- A positioning statement names your customer, their problem, your category, your main benefit and the alternative you beat.
- April Dunford's framework starts from competitive alternatives and works towards the category[1].
- Test it: if a competitor could say the same sentence, it is not positioning.
- Write it in your customer's words, then let it shape the logo, site and deck.
The formula
The most common template, popularised by Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, fits in one sentence: for a target customer who has a specific need, your product is a category that delivers a key benefit, unlike the main alternative. It is clumsy as prose, and that is fine. It is a thinking tool, not a tagline.
The five components underneath
Marketer April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, breaks positioning into components and suggests working through them in order[1]:
- Competitive alternatives: what customers would do if you did not exist. Often a spreadsheet, a manual process or doing nothing.
- Unique attributes: what you have that those alternatives lack.
- Value: what those attributes do for customers, ideally with proof.
- Best-fit customers: the people who care most about that value.
- Market category: the frame that makes your value obvious at a glance.
Starting with alternatives keeps you honest. Your real competition is rarely the other startup in your pitch deck; it is the way people solve the problem today.
A worked example
Before: "An AI-powered platform revolutionising restaurant operations." It could describe a hundred companies.
After: "For small restaurant owners who lose orders on busy nights, TableTap is the table-ordering app that takes orders in seconds, unlike paper slips and shouting across the room."
Three tests
- The competitor test. Could a rival say this? If yes, sharpen the customer, the benefit or the alternative.
- The customer test. Would your customer use these words? Replace jargon with how they describe the problem.
- The slide test. Does it fit on one slide in large type? If not, it is not one sentence yet.
How positioning shapes everything else
Once the sentence is right, design decisions get easier. The logo can carry the main benefit. The colours can separate you from the alternative. The pitch deck's problem slide describes the customer's problem, and the competition slide shows the alternatives. That is why the logo should come after the positioning, not before.