positioning-angles

Positioning Angles

Produce a positioning statement the rest of the marketing system can repeat: one claim, built from the market's stage, the offer's unique mechanism, and a single psychological angle. Governing principle: positioning is not being better, it's being different in a way the audience cares about — and one angle typically outperforms the others by a wide margin, so commit to one and treat it as a bet to test, not a truth.

When to use / when not to

• Use whenever a core claim is missing, weak, or generic — before landing pages, content strategy, or email work.
• If the user is unsure the product itself is differentiated (not just the message), hand off to skills/product-strategy/foundation-sprint — it pressure-tests the underlying bet with a differentiation 2x2; come back here to turn its output into market-facing language.
• If the claim exists and the user needs it written into a page, use skills/marketing/direct-response-copy.
• Audit mode: user has positioning but doubts it → skip to Step 4 and run the three tests against it; fix the failing part using the matching step.

Intake

One batch; skip anything already known from context or from skills/marketing/orchestrator:

1. What do you sell, in one sentence, and to whom?
2. What are the 2–3 alternatives your customer actually compares you to (including "do nothing" or a spreadsheet)?
3. What do you do differently from those alternatives — any step, ingredient, or approach they skip?
4. How saturated is your market: do you have to explain the category, or is the buyer already drowning in options and skeptical claims?

Don't stall: if the product and market are recognizable, infer stage and competitors, state assumptions, and proceed.

Workflow

1. Diagnose the market stage

The market's maturity dictates the message form. Classify using the signals, then adopt that stage's approach:

Stage	Signal (how to identify)	Approach	Template
NEW	You must explain what the category is	Simple promise	"Now you can [X]"
GROWING	Competitors exist but aren't saturating ads/content	Bigger claim	"[X] in [specific time]"
CROWDED	Multiple well-known players, active advertising	Show mechanism	"The [method] that works"
JADED	Buyers say "all [X] are scams"; category has burned people	Prove it	"[Data/proof] that shows [X]"
MATURE	Clear leaders; buyers identify with brands	Sell identity	"For [people who are X]"