What is positioning, and how do I work out mine?

Where the word comes from

The Ries firm's own history of positioning says Al Ries first called the idea the "rock", that Jack Trout suggested "position", and that their three articles ran in Advertising Age in April and May 1972. The book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, followed in 1981.

For a founder that means a buyer never judges your product alone. They file it beside the thing they use today, and your job is to choose what that thing is.

April Dunford's guide to positioning gives the working definition used here: positioning sets out how your product leads at delivering something a clearly defined set of customers cares a lot about.

How to work out yours, step by step

Dunford's guide breaks positioning into five parts and gives the order to answer them in.

1. What would they do if your product did not exist? Name what your buyers use today: a rival, a spreadsheet, a person they pay, or nothing.
2. What do you have that those do not? List only what is true of you and missing from step one.
3. So what? Turn each item into what it is worth to the buyer.
4. Who cares a lot about that? Many people care a little. The kind who care most are your ideal customer, and that page has the checks.
5. What kind of thing is it? Pick the category that makes the value obvious to those people.

The formula in words: what it is, for who it is for, in place of what they use today, because of what it does that the old way cannot.

One warning from the same guide: a fill in the blanks statement cannot find your positioning, because it assumes you already know each answer. So the sentence comes last, as a record of the work.

A worked example

Say you built a tool that chases unpaid invoices, the same made up product as on the ideal customer page. Every answer and number is invented for the example.

The sentence: An invoice reminder tool for freelance designers, in place of the spreadsheet and the reminder written by hand, that chases each late invoice for you on the day it falls due. It says what it is, who it is for, what it replaces and why it is different.

The mistakes a new founder makes

• Starting from the product. A list of features gives a sentence that sounds good to you and matches nothing in the buyer's head.
• Naming rivals your buyers never consider. Dunford's guide says the alternatives are whatever customers see as alternatives, and that the answer is sometimes to do nothing: the spreadsheet or the manual way.
• Inventing a new category. The same guide says a new category has to be made to mean something to the customer before it can explain anything.
• Writing it in your words, not theirs. One of the founder's own products was written around a term its buyers did not type. Nobody is signing up to my app tells what happened.

Which channels it decides

• Who it is for decides where you go. Reddit and Hacker News are worth your time only where those people already gather.
• What kind of thing it is decides the words. The category is what people type into a search and ask an assistant for, so build your pages around it for SEO and ChatGPT and AI search, and pick that shelf in directories.
• What it replaces decides what your price is weighed against.
• The whole sentence is the first line of the page a stranger lands on, and the start of your go to market plan.

How Sami uses it

The honest read gives you a start on the first two parts. It lists competitors found by live web searches, each with what it charges and a link to its own page. And it states your product's edge, or says plainly that it has none.

Then you talk the sentence through with Sami in the chat. Sami works from those records and the numbers you give it, says so when it has no data, and never invents a figure. Before you sign up, Sami in the chat can search the web, open a few pages of your site and read a screenshot or a table you send, for that one answer. Once you sign up, your honest read and your ranked plan are free.