Positioning and messaging

Positioning is upstream of everything. A campaign built on unsettled positioning optimizes the wrong sentence.

The five decisions

1. Competitive alternative — what the buyer does today if you do not exist. Often a spreadsheet or an intern, not a competitor.
2. Unique attributes — what you have that the alternative does not. Features, factual.
3. Value — what those attributes let the customer do that they could not before. Not the feature; the consequence.
4. Who cares most — the segment for whom that value is urgent rather than pleasant. Narrower than comfortable.
5. Market frame — the category you ask to be judged in. This sets every expectation the buyer brings, including on price.

Get these in order. Most positioning failures are step 5 done first: picking an exciting category and reverse-engineering the value.