How to Write a Brand Positioning Statement

A brand positioning statement is a short internal sentence that says who you serve, what you are to them and why they should pick you over the alternative. If you want to know how to write a brand positioning statement your team will actually use, the work is less about wordsmithing and more about making three or four hard choices and writing them down.

This guide gives you a template, worked examples for three kinds of businesses, and a test to tell a usable statement from a decorative one.

What a positioning statement is for

A positioning statement is an internal tool. Customers never read it. It sits behind your tagline, your homepage headline, your sales scripts and your ad copy, and it keeps all of them saying the same thing.

That matters because most weak statements are written as if they were ads: "We deliver excellence through innovative, client-focused solutions." Nobody can act on that. A designer can't pick a photo with it, a salesperson can't answer an objection with it, and a writer can't decide what to cut.

A useful statement answers four questions:

• Who exactly is it for? A specific customer in a specific situation.
• What are you, in their terms? The category they would put you in when comparing options. Marketers call this the frame of reference.
• Why choose you? The one benefit you lead with.
• Why should they believe it? Evidence: something you do, have or have done that a competitor can't easily claim.

A template you can copy

A widely used template comes from Geoffrey Moore's book Crossing the Chasm. As TechTarget's definition of the term reproduces it, the template has two sentences with six blanks:

• For (target customer)
• who (statement of the need or opportunity),
• the (product name) is a (product category)
• that (statement of key benefit, meaning the compelling reason to buy).
• Unlike (primary competitive alternative),
• our product (statement of primary differentiation).

Fill it in plainly, in sentences you would say out loud. Then add one line of proof underneath: the reason to believe, which Alice Tybout of the Kellogg School of Management describes as proof of the brand's benefits. Without it, the differentiation line is only a claim.

Points of difference, and points of parity

In a 2002 Harvard Business Review article, Kevin Lane Keller, Brian Sternthal and Alice Tybout argued that positioning depends on more than what makes you different. A brand also needs points of parity: the things it shares with other products in the category, which customers expect before they will treat it as a legitimate option at all. They also stressed understanding the frame of reference, the set of competitors you are being judged against.

This gives you a useful check. Before you write the "unlike" line, list what your category treats as table stakes:

• A home care agency must be reachable when a family calls and able to staff shifts reliably. Compassion is a point of parity here, because every agency claims it.
• A CPA firm must be accurate and meet deadlines. "Accurate" can't be the difference.
• A restaurant must be clean, consistent and on the delivery apps people use.

If your "unlike" line restates a point of parity, rewrite it. The difference has to be something the customer would notice, would value, and could not get from the next option.

Worked examples

These are invented for illustration, so you can see the structure working.

Home care agency. For adult children arranging care for a parent after a hospital discharge, who need help in place within days, Example Home Care is a non-medical home care agency that can start care quickly and keeps the same caregiver on every visit. Unlike agencies that send whoever is free, we schedule a primary caregiver and a named backup for each client. Reason to believe: every family meets both caregivers before the first shift.

CPA firm. For owners of construction and trade businesses with five to fifty employees, who need more than a once-a-year return, Example CPA is an accounting firm that handles tax, payroll and job costing together. Unlike general practices that see trade clients a few times a year, we review job profitability with each client monthly. Reason to believe: a monthly job-costing review is written into every engagement.

Printing and packaging. For pharmaceutical and consumer brands that need packaging printed to exact color and regulatory text, Example Print is an offset printer that runs proofing and production under one roof. Unlike brokers who send jobs to the cheapest plant, we control every stage from plate to finishing. Reason to believe: the plant, the presses and the quality checks are ours.

Each one names a real situation, picks a category the customer already understands, and makes a difference claim that a competitor would have to change how they operate to copy.

How to write yours in an afternoon

1. Pull evidence first. Read your last twenty reviews, your best sales emails and your notes from lost deals. Write down the exact words customers use for their problem and for why they chose you.
2. Pick one segment. If you serve several, write one statement per segment. A statement that tries to cover everyone ends up saying nothing.
3. Name the real alternative. It is often something other than your closest competitor. For a small business it may be doing the job in-house, hiring a cheaper freelancer, or doing nothing.
4. Draft three versions of the benefit and difference lines, then argue about them with the people who sell and deliver the work.
5. Write the proof. If you can't name a reason to believe, you have found a gap in the business, and better copy won't close it.
6. Test it against the checklist below.

The checklist: usable or decorative?

• Could a competitor sign it without changing anything? Then it's decorative.
• Does it name a customer you could pick out of a list?
• Would a customer recognize the category you named?
• Is there exactly one lead benefit, with a proof point?
• Can a designer, a writer and a salesperson each make a decision from it?
• Does it avoid the words every brand uses: quality, innovative, solutions, passionate?

Weak: "We provide high-quality care with compassion and integrity." Strong: the home care example above, because it names a moment (after discharge), a promise (the same caregiver) and a proof (introductions before the first shift).

From statement to brand

Once the statement holds, everything else gets easier to judge. The homepage headline becomes a customer-facing version of the benefit line. The about page tells the story behind the reason to believe. Photography shows the customer you named. Our post on what brand identity includes covers how the visual side follows from here, and a brand voice guide turns the statement into how you sound.

Revisit the statement when something real changes: a new service line, a new segment, a competitor that copies your difference. Otherwise leave it alone. Writing for Kellogg Insight, Tybout calls a full repositioning "a strategy of last resort," because it takes considerable time and money and can confuse the customers you already have. She allows for modest changes that bring the category, the difference and the proof back into line, and she notes that repositioning is warranted when a position is too broad for its reason to believe to support. Positioning works through repetition.

How we approach positioning at Pinn.Media

We start brand projects with positioning because design decisions are guesses without it. On a rebrand for a printing and packaging house with decades of history, the brand foundation came before the identity system and the website, so every later choice had something to answer to. You can read more about how we work. If your brand feels like it could belong to anyone in your category, book a discovery call and we will work through your positioning statement with you.