I mean by thinking Outside In.

It’s simple in theory, but hard in practice, because we’re all too close to what we build. Inside your company, you see every feature, every possibility, every untapped potential.

Outside, your prospects see none of that. They see a blink of information, an ad, a headline, a few seconds of your website, and their brains quickly decide: Is this for me? Is this worth my time?

Positioning is how you bridge that gap between what you know and what they perceive.

To think Outside In, you start by stepping out of your own narrative and entering your prospect’s.

1. How do prospects currently see the world?
   What are they trying to achieve? What language do they use to describe their pain? What’s the story playing in their head before you show up?
   
   

2. Understand what they compare you against.
   Even if you think you’re “one-of-a-kind,” your prospects are mentally comparing you to something; maybe an incumbent competitor, maybe Excel, maybe doing nothing at all. If you don’t know what that comparison is, you can’t influence it.
   
   

3. Discover what context makes your unique value obvious.
   Which frame, metaphor, or use case helps people immediately get it? In what situation does your strength shine most clearly?

That’s the sequence: start outside, then move in.

An Outside-In position realigns the company around how potential customers already think, compare, and choose. 

When you position from the Outside In, three things happen:

• Your marketing starts to resonate because it speaks your customer’s language.

• Your sales cycles shorten because prospects “get it” faster.

• Your product decisions tighten because you’re anchored to what the market actually values.

A positioning built from the Outside In prevents misaligned expectations, wasted features, and diluted marketing. It’s the difference between saying, “Here’s everything we do,” to hearing your customer respond, “That’s exactly what I need.”

That’s when you know your message has found its mark.

We want to get started with positioning - should we fill out a Positioning Statement? 

Whenever teams decide to “get serious” about positioning, they usually start by googling a positioning statement template.

It looks something like this:

“For [target customer], who [statement of need or opportunity], our [product name] is a [product category] that [statement of key benefit]. Unlike [primary alternative], we [statement of differentiation].”

It feels professional, structured, and productive. Like you’re finally codifying your brand.

But here’s the problem: filling in a positioning statement assumes you already know your position. You’re simply writing it down, not discovering it.

Most teams treat this exercise like a quick plug-and-play formula: fill in the blanks, polish the phrasing, and voilà! you have your “position.”

But what you actually have is a beautifully formatted summary of your inside-out perspective. You describe your audience the way you see them, define your benefits based on your roadmap, and declare your differentiators without testing if anyone actually perceives them as such.

That’s why positioning statements often sound neat but feel hollow.The positioning statement template is not a bad tool — it’s just the wrong starting point.

A statement can articulate a position, but it can’t create one. If you’ve ever filled out a positioning statement and felt vaguely disappointed by the result, this is why.

The tool isn’t broken; the inputs are.

So where should you start? By doing the work that informs a statement, not by writing one.

Only once you’ve gathered those insights, you begin to shape a statement that reflects your position.

A positioning statement should be the output of discovery, not the starting point.

So to Figure Out What Position to Own, How Do We Go About It?

By now, we’ve established that you can’t start with a positioning statement, you have to position by understanding how the market already sees you.

So how do we actually go about it?

I like to divide the process into two distinct phases:

1. Discovery – uncovering what’s true, what customers believe, and what might be possible.

2. Decision-making – narrowing in on the most defensible, valuable, and believable position to claim.

We’ll start with the discovery phase, where we gather raw insights about how customers think, compare, and categorize. These insights become the foundation for the later decisions we’ll make about category, context, and messaging.

The Seven Components That Set Context and Contribute to Good Positioning

It’s worth remembering what positioning actually does:  it sets the context, the frame of reference, that makes your unique value obvious.

Most teams confuse positioning with listing everything customers like about them. That’s not what this is.

When we position a product (or company, or service), our goal isn’t to highlight every single feature that works, it’s to identify the few critical traits that make us worth considering and bring those to the front.

The truth is, prospects don’t start by evaluating all your features and benefits.
They begin with a quick scan for relevance. They ask:

“Is this for me?”
“Does it solve something I care about?”
“Does it look credible?”

If the answers feel promising, then they lean in to learn more.

To get your foot in the door, you only need to spotlight what your audience values most deeply, not what you, internally, think is most impressive.

In this section we will examine seven elements critical for strong positioning, drawing on insights from April Dunford's Obviously Awesome, Andy Cunningham’s Getting to Aha and Ulli Applebaum's The Brand Positioning Workbook. These are excellent resources for those seeking a deeper understanding of positioning.

For each component, you will be required to go through the discovery process, and brainstorm options / answers to each.

Even though we talk about taking an Outside-In perspective during discovery, we can’t magically step into our customers’ minds and know what they’re thinking. What we can do is decode the signals they leave behind, through every conversation, behavior, and trace of interaction.

That means drawing insights from customer interviews, recordings of sales calls or demos, objections raised during pitches, website analytics and usage data, search patterns, and even the language prospects use when they talk about competitors.

Reviews, testimonials, discussions on social media and industry forums, both for your product and for others in your space, are goldmines for understanding how prospects think.

These aren’t perfect windows into your audience’s mind, but collectively they form the next best thing, a mosaic of evidence that lets you think Outside-In with discipline.

1. Competing Alternatives

The first, and perhaps most underestimated, is Competitive Alternatives

One of the simplest but most powerful questions you can ask is:

“What would my customers do if my product didn’t exist?”

That’s your competitive alternative, the baseline reality your audience uses to judge whether your solution is “better.”

And here’s where most teams go wrong. They assume their competitors are other companies that sell similar products. But that’s often not how customers see it.

Many buyers haven’t purchased a solution like yours before. They’re approaching their problem with limited knowledge of what “state of the art” looks like. So they default to what’s familiar, a spreadsheet, a manual process, or an internal workaround.

If you don’t know what that comparison is, you can’t position effectively. Understanding those alternatives is the first step to defining your true advantage. Many companies have weak positioning precisely because they never stop to clarify this.

They describe their strengths relative to the wrong opponent, or they try to differentiate from competitors the customer never even considered.

You need to truly understand what your audience would replace you with. 

A few questions to help you discover your competing alternatives

When you’re trying to uncover what your customers compare you to, don’t ask “Who are our competitors?” That’s your company’s view.

Ask questions that reveal how your customers think, act, and substitute. 

Here are a few prompts to get you started:

1. If our product didn’t exist, what would our customers do instead?
   This simple question often surfaces unexpected answers, from spreadsheets to freelancers.
   
   

2. What are customers currently using to solve the same problem (even partially)?
   Look beyond direct competitors; consider workarounds, manual processes, or adjacent tools.
   
   

3. What are prospects typing into Google before they find us?
   Their search behavior reveals the category they think they’re shopping in.
   
   

4. What does “good enough” look like for them today?
   This defines the minimum standard you have to beat to earn attention.
   
   

5. Who or what gets budgeted instead of us?
   Positioning isn’t just about categories. It’s about where you fit in a company’s mental and financial priority list.
   
   

6. When we lose a deal, who or what do we lose to most often?
   Sometimes your toughest competitor is “no decision.”

Once you’ve answered a few of these, patterns will start to emerge. That’s your first glimpse of where your product really lives in the customer’s mind.

Competing Alternatives to this article

If you weren’t reading this guide right now, what might you be doing instead to strengthen your positioning?

1. Doing Nothing

Continuing with business as usual, simply because they haven’t realized how central positioning is to marketing and growth.

2. Reading the Classic Books on Positioning

Reaching for foundational books like Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind or April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome.

3. Skimming Short-Form Marketing Content

Consuming quick blogs, LinkedIn threads, or listicles.

4. Filling In Templates like Positioning Statement

Using plug-and-play positioning statements or fill-in-the-blank frameworks.

5. Stumbling into a Position by Iterating on Tactics

Tweaking copy, running ads, and hoping repeated effort will lead to clarity.

6. Outsourcing to Marketing Experts

Hiring an agency or consultant to “figure it out” instead of building internal clarity first.

7. Copying Competitors

Reverse-engineering messaging from competitor websites or category leaders.

8. Enrolling in Marketing Courses or Webinars

Turning to online marketing courses or bootcamps.

2. Unique Attributes

Once you’ve mapped your competing alternatives, the next step is to uncover your unique attributes, the things you can credibly claim that others can’t. These are your edges, your differentiators, your reason to be chosen.

Think of them as the undeniable proof points that bring your positioning to life.
Strong positioning isn’t about being everything for everyone; it’s about being exceptional at something specific, and making sure your audience knows it.

For tech products, these attributes could be:

• A proprietary dataset or algorithm that produces superior outcomes.

• A security or compliance model that unlocks industries others can’t serve.

• An architectural advantage that makes you faster, lighter, or cheaper to deploy.

But uniqueness doesn’t always live in the code.  It could be your delivery model, say, an API-first approach in a market full of bulky dashboards. Or your business model, like Canva, which democratized design tools, with large template libraries.

For services and agencies, differentiation might come from your approach and experience.

A boutique B2B content agency that’s run by ex-engineers might have an unmatched ability to simplify technical stories. A cybersecurity consultancy that only serves critical-infrastructure clients could claim deep domain authority few others possess.

The form doesn’t matter. What matters is that your difference is both valued and visible.

Some prompts that can help:

• What can we credibly claim that competitors can’t — or won’t?

• What do customers consistently praise in reviews, feedback, or renewal calls?

• What aspect of our product or approach others have tried to copy but never quite replicated?

• What makes our delivery model, pricing, or experience stand out in our category?

• What’s a strength that becomes clear once people work with us?

Since most of us are used to communicating from the inside out, this is the part that feels easiest, we already have lists of “features” and “strengths.”

The real task is to prioritize those that customers would instantly recognize as meaningful advantages in their context. Those can become your true differentiators.

Thinking through Unique Attributes of this Article

So what could the unique attributes of this article be?

At this stage, the goal isn’t to decide — it’s to discover.

Think of this as laying everything on the table before we start narrowing it down later in the process.

Here’s what that initial brainstorm might look like:

1. Depth and Breadth Combined
   It’s not a shallow “how-to” nor an academic essay — it walks through both the theory and the practice of positioning.
   
   

2. Workshop-Style Flow
   The structure mimics a live session. Guiding the reader step-by-step instead of lecturing.
   
   

3. Mentor-Coach Voice
   The tone feels like learning from someone who’s been in the trenches, not someone quoting frameworks.
   
   

4. Integration of Multiple Frameworks
   Ideas from multiple thinkers synthesized into a usable process.
   
   

5. Uses a Running Example (Positioning the Article Itself)
   The piece demonstrates positioning in action by applying the same framework to itself.
   
   

6. Hands-On Prompts and Exercises
   Every concept ends with actionable questions, turning reading into doing.
   
   

7. Relevance to the AI and Attention Era
   It contextualizes positioning within today’s noisy, AI-driven marketing environment.
   
   

8. Bridge Between Strategy and Execution
   It connects abstract positioning principles to how they actually show up in copy, campaigns, and GTM execution.

The discovery phase should be intentionally expansive. We’re not yet editing, filtering, or prioritizing yet.

Later on, we’ll have a step in the process for decision-making. We’ll come back to this list and identify which attributes truly shape the article’s position in the reader’s mind, just as you would when refining the positioning of your own product. 

3. Value Proposition

If your unique attributes are your secret sauce, then your value proposition is the reason someone would want to taste it.

Attributes describe what your product is or does. But what customers truly care about is what those features do for them. How they move the needle on something that matters.

From Features → Benefits → Value

Here’s a simple way to think about it: Your goal in positioning is to move up this ladder — from what you do → to what that means → to why it matters.

Features: Your Secret Weapon

A feature (or unique attribute) is like a secret weapon. Something your product has or can do that gives it power. It could be “real-time analytics,” “multi-language AI summarization,” or “custom dashboards.”

But a list of features, by itself, is like saying “Spider-Man can shoot webs and sense danger.” Unless you explain what that means, it sounds trivial. For someone who’s never seen Spider-Man, those “features” don’t mean much.

Benefits: Your Superpowers

A benefit is what those features allow someone to do.

Because Spider-Man has webs, he can swing through the city at lightning speed. Because of his spidey-sense, he can anticipate danger before it strikes.

Those are his superpowers — new abilities that change what he’s capable of.

That’s the level where prospects begin to understand how your product helps them. What they can do better, faster, or smarter because of it.

Value: The Big Win

A value proposition is how all those benefits connect to a bigger outcome. Something the prospect truly wants.

For people in Spider-Man’s universe, it’s not about webs or reflexes; it’s about him protecting their neighborhood from bad actors. That’s their Big Win.

In the same way, your product’s features and benefits matter only when they connect to a broader business or personal goal:

• Improving visibility so managers can spot delays before they become fire drills.

• Reducing errors so that rework doesn’t eat up productive hours.

That’s what transforms your offering from a toolkit into a meaningful solution.

The ‘So What’ Method: Climbing from Feature to Value

One of the simplest and most powerful ways to uncover your value proposition is to ask “So What?” repeatedly.

Here’s how it works:

Take one of your unique attributes and ask, “So what?”. Whatever answer you give, ask “So what?” again. Keep going until you can’t answer anymore. You’ll end up with a chain of responses ranging from very specific to very abstract.

Each “So What” climbs one level higher in meaning: from feature -> benefit -> value.

Here’s a sample ‘So What’ chain

Feature: Automatically consolidate customer feedback from multiple channels.
So what? → You save time collecting and organizing feedback manually.
So what? → You get a single, unified view of what customers are saying.
So what? → You can identify recurring issues and feature requests faster.
So what? → You can prioritize updates that actually improve customer satisfaction.
So what? → Happier customers stay longer and recommend your product more often.
So what? → Retention improves, and referrals increase without extra marketing spend.
So what? → You build a product that evolves directly with customer needs, creating sustainable, compounding growth.

At the start, you’re describing what the feature does.
By the end, you’re describing why it matters to the business.

If you follow this method, you’ll get a range of responses at different levels. At the ground level, you’ll find benefits. At the sky level, you’ll find broad, vague statements. But the sweet spot, where great positioning lives, is somewhere in between.

This is where your prospects’s goal intersects with what your product can uniquely deliver. That’s the level where the value feels both tangible and differentiated.

The translation from feature → benefit → value is something almost every marketer tries to do. The problem isn’t that teams don’t try this translation, it’s that they often go too high. They jump straight to vague, universal outcomes like “grow revenue” or “save time.”

The issue is, nearly every product can make that claim. Your CRM can claim to grow revenue. So can your business intelligence platform. Your ERP can claim to save time — and so can your payroll software.

At that abstract level, the value sounds impressive but means nothing. And your product is again invisible in a sea of similar messaging.

The trick is to find the level of value that’s specific enough to showcase your unique attributes, while still resonating with what customers care about most. That’s where positioning becomes powerful — when your value is unmistakably yours to own.

Gathering the spectrum of value responses

For every unique attribute of your product that you listed in the previous section, apply the ‘So What’ method and create its own “value ladder.”

When you repeatedly ask “So What?” about each one of the attributes, you’ll find a spectrum of value responses.

Some ladders will climb higher than others, and some will overlap, but together, they’ll help you see which parts of your product’s story can carry the most resonance.

By the end of this exercise, you’ll have multiple “chains” of potential value statements that show:

• How each unique attribute contributes to customer impact.

• Which benefits are repetitive or cluster together.

• Which ones feel truly distinct or compelling.

The purpose of this step is to  map the full landscape of value responses before deciding what truly defines our position later.

Translating this articles unique attributes to value propositions

Let’s now apply the “So What” method to a few of the unique attributes we brainstormed earlier for this article.

For brevity, we’ll limit the exercise for just two of them, asking “So What?” until we reach the point where the responses become too broad and vague.

1. Workshop-Style Flow

It’s structured like a live session — not a lecture.
So what? Readers feel guided instead of being talked at.
So what? They engage more deeply because they can actively participate.
So what? They retain what they learn through real-time application.
So what? They finish with tangible progress and a sense of clarity.
So what? They can immediately apply positioning principles to their own brand or product with confidence.

2. Uses a Running Example (Positioning the Article Itself)

The article doesn’t just explain positioning; it demonstrates it.
So what? Readers see how theory translates into real-world execution.
So what? They internalize concepts faster because they’re watching them in action.
So what? They can visualize how to apply the same process to their own product.
So what? It creates a sense of “I can do this too,” reducing the intimidation of strategy work.
So what? Readers walk away with a practical understanding of how the process works.

Each “So What” ladder uncovers a different flavor of value. At this stage, we’re not deciding which one to use. We’re simply exposing the full range of meaning each unique attribute can carry.

Later, when we reach the decision-making step, we’ll:

• Group overlapping ideas,

• Identify recurring themes, and

• Select which combination of attributes and value propositions best expresses this article’s (and your product’s) true position.

For now, the goal is to stretch your thinking. To reveal not just what your product is, but why it matters deeply to the people it’s built for.

Target Audience / Target Market Characteristics

If your value proposition defines why someone should care about your product, your target audience defines who is most likely to care deeply and act on it.

Most teams start defining audiences in terms of titles, company size, and industry:

“We sell to CFOs and Finance Directors at mid-sized tech companies.”
“We target Series B startups in the fintech or cybersecurity space.”

While that might sound specific, it doesn’t tell you why those people would care about what you offer. You know who they are, but not what drives their decisions.

That’s not a target audience, it’s just demographic segmentation.

Marketing textbooks teach segmentation in a way that only talks about demographics (age, income, gender, job title) or firmographics (company size, funding stage, industry) or geography. 

Those are surface traits. They don’t explain why certain companies or people buy from you faster or stick with you longer.

An actionable segmentation, the kind that actually drives positioning, captures traits that signal fit and urgency.

For example:

These second-column characteristics tell you why they’ll care about your product.
They point to pain, context, and readiness.

Another way to define your audience is through the Jobs to Be Done lens.

Instead of focusing on who they are, you define them by what they’re trying to achieve.

For example, if your product helps grow a company’s LinkedIn presence, your audience might be: “Those looking to grow the company’s presence and influence on LinkedIn.”

For different types of companies, those could be:

• A social media manager at a large enterprise,

• A marketing lead at a growth-stage startup,

• Or even a founder doing it solo at a seed-stage company.

Different people. Different titles. Same job to be done.

When you frame audiences this way, you start seeing patterns that cut across roles.
You realize you’re not selling to titles, but to address pain points.

And once you know that, your messaging can meet them where they are. Speaking directly to their goal, regardless of where they sit in the org chart.

Thinking through your target audience

To help you brainstorm options of who you target audience might be, think of the following:

Who are your best-fit customers currently?

Your best-fit customers are the ones who:

• Buy quickly because they immediately “get it.”

• Rarely ask for discounts because they clearly see the value.

• Tell others about you because your product solves something real for them.

They are your advocates, your early wins, your proof of resonance.

Now imagine your company was running out of cash, and you had to close deals fast to stay alive. Which customers would you focus on first? Who is most likely to say yes without hand-holding, friction, or confusion?

The answer to those questions almost always points to your target audience. The people for whom your value proposition hits hardest.

Make a list of who you think your target audience would be.

Broad Target Audience options for this article series

1. Those bringing new products to the market.

2. Those advising or mentoring on Go To Market Strategy

3. Those working on repositioning mature products for new market realities

Target Audience Characteristics

Now that we’ve defined what makes a target audience meaningful, let’s look at the traits that describe people in your target audience. We’ll borrow the example of: “Those looking to grow their company’s presence and influence on LinkedIn.”

These traits aren’t about title or company size, they describe the headspace, the pressures, goals, and motivations shared by anyone who owns this job, whether they’re a founder, marketer, or social media lead.

Examples of Traits:

• Feel pressure to show that activity on LinkedIn contributes to qualified leads.

• Seek ways to differentiate the company’s voice in an overcrowded content feed.

• Want frameworks and repeatable systems that make content creation less ad hoc.

These characteristics cut across roles and company types. They reflect the shared headspace of people doing this job, regardless of whether they sit in a startup, a scale-up, or an enterprise marketing team.

As we move forward, we’ll use these characteristics to further narrow down the target audience and connect it more tightly to what a specific product enables.

For example, if your product is a Linkedin content creation and post-scheduling tool, the characteristic of “wanting frameworks and repeatable systems that make content creation less ad hoc” becomes a way to refine your audience.

Your  target audience could then look like this:

Those looking to grow their company’s presence and influence on LinkedIn 

AND Want systems and frameworks that make content creation and scheduling less ad hoc.

This layered approach takes you from a broad job to be done to a precise, actionable audience definition. One that maps directly to your product’s value proposition.

Your exercise in this section is to discover a list of characteristics for each of the target audience options you have listed in the ‘Target Audience’ section. List the characteristics as closely as you can with your product.

Broad Characteristics for each audience option for this article series

For this article let’s brainstorm a few characteristics for each of the target audience options that we listed in the previous section.

1. Those bringing new product to the market

Characteristics: 
- Have inconsistent messaging across reps, decks, and channels.
- Need to create clarity and credibility for something unfamiliar.
- Have initial sales from referrals, rfp’s, etc.
- Want to establish a repeatable sales motion

2. Those advising and mentoring on Go To Market strategy

Characteristics:
- Want to give their portfolio or clients tools that work without them.

- Constantly coach founders or teams who struggle to articulate what they do.
- Need frameworks that simplify abstract strategy into practical language.

3. Those repositioning mature products for new market realities

Characteristics:

- Aware that their current narrative no longer reflects where the market is going.
- Struggle to evolve messaging without alienating their existing customers.
- See new competitors reframing the category and reshaping buyer expectations.

So What Role Does Traditional Segmentation Play?

Traditional segmentation still plays an important role in keeping your focus aligned with business reality. Take the example of a company that builds a LinkedIn post creation and scheduling tool.

You might know that your ideal audience are people who want to grow their company’s presence and influence on LinkedIn.

But not all of them are equally reachable or viable as customers.

If your SaaS is priced for mid-market teams, targeting solo creators or small agencies may not make sense, even if they share the same motivations.

Or if your product’s support hours and integrations are optimized for North American time zones, expanding prematurely into Europe or Asia might dilute your early traction.

Likewise, if your tool integrates with CRMs used primarily by B2B teams, pursuing B2C influencers or e-commerce brands would stretch your positioning too thin.

That’s where traditional segmentation, geography, company size, and funding stage, becomes valuable. It helps you narrow your focus to the audience you can realistically reach, serve, and win today.

This balance between motivation-based targeting (the why they care) and segmentation-based constraints (the where you can win) ensures your positioning is not just aspirational, but actionable.

It grounds your strategy in the practical realities of who can actually buy, implement, and benefit from your product right now.

But before we think of segmenting target audiences further, we need to make decisions on the four components of positioning discussed so far.

Iterating Through Four Components and Making Positioning Decisions

By now, we’ve explored four out of the seven components of positioning: alternatives, attributes, value and audiences.

Each one is a piece of the larger puzzle. But positioning only becomes powerful when those pieces lock together into a coherent and believable whole.

Before we move to defining external context with the remaining three components (market category, associations, and trends), we first need to make deliberate choices about the core four.

These four act as the foundation. The internal logic of your positioning. Once these are clear, the remaining three (market category, associations, and trends) will simply frame and amplify that story.

How the Components Connect

Each component depends on the other:

• Attributes are only “unique” when seen against competing alternatives.

• Those attributes combine to form the value proposition. The “so what” customers actually care about.

• That value resonates most with a specific target audience, defined by motivation and fit, not just title or company size.

Because these relationships are interdependent, you’ll likely move back and forth, testing combinations and asking:

“If we choose this, what else naturally follows?”

This is where the process shifts from exploration to alignment. Here you will take a look at all the options you have listed in the previous sections side by side, and start putting the pieces together.

At the end, you want to choose:
1 Target audience and their Characteristics
1 Value Proposition
3 Unique Attributes
3 Competing Alternatives

For the example of positioning this blog, here’s what the final choices look like.

Target Audience:

Personally, I always like to lock in the target audience first. The activity of going through all the four components gives enough insight and gut feeling to know which target audience might find our offering the most valuable.

The Target Audience I have chosen for this article series is: Those bringing new products to the market

With the following characteristics:
1. Have initial sales - through referrals, RFP’s, founder-led sales.
2. Need to establish repeatable sales motion.

Value Proposition:

When choosing the value proposition for this particular target audience, lay out the spectrum of responses to the ‘So What’ exercise side by side. Cluster responses and values that are similar, and can be umbrella value props to 2-3 strong unique attributes.

For this article, the exercise yielded the following value prop,

“Quickly apply positioning principles to your product with confidence, without having to read and decode concepts from multiple books and sources.”

Unique Attributes:

Since we have already chosen the value proposition, we need to choose the 3 unique attributes that support that value proposition the strongest.

1. A Bridge Between Strategy and Execution
It connects abstract positioning principles to how they actually show up in copy, campaigns, and GTM execution.

2. Workshop Style Flow
The structure mimics a live session. Guiding the reader step-by-step instead of lecturing.

3. Uses a Running Example
The piece demonstrates positioning in action by applying the same framework to itself.

Competing Alternatives:

The competing alternatives are what the target audience that you have chosen will genuinely replace you with.

1. Do Nothing
Rely on team’s (founder, marketer, product manager) experience and know-how.

2. Stumbling into a position by iterating on tactics
Test and Tweak copy, campaigns, decks until things click.

3. Filling In Templates like Positioning Statement
Using plug-and-play positioning statements or fill-in-the-blank frameworks

Now that we have the four components locked in, it’s time to move on to the remaining three.

But before we jump in, we need to add a little more detail to the Target Market Characteristics by exploring traditional segmentation and some narrow characteristics.

Target Market Segmentation & Specific Characteristics

This step isn’t possible until you’ve decided who your core audience truly is, because only then can you narrow it further with traditional segmentation (demographics and firmographics), and more specific characteristics. For demographics you can segment based on things like role, job title, age, income bracket, education, marital status etc. For firmographics you can segment based on things like compage stage, industry, location, size, performance, org structure, employees, revenue etc.

Once you have narrowed your target audience further by demographics and firmographics, you can think of a couple of specific characteristics that apply to that narrow audience.

For this article, these are the decisions I made.

Demographic (role, age, income etc):
Role: B2B Founder

Firmographic (stage, industry, revenue, employees etc):
Stage: Seed Stage (Funded) B2B Startups
Industry: Crowded Industries (AI Tools, SaaS etc)

Narrow Characteristics:
First Time Entrepreneur leading product, marketing and sales functions.
No experienced Product Marketer on the team to help with marketing communications.

Once you have these decisions made, let’s move to the remaining three components.

5. Market Category

Your market category is the mental box customers use to understand what you are, and, just as importantly, what you’re not.

Think of it as your frame of reference. It helps prospects make sense of your offering by relating it to something familiar.

The moment you name your category, whether you call yourself an AI note-taking app or a LinkedIn content tool, you trigger a chain of assumptions in your customer’s mind.

Categories are shortcuts for understanding. When someone hears CRM, they instantly think of Salesforce. That mental association brings a bundle of expectations:

• Competitors like HubSpot or Zoho

• Features like contact tracking, pipelines, and analytics

• A subscription-based per-user pricing model

You didn’t have to explain any of that. By simply choosing that label, CRM,  your positioning borrowed all those assumptions.

That’s the power of categories: they can amplify or undermine your message.

If you pick the right one, all the assumptions work for you. If you pick the wrong one, they work against you.

Customers don’t evaluate every product from scratch. They’re constantly filtering and pattern-matching, trying to understand “What is this most like?”

If they can’t place your offering into a familiar context, they’ll either:
a) ignore it altogether, or
b) force-fit it into an existing mental model (often one that doesn’t serve you).

A good market category does three things:

1. Sets clear expectations: It tells customers what type of problem you solve.

2. Positions you against the right competitors: Not too broad, not too niche.

3. Signals your value tier: It hints at your sophistication and price point.

But here’s the nuance:
You don’t always have to fit neatly into one pre-existing box.

Sometimes, the most effective category strategy is a hybrid, defining yourself as a familiar category with a twist.

For example:

• “We’re a CRM built for solopreneurs.” → Keeps the base category but narrows context.

• “We’re a project management platform for creative teams.” → Adds a distinctive layer of audience specificity.

Your Exercise

To define your market category:

1. List the categories your customers might already associate with your product.

2. Evaluate the assumptions each brings. Which are useful, which aren’t?

3. Decide whether to align with an existing category or redefine it slightly by combining it with another.

Your market category is the first lens through which people interpret everything you say next.
So choose it consciously, because once it sticks, everything else follows its logic.

Choosing a Market Category for this article.

If we think about our chosen target audience, B2B founders bringing new products to market, what categories are they naturally familiar with? And within those, what “mental box” would this article most easily fit into?

Here are a few that come to mind:

• Business Strategy Resources → Broad thinking frameworks and principles that help founders clarify their direction.
  
  

• Marketing Communication Methods → Guides and methods focused on messaging, storytelling, and customer perception.
  
  

• GTM Frameworks and Playbooks → Structured systems that connect positioning, sales, and growth, helping teams bring new products to market.

If we look at the language B2B founders use today, the term “Go-To-Market” is the one they most recognize and seek out. The ecosystem around GTM, from books and blogs to advisors and frameworks, it is a familiar part of their world.

And while many GTM resources focus on tactics (sales processes, outreach, demand generation), few focus on positioning, the foundation that makes all those tactics work.

That’s the gap this article fills.

Positioning is the starting point for every GTM motion that scales, the clarity that turns founder insight into a repeatable story the whole team can tell.

So, the most relevant and advantageous market category for this article is:

GTM Frameworks and Playbooks

It’s a familiar frame for our readers, yet within it, we occupy a distinct niche: connecting positioning to the mechanics of sales and messaging consistency.

How the Market Category Leads Into Your One-Line Description

Your market category also sets up how you describe yourself in a single sentence.

Once you choose the right frame of reference, you can weave in the other elements of your positioning to form a concise, high-context statement.

It tells people what you are, who it’s for, and why it matters, all through the lens of your chosen category.

One-Line Description for this Article Series

This article series can be described as:

A practical system that helps B2B founders define, articulate, and operationalize their positioning - building a strong foundation for a repeatable sales motion as part of their GTM efforts.

This framing does two things simultaneously:

1. Anchors the article in a category the audience is familiar with.
   “GTM Frameworks and Playbooks” immediately signal something practical, actionable, and outcome-oriented. A system they can apply, not just read.
   
   

2. Positions the content as a missing piece in that ecosystem.
   It reframes positioning not as a marketing afterthought, but as the first building block of scalable go-to-market execution.

6. Associations

Associations act like mental shortcuts. They allow customers to recall your product in specific situations, sometimes triggered by a problem, emotion, or environment.

Consumers will form associations with your brand whether you want them to or not.

They’ll put your product into mental categories and attach meaning to it, drawn from their personal experiences, beliefs, values, and from what they hear from others. Colleagues, friends, peers, or the media.

These associations shape how people think about you long before they ever evaluate your product. They define whether you’re perceived as reliable, innovative, affordable, premium, rebellious, or boring.

The key, therefore, is to manage what sticks in people’s minds.

A resource I have found very helpful when thinking about associations is Ulli Appelbaum’s - The Brand Positioning Workbook. He talks about 26 different sources of brand associations, developed from analyzing over 1,200 successful brand case studies.

To give you a couple examples that will illustrate what an association looks like, I have chosen 3 of the 26 categories of associations from Ulli’s work. And I have researched and found examples that illustrate that category of association. For familiarity, I have chosen to showcase examples from consumer brands. But the same principles apply to B2B as well. 

1. Identify an Enemy

Example: Head & Shoulders - Fighting Dandruff

Some of the strongest associations come from defining a clear “enemy”. A problem, belief, or behavior your brand exists to defeat.

Head & Shoulders did this masterfully by declaring war on dandruff.

Every touchpoint reinforces that enemy:

• The packaging, copy, and ads all focus on “anti-dandruff.”

• Even their product innovation pipeline centers on that single problem.

• Even their homepage is about The #1 recommended brand by dermatologists to fight dandruff.

By consistently positioning dandruff as the villain, Head & Shoulders made themselves synonymous with its solution. When customers encounter the problem, their brain instantly retrieves the brand.

If I ever notice dandruff in my hair, I immediately think of Head & Shoulders, not Dove. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I will buy it, but Head and Shoulders have ensured that they are top of mind, and top of the consideration list. And every other product I evaluate for anti-dandruff, is evaluated in comparison to Head and Shoulders.

That’s what effective association looks like. An automatic mental shortcut between problem and brand.

2. Give Meaning to a Perceived Weakness

Example: Hans Brinker Hostel - The “Worst Hotel in the World”

Most brands try to hide their flaws. Hans Brinker Hostel turned theirs into a brand-defining strength. In a world where hotels compete on comfort and luxury, Hans Brinker took the opposite stance.

Their advertising leaned into chaos, noise, and discomfort. Exactly what most hotels try to avoid.

Their audience wasn’t business travelers or families seeking quiet. It was young backpackers looking for fun, social energy, and stories to tell. By owning a perceived weakness, they made it a signal of belonging. Their imperfection became their identity.

When your brand gives meaning to what others would consider a flaw, you attract people who share your worldview, not just your product.

3. Leverage Your Origin Story

Example: Himalayan Natural Mineral Water

Some associations can be formed around your origin. Himalayan Natural Mineral Water built its entire brand around this principle.

It’s not “just another bottled water.” Their identity is in their source. The Himalayas.

Every element of their communication, from name and design to tagline (“From the purest place on Earth”), reinforces that origin.

It’s not just water. It’s water from there.

Their place of origin becomes a proxy for value, trust, and distinctiveness.

Applying an Association to This Article Series

For this article, we’ll draw from one of the 26 association categories from The Brand Positioning Workbook - “Leverage the Usage or Consumption Context.”

This category focuses on connecting your brand (or product) with a specific moment of use or emotional trigger. The situation where your audience most needs what you offer.

In our case, we want to create a similar moment of recall. One that immediately connects positioning to a specific business situation.

If we think about our chosen audience, B2B founders bringing new products to market, what is the most high-stakes situation they face?

It’s the when the sales pipeline is dry.

That’s when you realize that your GTM message isn’t resonating. That’s when clarity becomes urgent. And that’s when you might go searching for answers.

When a founder looks at an empty pipeline and wonders,

“Why aren’t people getting what we do?”

The association we want to build is:

“Time to revisit your positioning.”

By owning that usage context, when the sales pipeline is dry, this article series and the framework within it become directly tied to real-world pain and urgency.

7. Trends

Trends are like currents in the ocean. You can’t control them, but you can ride them.

In positioning, a well-chosen trend helps your audience understand why your product matters right now. It connects relevance with timing.

When used thoughtfully, trends give buyers a reason to pay attention, not just because your product is good, but because it feels aligned with the direction the world is already heading.

But here’s the caveat: trends are optional. And when used carelessly, they can do more harm than good. Attaching yourself to every new buzzword: AI, blockchain, Web3, sustainability; can make your product forgettable.

The goal isn’t to chase hype. It’s to connect your enduring value to a movement your audience already understands and cares about.

Why Trends Work

Trends create psychological urgency. They answer a question that every potential buyer has whether they say it out loud or not:

“Why should I care about this now?”

We all want to feel current. To stay competitive, relevant, and ahead of change. When your positioning is tied to a credible trend, you give your audience both context and permission to act today, instead of deferring a decision to “someday.”

That’s the magic of trend-aligned positioning: It doesn’t just tell customers what your product is, it helps them see why it matters at this moment.

Example: Zoom — Riding the Remote Work Wave

Few companies have ever aligned more perfectly with a global trend than Zoom.

Before 2020, Zoom was one of many video-conferencing tools competing in a crowded market, space dominated by Cisco Webex, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Teams.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Overnight, remote work went from a niche flexibility perk to a global default.

And Zoom’s positioning, clear, simple, and timely, made it the natural home for that movement.

Zoom didn’t invent remote work. It simply rode the wave of a global behavioral shift by embodying what people most needed in that moment:

• A tool that “just works.”

• A sense of connection in isolation.

• Simplicity that cut through the chaos of corporate IT.

Its marketing wasn’t about innovation or enterprise control. It was about belonging to the new rhythm of work and life.
The trend gave Zoom context, relevance that no amount of feature-based marketing could have achieved on its own.

Even after lockdowns ended, that association persisted, maintaining its link to an enduring trend: the normalization of distributed teams.

This is what trend alignment looks like at its best: Not chasing headlines, but capturing a permanent shift in behavior that amplifies your product’s natural strengths.

Aligning this article with a trend

In the context of this article, there’s really just one trend that feels directly relevant: the way AI has lowered the barrier to creating products. And to marketing them.

When everyone can generate copy, design, or even software at near-zero cost, the world becomes flooded with more. More tools. More ads. More noise.

This article exists because while AI has democratized creation, it has also commoditized communication. Making it harder than ever to stand out, be understood, and be remembered.

So, the trend we’re aligning with isn’t just “AI.”

It’s the broader consequence of it:

Information saturation. And the growing need for sharper positioning to cut through it.

That’s the “why now” behind this entire framework.

Bringing It All Together

Now that you’ve made decisions on all seven components of positioning, it’s time to articulate them clearly and cohesively.

The goal is to see how each element, from competing alternatives to associations and trends, connects to form a single, unified narrative.

A great way to do this is through a one-page articulation of positioning. A simple document that captures the essence of your strategy at a glance. It becomes your reference point for messaging, content, sales enablement, and future iterations. This document can be shared with every team member to help them understand your market positioning.

Here’s how I’ve articulated the positioning for this very article series, summarized on a one-pager below:

You can document yours in whatever format makes sense for your company: a Notion page, a slide, or a shared doc that the whole team can reference.

If you like the structure of this template and want to use it as a base, you can request a copy of the editable version here. In the next article, we will go over how to use this to operationalize your positioning across the company.

Visualizing Positioning

To truly understand positioning, it helps to visualize where all of this work actually plays out. In the mind of your prospect.

Think of your prospect’s mind as a 3D space filled with impressions, associations, assumptions, and mental shortcuts. Every brand that tries to communicate with them leaves something behind in that space.

Default messaging creates fog

Most companies fill this mental space with fog. Vague impressions, overly broad claims, scattered features, generic benefits. It’s messaging without shape.

This fog blurs into everything around it:

• It overlaps with competitors.

• It’s hard to recall.

• It’s impossible to compare meaningfully.

When every company communicates this way, the prospect’s mental space is flooded with indistinct 3D clouds. Blurry and forgettable. There is no clear position, just noise.

A strong position forms a cube

A strong, deliberate position feels very different. Instead of fog, it shows up in the prospect’s mind as a sharp-edged cube. Something with clean lines, clear boundaries, and memorable shape.

Why a cube?

Because each edge represents the components you just defined:

• Competing Alternatives (3 edges)

• Unique Attributes (3 edges)

• Value Proposition (1 edge)

• Target Audience (1 edge) & Characteristics (1 edge)

• Market Category (1 edge)

• Associations (1 edge)

• Trends (1 edge)

For a total of 12 edges of the cube.

Each side constrains and defines the others. Together, they carve out a structure that is:

• Distinct (it doesn’t blur into other cubes)

• Recognizable (the mind can categorize it quickly)

• Memorable (it has edges, not haze)

A cube stands apart from the surrounding fog. It occupies its own clear coordinates in the prospect’s mental space.

This visualization connects directly back to the earlier core idea of positioning: To find the gap in the mind of your prospect and fill it with something unmistakable.

You’re not just competing in a market. You’re competing for mental real estate.

A defined cube occupies mental space. And once it’s there, it becomes the reference point for everything the prospect learns next.

• Their comparisons anchor to it.

• Their memory stores it.

• Their expectations form around it.

• Their buying decisions rely on it.

Your job with positioning is to create a shape the mind cannot ignore.

Scaling Positioning: From Feature → Product → Company

Your product doesn’t live alone in your customer’s mind. It lives inside a larger structure.

Just like your positioning cube clarifies where one product fits, your broader brand - your company, your portfolio, your personal brand - also occupies its own, larger space in that same mental landscape.

Think of it like nesting cubes:

• A feature has its own mini-position.

• Those features roll up into a product position.

• That product sits inside the broader company position.

• And if you’re a multi-product company, each product cube sits within an even larger brand architecture.

Each cube is distinct, but all are connected. Each derives meaning from the ones around it. 

If we think of the position we have developed for this article series, then the position for my personal blog would be the larger cube that contains this article series.

The components of the broader cube would also be broader. For example, the target audience might expand from being ‘those bringing new products to market’ to ‘those responsible for the success of a business’ 

Within that, this articles series becomes one expression of that promise, a nested sharp cube within the broader cube that is my personal blog.

This is exactly how product ecosystems work:

• Google Search sits inside Google’s broader positioning around “organizing the world’s information.”

• Gmail reinforces sharing of information with others.

• Drive enables storage and collaboration of information.

Each has its own role, its own cube, within the larger brand position.

A Common Barrier to Good Positioning: Stakeholder Buy-In, Participation, and Alignment

One of the biggest barriers to developing and operationalizing a strong position isn’t the lack of insight. It’s the lack of alignment.

A positioning process works best when it’s a team sport. Every function, from sales, marketing, and product to customer success, sees the product through a slightly different lens. Bringing those perspectives together not only sharpens the story but exposes hidden assumptions about your attributes, value, and audience.

Why Positioning Can’t Be Done in a Silo

In most companies, the first person to feel the pain of weak positioning is someone in marketing.

They’re the ones trying to turn vague ideas into messaging, campaigns, and content that resonate, and they quickly realize that the real issue isn’t creative, it’s clarity.

But positioning is too foundational to be owned by marketing alone.

It’s not a campaign problem; it’s a business strategy problem.

• For Marketing, positioning drives messaging, differentiation, and campaign narratives.

• For Sales, it shapes segmentation, talk tracks, and deal qualification.

• For Product, it informs roadmap priorities and feature framing.

• For Customer Success, it influences onboarding, retention, and account expansion.

If these functions aren’t aligned on what the company truly stands for: who it’s for, why it matters, and what makes it different, every downstream effort fragments.

Your story changes depending on who’s telling it, and the customer gets mixed signals.

Who Should Lead the Positioning Effort

Because positioning sits so close to business strategy, it must be driven by the person responsible for the business of that product, not just its promotion.

This could be a founder, general manager, business unit head, or product leader.

This person:

• Has the authority to gather cross-functional input.

• Can make trade-offs between opportunities and focus.

• Holds the credibility to rally the team behind the final decisions.

When they lead the effort, and marketing facilitates the process, positioning transforms from a theoretical exercise into a company-wide alignment tool.

How to Build Buy-In and Alignment

The most effective positioning sessions look less like a marketing workshop and more like a strategic alignment exercise.

They:

• Invite representatives from each major function.

• Encourage everyone to share how they believe customers see the product.

• Expose points of disagreement before decisions are made.

• Use structured frameworks to turn opinion into insight.

When people participate in shaping the position, they understand not just what was decided, but why.

That shared understanding is what turns positioning from a slide in a deck into a lived reality, guiding how teams speak, sell, and build.

The Goal: Shared Clarity That Scales

A strong position isn’t just what you write down. It’s what every team can confidently articulate in their own words.

When positioning is developed collaboratively and supported by leadership, it stops being “marketing language” and becomes company language.

That’s when positioning becomes what it’s meant to be: the foundation of every strategic decision that follows.

Conclusion: From Defining Positioning to Bringing It to Life

This first part of the series has focused on the foundations: how to develop a position and understand the components that shape it.

We explored how competing alternatives, unique attributes, value propositions, target audiences, market categories, associations, and trends all interlock to create a coherent positioning system.

But defining a strong position is only part of the journey.

The real impact comes when that position is operationalized. When it begins to shape what you say, how you sell, and even what you build next.

That’s what we’ll explore in Part 2 of this series: how to turn a well-defined position into consistent execution, across messaging, copywriting, product roadmaps, and go-to-market strategy.

If you’ve found this framework useful and want to continue the journey, subscribe to be notified when Part 2 is published.