Product Positioning

Work through competitive alternatives, unique attributes, and value to pick the market category and position where your product obviously wins.

Work out my product's positioning. Challenge my assumptions as we go: the most common positioning failure is defaulting to the market category we started in, not the one we win.

Product: [WHAT IT IS + WHAT IT DOES]
Who buys today (our best customers, not everyone): [THE CUSTOMERS WHO LOVE US MOST + what they say about us]
What they'd use if we disappeared: [THE REAL ALTERNATIVES: competitors, spreadsheets, an intern, doing nothing]
What we do that those alternatives can't: [FEATURES/CAPABILITIES: be concrete]

Work through, in order:
1. **Competitive alternatives**: group what customers would really do without us (including "nothing" and "spreadsheet"). The alternatives define what we're actually compared against, not who we think our competitors are.
2. **Unique attributes**: from my list, keep only capabilities the alternatives genuinely lack. Cut table stakes. If nothing survives, say so honestly: that's a product problem positioning can't fix.
3. **Value themes**: translate each surviving attribute into the customer outcome it enables ("2-way sync" becomes "sales and support never work from stale data"). Group into 1-3 themes.
4. **Who cares most**: the customer segment for whom those themes are urgent, from my best-customer evidence.
5. **Market category options**: 2-3 different markets we could claim (the category we came from / an adjacent category where our strengths are exceptional / a niche we could own outright). For each: what buyers automatically assume the product does and costs, who we'd be compared against, and whether we win that comparison. Recommend one, with the trade-off named.
6. **The positioning statement**: For [segment] who [job/trigger], [PRODUCT] is the [chosen category] that [value theme #1], because [unique attribute proof]. Plus a one-line version for the homepage.
7. **The test**: 3 questions to ask the next 5 prospects to validate the chosen category resonates (e.g. "what did you think this was when you first saw it?").

Rules: everything traces to the inputs, where you're inferring, tag it [ASSUMPTION]. If my best-customer description and my claimed differentiators point at different segments, surface the conflict instead of averaging it.

How to use

This walks the April Dunford positioning methodology (alternatives first, category last) which reverses how most teams do it and is why it works. The category decision (step 5) is the highest-stakes choice in marketing: it sets what buyers assume, compare, and expect to pay before they read a word of your copy. Validate with the step-7 questions before rewriting your site.

More marketing prompts

Audit my visibility in AI answer engines and give me a fix list.

Business: [WHAT YOU SELL, TO WHOM]
Category terms people use: [e.g. "invoicing software for freelancers"]
Competitors that get named instead of us: [LIST, or "unknown"]

Pages to evaluate:
"""
[PASTE THE FULL TEXT OF 1-5 KEY PAGES: homepage, a product page, your best guide]

AI Search Visibility Audit

Audit whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews can find, quote, and recommend you, then get a prioritized plan to fix what they cannot.

Marketingadvanced

Audit my existing content and tell me what to refresh, merge, or retire.

Page data (title, URL, target keyword, traffic now, traffic at peak, publish date, last update, conversions if known):
"""
[PASTE AS A TABLE OR LIST]
"""

Business goal this content serves: [e.g. "trial signups from mid-funnel guides"]

For each page, assign one act

Content Refresh Audit

Decide which existing pages to update, merge, or delete based on decay and intent drift, with a specific change list for each keeper.

Marketingintermediate

Write responsive search ad copy for this ad group.

Product or service: [WHAT IT IS, WHO IT IS FOR]
Ad group theme and keywords: [THE TIGHT KEYWORD SET THIS AD GROUP TARGETS]
What the searcher is trying to do: [e.g. "compare options", "buy now", "fix an urgent problem"]
Landing page: [WHAT THE PAGE ACTUALLY OFFERS AND WHAT THE PRIMARY ACT

Google Ads Copy

Write responsive search ad headlines and descriptions that match query intent, with pinning guidance and a matching landing page check.