How to write a positioning statement for your business

If you’re looking to hire a firm to help you write a positioning statement for your business, you might consider doing it yourself first. Why?
 
In this article, we’ll walk you through the basic steps of creating a powerful positioning statement. We’ll touch on the pros and cons of doing it yourself. But first, we’d like to address a couple of important questions: 
 
1) What the heck is a positioning statement? 
 
And: 
 
2) Why would you ever want one? 
 
Internal vs. external
 
First things first: What is a positioning statement? Its name gives you a clue. It’s a short written piece—generally a single sentence—which describes your business, relative to its competitors, along with who your intended customers are, and why they should choose your business vs. the others. 
 
Sound straightforward? It is. 
 
Indeed, if it’s that straightforward—if it’s that much of a no-brainer, then our second question becomes all the more relevant: Why would you ever want one?
 
There are two important words to consider here, both of which pertain to this discussion. And those words are internal and discipline.
 
Let’s be crystal clear about this: A positioning statement is strictly an internal document. You do not put this on your website. You do not use it in any of your marketing material. You do not include it in a presentation deck alongside your company’s mission statement or team bios. This is internal. For you. And your team. And selected partners. And that’s it. 
 
Which begs the question: Why?
 
Quite simply: It’s not a good piece of marketing. Any more than your company’s policies-and-procedures manual is. Sure, that’s an important document. But you don’t put it on your website. Same thing for the positioning statement. 
 
The biggest advantage of a good positioning statement is to provide alignment. If you’ve got sales reps out in the field, they need to know what your company is about. If you’re hiring a marketing firm, they need to understand where you’re coming from. Similarly, every single member of your team should know and understand how the company is intended to compete. Thus the “discipline.” 
 
To make this easier to understand, consider the opposite. Imagine if everyone on your team had a different idea of who your prospects are. Imagine they all had their own, varying ideas, on why those prospects should choose you. Imagine they had differing opinions on who the competition is. All of this “noise” can be eliminated with a good positioning statement. 
 
So how do you create one?
 
As we’d said above, this is very straightforward. Indeed, there’s a formula for it. We didn’t invent this. It goes like this: 
 
For [target audience], [brand name] is the [competitive frame of reference] that delivers [emotional benefit/point of difference], because only [brand name] is/offers [reason to believe/critical support].
 
It’s a fill-in-the-blanks exercise. Simple as that. 
 
Or perhaps not so simple. We’ve helped to moderate some very emotional, hair-pulling arguments over each of these “blanks” to fill, with various clients of ours. Consider some of the issues that can arise: 

• Who’s the “target audience”? Would it be, perhaps, “Time-constrained insurance executives in North America who need to reduce margin leakage? But what about their underlings? Does that mean we should rule them out?” 

 

• What’s the “competitive frame of reference”? “We’re a logistics company, we compete against other logistics companies. But what about LTL-only? Should we narrow our definition?” 

 

• What’s the “emotional benefit”? Is it “peace of mind”? But what about “savings”? 

 

• What’s the “reason to believe”? Is it “because we take an eco-friendly approach to all we do, so when you choose us, you’re also helping the planet? But if so, how does that fulfill the word ‘only’ in the positioning statement? Other companies—even competitors of ours—are eco-friendly, too.” 

 
A little tip: Be prepared to do this a lot. A lot. We typically go through a zillion iterations of positioning statements when we’re hired to help craft them. 
 
And a caveat: Don’t expect to find good examples of others’ positioning statements online. We know. We’ve tried. All you’ll find are other bloggers out there, pretending to quote, say, Amazon’s or Disney’s positioning statement, when you can tell, just by reading it, that that’s not it. As we’ve said, these are internal documents. There’s an embarrassing number of mission statements and even taglines out there, supposedly standing in as “positioning statements” in all these other articles. Don’t believe them.
 
Besides, someone else’s positioning statement won’t help you. This is about your business, not theirs. 
 
A parting shot
 
As we hinted above, a positioning statement is not the same thing as a mission statement. Or a vision statement. Or a tagline. Or a value proposition. They’re all different. Some are internal; others are external; there are subtleties which differentiate them all. 
 
That said, the utility of all these things is limited—by their intended usage, by the quality of the input used to create them, and how they’re actually leveraged in the real world. In other words, don’t put effort into this exercise unless you really intend to use it. 
 
And if you do, you might want to get help. This is a real team-building exercise, and as we’ve intimated above, we’ve facilitated this numerous times. Contact us today to get started. 

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