Same caveat as yesterday. These are established frameworks, named so you can trace them and read the originals. Marketers disagree about all of them. Take the core, not the letter.
Yesterday you gathered evidence two ways and checked what the agent got wrong. Today you use it to make the two decisions everything else rests on: who this is for, and why they would choose it over everything else they could do. Making these decisions before the research — which is the normal order almost everywhere — is why so much marketing is confidently pointed at nobody.
- Positioning happens in the customer's mind, not in your product.
- The frame of reference: what you get compared against decides everything.
- Dunford’s five components — the framework we use here.
- The positioning statement, and the classic template.
- If it rules nothing out, it is not positioning.
- Segmentation, targeting, positioning — where ICP actually fits.
- ICP, persona and segment are three different things.
- Jobs to be done: what did they hire it to do?
- What this lesson did not cover, and how to go deeper.
1. Positioning happens in the customer's mind, not in your product.
The foundational idea comes from Al Ries and Jack Trout, whose 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind is where the term entered general use. Their claim was deliberately provocative:
Positioning is not what you do to a product. It is what you do to the mind of the prospect.
The point is that you do not control your position. It exists in someone's head, alongside everything else they already know, and it is defined by what you are stored next to.
You cannot install a position by describing yourself well. You can only connect to something already in there — a category they recognise, a problem they have felt, a product they already use.
This is decades old and still the most useful single sentence on the subject. It is also why "we just need to explain our product better" is usually the wrong diagnosis.
2. The frame of reference: what you get compared against decides everything.
The most consequential positioning decision is which category you claim, because the category sets the comparison — and the comparison sets what people expect, what they will pay, and who they weigh you against.
Call something a project management tool and it is compared to Asana, judged on features, and expected to cost a certain amount per user.
Call the identical product a team operating system and nobody knows what it is, nobody searches for it, and you now have to teach the category before you can sell anything.
Both choices are legitimate and they lead to completely different companies. Inventing a category is occasionally right and is usually an expensive mistake, because you take on the cost of educating the entire market.
The practical guidance most practitioners land on: claim the category the buyer is already searching in, then win inside it on something specific. Be the obvious choice on a shelf people already visit, rather than the only item on a shelf nobody looks for.
3. Dunford’s five components — the framework we use here.
One of the most practical modern frameworks is April Dunford’s Obviously Awesome. Her argument is that positioning is not a slogan you write but a set of connected decisions you make in order.
I am using it in this program for a specific reason: it is the one that forces the decisions into an order, and the order is where most people go wrong. Other frameworks are as good and some people prefer them. Learn this one properly first, then borrow from others once you can feel what each step is doing.
| Component | The question | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Competitive alternatives | What would customers do if you did not exist? |
| 2 | Unique attributes | What do you have that those alternatives do not? |
| 3 | Value and proof | What can customers do because of those attributes — and how do you prove it? |
| 4 | Target market | Who cares a lot about that value? |
| 5 | Market category | What context makes that value obvious? |
The order matters and it runs the opposite way to instinct. Most people start at 5 by picking a category, or at 4 by picking an audience. Dunford starts at 1, because your alternatives determine what counts as unique, and uniqueness determines who could possibly care.
Two things people miss on component 1. The alternatives include doing nothing and doing it by hand in a spreadsheet — which are frequently the real competition and are never listed on a competitor matrix. And they are alternatives from the customer's point of view, not yours: the products you consider peers may be irrelevant to how a buyer actually shortlists.
4. The positioning statement, and the classic template.
Once the components are decided, they get compressed into an internal statement. The standard template comes from Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm:
For [target customer] who [statement of need], [product] is a [category] that [key benefit]. Unlike [primary alternative], we [key differentiator].
Two things are commonly misunderstood about it.
It is an internal document, not copy. Nobody puts a positioning statement on a homepage. It is the thing every piece of copy has to be consistent with — a reference the team argues over once so it does not get re-argued in every post.
The "unlike" clause is the load-bearing part. Everything before it is usually easy and usually generic. If you cannot complete the "unlike" without an adjective — better, easier, more powerful — you do not have a position yet, you have a preference.
5. If it rules nothing out, it is not positioning.
This is the test I would apply to any positioning work, including your own today.
A position that excludes nobody is a description. It reads well, offends no one, and does no work, because it gives a reader no reason to conclude "this is for me" — which requires the possibility of concluding "this is not."
| Description | "A powerful, easy-to-use platform for businesses of all sizes." |
| Position | "For agencies running 10+ client accounts who are being billed per seat." |
The second loses everyone with three clients. That is the mechanism working, not failing.
You already have a test for this from Day 4, which four of you arrived at independently: could a competitor publish this line word for word? Applied to a positioning statement, it catches almost every version of this failure.
6. Segmentation, targeting, positioning — where ICP actually fits.
The classic model, from Philip Kotler's marketing textbooks and taught almost everywhere, is STP. It runs in a fixed order:
- Segmentation — divide the market into groups with meaningfully different needs.
- Targeting — decide which of those groups you are actually going after.
- Positioning — decide how you want to be understood by that group.
ICP — ideal customer profile — is the output of step 2, written down in enough detail to act on.
The reason the order matters: positioning is relative to a target. The same product positioned for solo operators and for agencies produces two different sets of claims, both correct. People who skip targeting end up writing copy that is trying to be true for everyone, which is how you arrive at "businesses of all sizes."
A product can serve several segments. What it cannot do is serve them with one message — which is why multi-segment companies build separate pages per segment rather than arguing all cases at once.
7. ICP, persona and segment are three different things.
These get used interchangeably and they answer different questions.
| Answers | Typically contains | |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | How is the market divided? | Firmographics — company size, industry, maturity |
| ICP | Which customers do we win, keep and profit from? | Situation, triggers, great-fit signals, disqualifiers |
| Persona | Who is the human reading this? | Role, goals, objections, vocabulary, where they spend attention |
The most common failure is writing an ICP as demographics. Age, city and job title feel concrete and predict very little about whether someone buys.
What predicts it is situation and behaviour: what is happening in their week, what they have already tried and abandoned, what would have to be true for this to be obviously worth paying for.
The single most useful field, and the one most often missing, is the trigger — the event that makes someone start looking. Nobody wakes up wanting software. Something happened. Knowing what it was tells you both what to say and when it will land.
The second most useful is the disqualifier: who should you actively not pursue. An ICP with no disqualifiers has not made a decision.
8. Jobs to be done: what did they hire it to do?
A different frame, and often a better one for ICP work. Associated with Clayton Christensen, and the standard illustration is his team's fast-food study: a chain wanted to sell more milkshakes and had segmented by customer demographics without result.
Watching actual buyers revealed something the segments could not: a large share of milkshakes were bought early in the morning, by solo commuters, taken away. The job was not "have a treat". It was make a boring commute less dull, one-handed, and keep me full until lunch. Its real competitors were bananas, bagels and doughnuts — not other milkshakes.
The reframe: customers do not buy products, they hire something to make progress in a situation. The question stops being "who is our customer" and becomes "what job are they hiring this for, and what are they firing to do it?"
Why it is useful in practice: it produces a much better answer to Dunford's component 1. Competitive alternatives defined by job are usually broader and more accurate than a list of similar products — as with bananas.
It also points directly at tomorrow. You cannot deduce someone's job to be done from your desk. You have to ask them, and there is a right and a wrong way to do that.
9. What this lesson did not cover, and how to go deeper.
Covered: positioning as mental real estate, frame of reference, Dunford's five components, the Moore statement template, the exclusion test, STP, ICP versus persona versus segment, and jobs to be done.
Not covered:
- Category design — deliberately creating a new category. A real strategy, rarely the right one.
- Brand positioning versus product positioning — related, not identical, and they can conflict inside one company.
- Pricing as positioning — price is a message before it is a number.
- Repositioning — changing position with existing customers, which is much harder than starting.
- Competitive intelligence and battlecards — structured comparison against named rivals.
- Message testing — putting two positionings in front of real people instead of arguing internally.
Where to go. April Dunford, Obviously Awesome — short and the most directly usable. Ries and Trout, Positioning — dated examples, the idea holds. Moore, Crossing the Chasm — where the template comes from. For jobs to be done, look up the milkshake study and then Bob Moesta's interview work.
And read positioning you can see working. Open three companies you admire, write down what category each claims and who each excludes, and you will learn more in twenty minutes than from another explainer.
Today's task — position LotsSocial (60 min)
Real work again, on LotsSocial. We hold our own ICP and positioning. I will compare them with yours, and where yours is better, ours changes.
1. Re-read yesterday’s research (10 min)
Your report — the competitor pass, the quotes you collected by hand, and whatever survived your audit of the agent’s output.
Everything below has to be traceable to something in there. If you cannot point at it, it is a hypothesis — mark it as one.
2. Work Dunford's five components (25 min)
In order — alternatives first, category last. Do not skip ahead.
Component 1 is the list of alternatives you built yesterday — bring it across, including the ones that are not software. If the agent found one you missed, add it and say so.
3. Write the positioning statement and one ICP (20 min)
Use Moore’s template. Then define one ICP — situation, trigger, great-fit signals, and at least one disqualifier.
Build it from your quotes, not from imagination. Cite at least one verbatim line behind the pain you claim they have, and use their words for it rather than the industry term.
One, not three. Choosing is the exercise.
4. Attack it (5 min)
Give your statement to an AI: "Who does this exclude? Which parts are trying to keep everyone? Could a competitor publish this word for word?"
Fix whatever it catches, then send it.
Then post one line
In #daily-log: the "unlike" clause of your positioning statement — the differentiator, with no adjectives in it.
Submit the full work separately. I will read every one.
Tomorrow — Day 9: The channel map. You will know who it is for and why. Tomorrow is where the words actually go — planned from what you have built this week rather than from a blank page.