Positioning Statement: How to Write One, With Examples

Picture a new hot sauce arriving at a grocery store. The stocker can put it in the condiment aisle beside forty other hot sauces, or in international foods beside the imports. Same bottle, same price. In one aisle it's the expensive choice, and in the other it's the bargain.

Shoppers judge a product by whatever sits next to it, and buyers judge a startup the same way. Most startups never pick their shelf. The homepage says one thing and the sales deck says another, so each buyer files the company wherever they happened to look first.

A positioning statement picks the shelf and writes down why. Two questions decide whether yours works. Does each line make a real choice? And does your team reach for it when a decision comes up?

The positioning statement formula

The common form is the template Geoffrey Moore set out in Crossing the Chasm. It fits on an index card:

For [target customer] who [need],
[company] is the [category]
that [one key benefit].
Unlike [the buyer's current alternative],
[company] [the difference a buyer could check].

Each line forces one choice:

• Target customer: a role at a company of a given size, narrow enough that most of the market isn't it. "Small businesses" chooses nothing.
• Need: the job the buyer is trying to get done, in the buyer's words, rather than a feature they asked for.
• Category: the shelf. It sets what buyers compare you against before they read a single feature.
• Benefit: one result. A list of benefits means the choice hasn't been made yet.
• Alternative: what the buyer does today without you. It's often a spreadsheet, a person or nothing at all.
• Difference: the reason that alternative can't deliver the same result. A buyer should be able to check it.

Positioning statement examples

The formula reads easily in the abstract and gets harder once you fill it in. Two hypothetical companies show it done.

A dispatch tool for trade contractors: For owners of electrical and HVAC contractors with 10 to 40 technicians, who lose hours every day to customers calling to ask where the technician is, Dispatchly is the dispatch software that sends each customer a live arrival time automatically. Unlike a whiteboard and a phone, or a field-service suite that takes months to roll out, Dispatchly runs the same day you sign.

A bookkeeping firm for dental clinics: For practice managers at independent dental clinics with two to six dentists, who close the books late every month because insurance payments arrive in pieces, Ledgerline is the bookkeeping service that matches every insurance payment to the visit it pays for. Unlike a generalist bookkeeper or the office manager working after hours, Ledgerline works inside the practice software the clinic already uses.

In both, the alternative is a habit or a person, and neither names a competitor. Both also leave out most of what the company does. Leaving things out is the whole job.

Writing one your team will use

Filling in the blanks is quick. A statement your team believes takes longer, because the lines have to be worked in a different order from the one they're read in. April Dunford's method in Obviously Awesome starts from the buyer's options rather than your product:

1. List what buyers would do if you didn't exist, including doing nothing.
2. Write down what you have that those alternatives don't, and check each item against the strongest alternative.
3. Turn each of those into a result a customer would name.
4. Find the buyers who care most about those results. They're your target customer, usually a smaller group than you hoped. Beachhead market covers choosing that first group, and the ideal customer profile template turns it into criteria an account has to meet.
5. Choose the category last, once you know who it's for.
6. Test the draft on a real decision: a feature request, an ad headline, a deal that doesn't fit.

Teams skip the last step most often. If the statement can't settle whether to build the feature or run the ad, it's too vague to guide anyone.

Choosing the shelf: an existing category gives you buyers who already know how to judge the product, and it judges you on the leaders' terms. A new category lets you set the terms, and you pay to teach buyers it exists. Build a new shelf only when you'd lose on the old one. A positioning map shows how buyers see the field before you choose.

What gets built on positioning

The statement stays inside the company. Everything customers do read gets written from it, and each piece has its own playbook:

• Value proposition: the customer-facing promise built from the benefit line. How to write a value proposition covers where it differs from positioning.
• Messaging: the pillars, proof and wording by buyer that every page and pitch draws on, set out in a messaging framework.
• Go-to-market plan: the market, the sales motion and the first channel, in the go-to-market plan template.
• Marketing plan: the quarter's channels, budget and measures, in the marketing plan template. A measurement plan decides what to track before you judge a channel.
• Channels: digital marketing channels picks the first one to test. SEO for startups and LinkedIn ghostwriting go deep on two of them.
• Landing pages: landing page structure lays out what a page needs once a buyer arrives.

Each of these inherits the shelf you chose. When a page reads vague, fix the statement before you rewrite the page.

Putting the statement to work

A positioning statement your team uses makes a choice in every line and gets tested against real decisions. Write it from the buyer's alternatives and choose the category last. Then reread it whenever the market or the product shifts.

If you'd rather have it built with you, every startup marketing engagement starts with Marketing Foundations, which sets who you sell to and what you say. A company whose website already works can take the positioning and brand project on its own through my fractional CMO work.

A hot sauce can't choose its aisle. Your company can.