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Fill in this workbook as you go. Each section has a “Concept review” dropdown underneath it. These explain the concept behind the section, not a rule to follow. Your brand might land somewhere different than the examples show, and that’s fine. Examples throughout use Doughnut Labs, a SaaS company that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology. Delete the grayed example text as you fill each section in.
Positioning comes before messaging. Messaging is how you say it. Positioning is what you’re claiming, and every message has to ladder up to it. Fill this page in first.
1

Fill in the six core sections in order

Each one feeds the next. The positioning statement in section 5 is assembled from your answers to sections 1 through 4.
2

Be specific enough to be wrong

A position no competitor would ever dispute isn’t a position. If every brand in your category could sign their name to it, keep going.
3

Add the optional sections only if they apply

Skip them otherwise, and delete them before you publish.
4

Revisit on a set cadence

Positioning changes when the category or the product changes, not when a campaign underperforms.

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Core sections

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1. Target

Who is this position for? Name the group, and what makes them different from everyone else you could sell to. E.g. Operations leads at 50 to 500 person companies who own a process that has outgrown spreadsheets but doesn’t justify a custom build. They buy tools themselves without a procurement cycle. Who is this deliberately not for? E.g. Enterprise buyers who need SSO, audit logs, and a security review. Doughnut Labs doesn’t serve them yet, and copy shouldn’t imply otherwise.
A target defined by demographics or firmographics tells a media buyer where to run an ad. It tells a strategist very little, because two companies with the same headcount and the same industry can want opposite things.What makes a target useful for positioning is the shared situation: the job they’re trying to get done, the constraint they’re under, the decision they’re currently making badly. That’s the thing a position can actually attach to.Naming who it isn’t for does separate work. A brand that claims everyone is a plausible buyer has no reason to be different from anything, since it has nothing it’s willing to give up. The exclusion is where the choice becomes real.

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2. Competitive frame

What does this brand get compared to? Fill in the alternatives a buyer is genuinely weighing, including doing nothing. Given those, what category do we want to be filed under in the buyer’s head? E.g. Not a workflow platform. Doughnut Labs is the tool a team reaches for when a spreadsheet has stopped working and a platform is too much.
The frame is the shelf a buyer mentally puts you on, and it decides which comparisons they run. A brand filed under “workflow platform” gets judged on integration count and configurability whether it wants to be or not.This is one of the few strategic levers a brand actually controls, because the frame is a choice. Some brands claim the established category and compete inside it on a specific attribute. Others reframe into an adjacent or invented category to change the comparison set entirely. The first is easier to communicate and harder to win. The second is the reverse.Including “doing nothing” tends to change the picture. For a large share of categories it’s the most common alternative by a wide margin, and it loses to different arguments than a named competitor does.

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3. Point of difference

In one sentence: what does this brand do that the alternatives above don’t, that the target actually cares about? E.g. Doughnut Labs is set up in an afternoon by the person who owns the process, with no implementation project and no admin. Why is that hard for a competitor to copy? E.g. Depth and setup speed pull against each other. A platform that added one-afternoon setup would have to hide the configurability its existing customers bought it for.
Three things have to be true at once here, and dropping any one of them is the usual failure. The difference has to be real (the product genuinely does it), it has to matter to the target (they’d change their decision over it), and it has to be relatively unavailable elsewhere.Most weak positioning fails the third test. “Easy to use” and “great support” are frequently true and frequently valued, and also claimed by every competitor, which leaves a buyer with no basis for choosing.The durability question is separate from the difference itself. A difference anyone could copy next quarter still works today, it just isn’t a position to build five years of investment behind. Naming why it’s hard to copy is what distinguishes a temporary advantage from a structural one, and both are worth knowing about honestly.

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4. Reasons to believe

What evidence makes the difference above credible? One row per claim.
A reason to believe is the answer to a buyer’s unspoken “says who?” Without one, a point of difference is an assertion competing against other assertions, and a buyer with no way to tell them apart usually defaults to the safest or cheapest option.Evidence comes in several forms and they’re not equally strong for every audience. A number carries weight where a buyer trusts the source. A mechanism (“it’s fast because it doesn’t require a data migration”) persuades a technical reader who wants to understand why. A named customer works when the reader recognizes the name or sees themselves in it.Writing down where each piece of evidence lives matters more than it looks. Claims outlive the data behind them, and a stat with no traceable source is the one that eventually gets repeated after it stopped being true.

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5. Positioning statement

Assemble the sections above into one sentence.
For [target] who [need or situation], [brand] is the [competitive frame] that [point of difference], because [reason to believe].
E.g. For operations leads whose process has outgrown a spreadsheet, Doughnut Labs is the tool that gets a working process live in an afternoon, because it needs no implementation project and no admin access.
The statement is a working artifact, not copy. It never appears on a website in this form, and trying to make it sound good usually breaks it: the hedges and adjectives that make a sentence pleasant to read are the same ones that make it agree with everything.Its real job is as a test. Once the sentence exists, a proposed campaign, a new feature description, or a headline can be held against it and either fits or doesn’t. That question is answerable in a way that “is this on brand?” is not.Some teams find the fixed template constraining and write two or three sentences of plain prose instead. That works as long as the same four inputs are all present and specific. The template is a scaffold for getting there, not the only valid output.

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6. Trade-offs

What are we choosing not to be good at, so the position stays sharp? E.g. Doughnut Labs won’t win a feature comparison against a full platform, and won’t try. Copy doesn’t list integration counts, and sales doesn’t chase deals that hinge on configurability.
A position that costs nothing usually isn’t one. Being the fastest to set up means not being the most configurable, because the work you’d add to win the second claim is exactly the work that loses the first.Writing the trade-off down converts it from a weakness people quietly work around into a decision the team made on purpose. That changes how it gets handled: a known trade-off gets an honest answer when a prospect raises it, while an unacknowledged one produces a defensive answer that reads as evasion.It also settles arguments in advance. Feature requests, campaign ideas, and deal exceptions that contradict the trade-off can be declined by pointing at the decision. The alternative is reopening the argument every time.

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Optional sections

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A. Sub-brand and product positioning

Optional: include if the brand has more than one product, tier, or sub-brand
How does each product’s position relate to the master brand’s? What does each one own that the others don’t? E.g. Doughnut Labs (master brand) owns speed to a working process. Doughnut Labs Teams adds shared ownership without adding setup time, and positions against a spreadsheet shared in a group chat, not against the master brand.
Once a second product exists, two positions are in the room and they can either reinforce each other or compete. The failure mode is subtle: each product positions itself well in isolation, and a buyer looking at both can’t tell which one they’re supposed to want.Brands resolve this differently depending on architecture. Some keep every product under one position and differentiate only on use case. Others let sub-brands hold genuinely distinct positions, accepting the extra cost of explaining the relationship. Both are workable, and the choice usually follows from how much the buyers overlap.

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B. Perceptual map

Optional: include if the category is crowded and the differences between players are hard to describe in prose
Name the two axes buyers actually decide on, then place the brand and its alternatives on them.
A map earns its place by what it exposes. Plotting a category often shows every player bunched in one corner, which says the axes chosen aren’t the ones anyone is really deciding on, or that a genuinely open space exists that nobody has claimed.The axes are the whole exercise. Picking two that are easy to measure but that no buyer weighs produces a tidy chart with nothing behind it. Picking the two a buyer trades off against each other, where moving toward one means moving away from the other, is what makes the empty space on the map mean something.
Last modified on August 12, 2026