oddlynew
Sign inStart for free
LibrarySource: Positioning, customer research and product narrativev9 · Updated Report

Source: Positioning, customer research and product narrative

Status: source note, first research pass on 29 September 2026 by a research agent. Every title, author, year and URL was confirmed by search or fetch in that pass; items marked [unverified detail] were not. Evidence class: practitioner frameworks; vendor-reported numbers are flagged. The step-by-step method and the templates built from these sources live in From product strategy to page copy: the eight steps and Templates. This note keeps the sources.

In short

Thesis

Copy comes last. Practitioners in different fields reach the same order. First you understand demand (JTBD, Mom Test, discovery). Then you make positioning choices (Dunford, Moore, Ries and Trout). Then you tell them as a story (Raskin, Dunford's Sales Pitch, PR/FAQ). Copy adapts that story and adds little of its own. Dunford: "Positioning is not equivalent to messaging. It isn't a tagline" (https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/positioning, read 29 October 2026). Kramer (MKT1): "Positioning is not the same as messaging or copy" (https://newsletter.mkt1.co/p/positioning-guide, read 29 October 2026). Voice-of-customer copywriters (Wiebe, Havice) add that the words themselves come from research, not invention.

1. Positioning

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout (1981)

  • Origin and URL: It grew from Trout's article "Positioning is a game people play in today's me-too market place" (Industrial Marketing, June 1969) and a three-part Advertising Age series (1972). https://www.alries.com/positioning ; background at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positioning_(marketing)

  • Summary: It is the source of the idea that position lives in the prospect's mind, not in the product. The book calls positioning "an organized system for finding a window in the mind."

  • Principles:

    1. The mind simplifies and files new information against what it already knows.

    2. Being first in a mental slot beats being better.

    3. If you cannot be first, create or claim a new slot.

    4. Relate your product to something the prospect already knows, which can include a leader you position against.

  • Into copy: The headline and category label must attach the product to an existing mental slot within seconds. A clever but unfamiliar label ("the Pipeline Cloud") gets no slot. Wynter's panel rated the homepage header and subheading built on that label 3.9/5 for overall clarity, a vendor-reported number (https://wynter.com/post/copy-testing, read 29 October 2026).

Obviously Awesome, April Dunford (2019; second edition 2026)

  • Summary: It gives a step-by-step B2B positioning method. Her definition: "Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about."

  • Principles:

    1. Five components: competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value (and proof), best-fit customers, market category. Relevant trends are an optional sixth.

    2. Process: the second edition (2026) uses five components and five steps, with an expanded pre-work section before them and an expanded section after them on turning positioning into a sales pitch and messaging (https://aprildunford.substack.com/p/announcement-obviously-awesome-the, read 29 October 2026). The 2019 edition's ten steps, in order: understand the customers who love you; form a cross-functional positioning team; align vocabulary and drop old assumptions; list true alternatives; isolate unique attributes; map them to value themes; find who cares a lot; choose the market frame; layer on a trend carefully; capture and share it.

    3. Alternatives are what customers would actually do without you, often "do nothing" or "hire an intern". Ignore "phantom competitors" you never meet in deals.

    4. Three positioning styles: head to head, big fish in a small pond (a subsegment), and create a new game (the hardest).

    5. "It's always better to be a little boring than completely baffling."

  • Into copy:

    • The competitive alternatives define what the homepage must contrast against (usually the spreadsheet, the status quo or the manual process, not a named rival).

    • The market category becomes the "what is it" line.

    • Value themes become the section headers.

    • Best-fit customer traits decide the audience cues in the hero ("for agencies with 10 to 50 staff").

Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win, April Dunford (2023)

Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore (1991; revised 1999, 2014)

  • Summary: It gives the standard positioning statement and the "beachhead" logic: win one segment of pragmatic buyers at a time.

  • Principles:

    1. Pragmatic buyers need "a compelling use case that will create pull, a whole product that nails the use case, and a word-of-mouth community."

    2. Target one segment you can dominate before moving on.

    3. The positioning statement is an internal alignment tool, not copy.

  • Into copy:

    • The "For / who" clause becomes the audience cue and the problem line.

    • "Is a [category]" becomes the clarity line.

    • "Unlike [alternative]" becomes the contrast section.

    • Beachhead thinking means one segment per homepage. Other segments get their own landing pages.

Play Bigger, Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney (2016)

  • Summary: It is the category design school: define and name a new problem, then become its "category king". The widely repeated claim that category kings take 76% of the value comes from this school's own study of venture-backed US technology companies founded 2000 to 2013, measured by market capitalization (https://playbigger.com/research/time-to-market-cap, read 29 October 2026).

  • Principles:

    1. Sell the problem before the product.

    2. Name the category deliberately.

    3. Line up company, product and category design together.

    4. Use a "lightning strike" moment to launch the category.

  • Critique:

  • Into copy: A new category name in the hero forces two extra jobs (define it, then make people care) before you can differentiate. Default to an existing category plus a subsegment qualifier. Use a problem-first "new game" narrative only when the buyer already feels the shift.

2. Customer understanding

Competing Against Luck, Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan (2016)

  • URL: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28820024-competing-against-luck ; related HBR article "Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'" (Sept 2016), https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done (only the header was read; body [unverified detail])

  • Summary: It defines "a job" as "the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance."

  • Principles:

    1. Circumstance, not demographics, explains why people buy.

    2. Jobs have functional, social and emotional sides.

    3. The competition is whatever else gets "hired". In the milkshake study, the morning commuter's milkshake competed with bananas, bagels and snack bars.

    4. The attributes that win follow from the job (thick, lasts the commute, fits the cupholder), not from product category norms.

  • Into copy: Write the hero around the circumstance and the progress, not the feature set. Treat "hired instead" alternatives as the contrast set.

Demand-Side Sales 101, Bob Moesta with Greg Engle (2020)

  • Summary: It gives the switch interview and the four forces of progress: push of the situation, pull of the new solution, anxiety of the new, habit of the present. A switch happens only when push plus pull beats anxiety plus habit.

  • Principles:

    1. "Nobody wants to be sold to, but everybody wants to buy."

    2. Rebuild the buying timeline: first thought, passive looking, active looking, deciding, then first use and ongoing use.

    3. "Context creates meaning" and "contrast creates value": ask what the choice was not. Unpack vague words ("there's no fast, only faster than...").

    4. The same action (such as a demo request) means different things at different timeline stages.

    5. Interview count: "I always like to do ten interviews and take a step back and ten more interviews and take a step back" (Moesta, "The Mattress Interview Q&A", https://jobstobedone.org/radio/the-mattress-interview-qa/, read 29 October 2026). Stop when the stories start to repeat (Spiek, same episode).

  • Into copy:

    • Push becomes the problem section, in the customer's words.

    • Pull becomes the outcome headline.

    • Anxiety becomes the FAQ, guarantees, migration help and security proof.

    • Habit becomes "works with what you already use" and low-effort first steps.

    • Timeline stages map to pages: passive lookers get education content, active lookers get comparison and pricing pages.

When Coffee and Kale Compete, Alan Klement (2016)

  • Summary: It is the most rigorous statement of the "jobs as progress" view. Customers want a better version of themselves or their situation; products are means.

  • Principles:

    1. Demand comes from the struggle to move from a current state to a preferred one.

    2. Competition is defined by the progress sought, so coffee and kale compete for "feel energetic".

    3. Job statements combine push and pull ("help me, free me, equip me").

    4. The job story format, devised by Paul Adams's team at Intercom in mid-2013 and later named "job story" by Klement (Adams): When [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome].

  • Into copy: Job stories give you a ready-made hero plus subhead. "When" becomes the audience and trigger cue, "I want to" becomes the promise, and "so I can" becomes the payoff line.

Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice, Anthony W. Ulwick (2016), Outcome-Driven Innovation

  • Summary: It is the quantitative school. A job is a solution-free functional statement ("cut a piece of wood in a straight line"), broken into a job map. Needs are measurable desired outcomes.

  • Principles:

    1. Every job map has eight steps: Define, Locate, Prepare, Confirm, Execute, Monitor, Modify, Conclude.

    2. Outcome statement format: direction + metric + object + context ("minimize the time it takes to...").

    3. A market holds 100 or more outcomes. Survey importance against satisfaction to find underserved ones.

    4. Set targets before ideation. (Strategyn claims an 86% success rate; this is vendor-reported.)

  • Into copy: The underserved outcomes with the highest importance become the proof-heavy benefit claims, phrased as metrics ("from 3 days to 20 minutes"). The job map steps suggest the "how it works" sequence.

How the JTBD schools disagree

  • Jobs as progress (Christensen, Moesta, Klement) against jobs as activities (Ulwick, ODI). The labels are Klement's, in "Know the Two, Very, Different Interpretations of Jobs to be Done": https://jtbd.info/know-the-two-very-different-interpretations-of-jobs-to-be-done-5a18b748bd89

  • Progress school: people are aspirational. The job is the change in their life, and tasks are only a means. Its method is qualitative switch interviews, and it is strongest at explaining why people buy and switch.

  • Activity school: the job is a stable functional task. Needs are measurable outcomes, and its method is large quantitative surveys. It is strongest for feature and UX priorities.

  • Public dispute: Ulwick replied to Klement in "Alan Klement's War On Jobs-To-Be-Done" (https://jobs-to-be-done.com/alan-klements-war-on-jobs-to-be-done-dad8eaed567c; 16 Jan 2018, read 29 October 2026). Ulwick says Klement uses the labels to set up straw man arguments, that ODI is not focused on activities, and that ODI and Christensen's theory share a common set of tenets. The core split over rigor versus meaning is visible on Strategyn's own page, which stresses data-defined targets.

  • For copy: use progress-school interviews for the hero, story and objections. Use activity-school outcomes for proof points and the feature section.

The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick (2013)

  • URL: https://www.momtestbook.com/ (the book PDF is dated August 1, 2013)

  • Summary: It gives rules for customer conversations that produce facts, not compliments.

  • Principles, quoted from the book:

    1. "Talk about their life instead of your idea."

    2. "Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future."

    3. "Talk less and listen more."

    4. Deflect compliments, anchor fluff, and dig beneath opinions, ideas, requests and emotions.

    5. Push for commitment and advancement (time, reputation, money), not praise.

    6. "Customer conversations are bad by default."

  • Into copy: Only past-behavior evidence ("last month I rebuilt the report by hand, twice") is safe to turn into problem copy. Hypothetical enthusiasm ("I'd totally use that") should never become a claim.

Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres (2021)

  • Summary: It makes research a weekly habit rather than a phase.

  • Principles:

    1. The product trio talks to customers at least weekly.

    2. The opportunity solution tree has four layers: desired outcome, opportunities (needs, pain points, desires), solutions, assumption tests.

    3. Story-based interviews: "Tell me about the last time..."

    4. Test assumptions, not whole ideas.

  • Into copy: The opportunity layer is a ranked list of customer-worded needs. The top few become homepage value themes, and the stories become testimonials and scenario copy. Weekly interviews keep the copy's language current.

Voice-of-customer research as copy input

  • Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers, "How to Find Your Message Using Review Mining" (Oct 2014), https://copyhackers.com/2014/10/amazon-review-mining/

    • Read reviews of the solutions prospects use today, including neighbouring categories. Sort phrases into love, hate and worry. Look for recurring language.

    • "Instead of writing your message, steal it. Steal it directly from your prospects."

    • Case: a rehab-center headline taken from book reviews, "If you think you need rehab, you do", got over 400% more clicks than the control, "Your Addiction Ends Here". This is a single test reported by Wiebe.

  • Jen Havice, Finding the Right Message: How to Turn Voice of Customer Research into Irresistible Website Copy (2016; second edition around 2020), https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29526623-finding-the-right-message

    • Covers interview and survey design, analysis, and writing value propositions from findings.

    • Clarity ("what is it?") comes first, then relevance, value and differentiation.

    • Test copy with panels of the target audience instead of reviewing it internally.

  • Into copy: Keep a VoC swipe file of exact phrases. Headlines and problem statements reuse customer wording verbatim wherever possible.

3. Product direction and narrative

Working Backwards, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr (2021)

  • Summary: The PR/FAQ writes the launch copy before the build, as a test of the product idea.

  • Principles:

    1. Write the press release as if the product has launched, from a future date.

    2. PR sections: Heading, Subheading, Summary paragraph, Problem paragraph, Solution paragraph(s), Quotes and Getting Started.

    3. The external FAQ covers price, how it works, support and where to buy. The internal FAQ covers alternatives, market size, economics, risks and dependencies.

    4. Expect many drafts. If the release is not compelling, rethink the product, not the prose.

  • Into copy:

    • Heading and subheading become the hero and subhead.

    • The problem paragraph becomes the problem section.

    • The solution paragraph becomes the "how it works" section.

    • The customer quote becomes the target testimonial (then go and earn it).

    • The external FAQ becomes the homepage FAQ.

Amazon narrative memos (six-pager)

"The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen", Andy Raskin (2016)

  • Summary: It is the strategic narrative model built on Zuora's "subscription economy" deck.

  • Principles:

    1. Name a big, relevant change in the world.

    2. Show there will be winners and losers.

    3. Tease the Promised Land. It should be desirable and hard to reach without you, and it is the customer's future state, not owning your product.

    4. Introduce features as "magic gifts" that overcome the obstacles to that Promised Land.

    5. Present evidence you can make the story come true, ideally a success story from a similar customer.

    6. The motto he cites is Ben Horowitz's: "The company story is the company strategy."

  • Into copy: A homepage built as a narrative runs:

    • Shift (eyebrow or opening line)

    • Stakes (what happens to teams that do not adapt)

    • Promised Land (the headline, framed as an outcome)

    • Features as capabilities, each tied to one obstacle

    • Case-study proof

    • This suits "new way against status quo" products.

Marty Cagan: Inspired (2nd ed. 2017) and Empowered (2020), SVPG

  • Principles:

    1. The vision spans 2 to 5 years for software and says how customers' lives get better, specifically.

    2. Vision stays stable while strategy changes yearly or quarterly.

    3. Communicate the vision as a "visiontype", a designed visual narrative.

    4. Pair the vision with product principles.

    5. Empowered teams are given problems to solve, not features to build.

  • Into copy: The visiontype and the vision narrative are the raw material for the promised-land and "why now" sections. The principles often become brand voice and trust claims.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt (2011)

  • Principles:

    1. The kernel of strategy has three parts: diagnosis (what is going on, and the crux), guiding policy (the approach that directs and constrains), and coherent actions (steps that reinforce each other).

    2. Bad strategy shows four hallmarks: fluff, failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy, and bad objectives.

  • Into copy: The diagnosis becomes the "insight" or "shift" opening. The guiding policy becomes the one-line "our approach". Fluff in strategy shows up as fluff in the headline: if the diagnosis is vague, the copy will be too.

Shape Up, Ryan Singer, Basecamp (2019)

  • Principles:

    1. Appetite: a fixed time budget chosen before the solution.

    2. A pitch has five ingredients: Problem, Appetite, Solution, Rabbit Holes, No-Gos.

    3. The best problem statement is "a single specific story that shows why the status quo doesn't work."

    4. Fat-marker sketches and breadboards are concrete enough to judge but leave room for the builders.

  • Into copy: The pitch's problem story is ready-made feature announcement and landing-page copy. No-gos keep copy honest about what the product does not do.

Badass: Making Users Awesome, Kathy Sierra (2015)

Des Traynor / Intercom

Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny's Newsletter)

Emily Kramer, MKT1

  • URL: "The MKT1 Guide to positioning" (12 Jun 2024), https://newsletter.mkt1.co/p/positioning-guide ; positioning, pricing and product marketing templates (paid subscribers only), https://newsletter.mkt1.co/p/templates-product-marketing

  • Principles:

    1. Positioning fills three blanks: Who is it for? What is it? Why is it better? "Positioning is ultimately about comparison."

    2. First pick one of four product types, each with its natural comparison:

      • vertical solution (against a horizontal tool)

      • buy against build (against internal effort)

      • new way (against the status quo)

      • 10x better (against the incumbent)

    3. Positioning sits under the brand story. Messaging then adapts it by audience, funnel stage and channel.

    4. Keep research and synthesis separate. Share the statement, not the pile of research.

  • Into copy: The product type decides the homepage's contrast frame. A "new way" page argues against the status quo; a "10x" page shows side-by-side comparisons with the incumbent.

Paul Graham

  • URLs: "Do Things that Don't Scale" (July 2013), https://paulgraham.com/ds.html ; "Be Good" (April 2008), https://paulgraham.com/good.html

  • Principles:

    1. "Make something people want" (YC's motto; "still the one I'd pick").

    2. Recruit users manually.

    3. "Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made."

    4. Start narrow: Facebook began for Harvard only, "because they felt it was really for them".

    5. Do things by hand to learn before automating.

  • Into copy: Founder-led manual selling is the cheapest source of messaging. You hear objections and wording first-hand. A narrow first market justifies a narrow, specific homepage ("for Harvard students", not "for everyone").

Stripe's writing culture

  • Principles:

    1. Leaders model the writing (Patrick Collison's emails with footnotes, structured like research papers).

    2. Share sample documents so nobody starts from a blank page.

    3. Standardize and review only high-leverage documents.

    4. Short paragraphs, subheads and diagrams.

    5. "Writing forces you to structure your thoughts" (Dave Nunez, documentation manager).

  • Into copy: Treat the messaging doc as a high-leverage document with formal review. Docs-grade clarity is part of how Stripe's product is perceived.

4. Message hierarchy and messaging documents

Message house (a common practitioner framework, no single author)

  • Structure: the roof is the umbrella statement or value proposition. Three or four pillars are the value themes. The foundation is the proof points (data, examples, quotes) under each pillar.

  • Into copy:

    • Roof becomes the hero.

    • Pillars become the three homepage sections.

    • Proof points become logos, numbers, quotes and case studies placed directly under each pillar.

    • Sales, docs and PR reuse the same house.

Value Proposition Canvas, Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Value Proposition Design (2014)

  • Structure: a Customer Profile (jobs, pains, gains) matched against a Value Map (products and services, pain relievers, gain creators). "Fit" means the value map addresses the most important jobs, pains and gains.

  • Into copy:

    • Top pains become problem-section bullets.

    • Pain relievers become feature or benefit pairs.

    • Top gains become outcome headlines.

    • Pains and gains with no reliever or creator mean you should not claim them.

Onlyness statement, Marty Neumeier, Zag: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands (2006)

Messaging hierarchy for the page (Wynter / Laja)

  • Order: clarity, then relevance, then value, then differentiation.

  • Mapping: lead with the market category for clarity, and spell out relevance "as close to the above-the-fold content as possible" (https://wynter.com/post/messaging-hierarchy, read 29 October 2026). Clarity in the hero, value mid-page and a section for differentiators are this note's reading.

5. Naming and product language

Lexicon Branding (David Placek)

Igor Naming Guide (Igor International)

  • Principles: four name types: functional (Infoseek), invented (Google, Agilent), experiential (Navigator, Safari, Lyft), evocative (Uber, Virgin, Apple: evokes the positioning, not the goods).

  • Into copy: Functional names explain themselves but blend in. Evocative names need the hero to supply clarity, so pair them with a plain category line.

Ubiquitous language, Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software (2003)

  • Principles:

    1. One rigorous shared vocabulary for domain experts, users and developers, rooted in the model and used in code.

    2. "Domain experts should object to terms or structures that are awkward or inadequate."

    3. The language evolves as understanding deepens.

  • Into copy (research agent's synthesis): Keep one glossary for code, UI, docs and marketing. Seed it with the customer terms found in interviews. When the homepage, the UI label and the database table use the same word for the same concept, onboarding friction and support load drop. A mismatch between the words is often a sign the model itself is unclear. Des Traynor's "pen icon" story (an Intercom customer's message button looked like Edit, so it became "Send Message") shows the same problem at the UI level (Traynor).

Method and templates

The step-by-step method from customer evidence to page copy, and the reusable templates built from these sources (positioning statement, positioning canvas, three blanks, onlyness, PR/FAQ, strategic narrative, sales pitch, Shape Up pitch, job story, outcome statement, strategy kernel, switch interview questions, Mom Test guardrails, message house), live in From product strategy to page copy: the eight steps and Templates. Each template's author and book are in this note's entries above.

One positioning rule from the method stays here as its evidence: when copy fails in tests repeatedly, go back to positioning, not wording (Dunford).

Verification notes

  • Naming firms: the note covers Lexicon Branding and the Igor Naming Guide. Catchword (https://catchwordbranding.com/) is another established naming firm.

  • Pages not read directly:

    • Raskin's Medium originals returned 403. His "Greatest Sales Deck" steps are confirmed through his LinkedIn republication (read 29 October 2026).

    • The body of the HBR article "Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'" (2016) was not accessible.

  • Numbers not independently audited: Strategyn's 86% success rate and the "76% for category kings" figure both come from interested parties.

  • Fetched rather than searched: the last confirmations (Intercom, Shape Up, Mom Test text, Neumeier, Crossing the Chasm editions) were done by fetching the pages directly.

Oddlynew Copy and Messaging PrinciplesSign in

Referenced by

and more