Positioning statement examples, and the one test most of them fail
Positioning statement examples run through one test: swap in a competitor's name. Most survive it, which is the problem. Here is what a position reads like.
Most positioning statement examples you'll find online are grammatically fine and strategically empty. They get through every review meeting because they don't exclude anyone, and they fail the one test that matters: put a competitor's name where yours is, and the sentence is still true.
A positioning statement names who you're for, the situation they're in, the category you're claiming, and the alternative you're better than. If you swap in a competitor's name and it still reads true, you've described your market, not your place in it.
The positioning statement template
The template most people use comes from Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, and it still holds up:
For [specific audience], who [situation, right now], [product] is the [category] that [one claim], unlike [named alternative].
Two of those slots carry most of the weight, and they're the two people most often fill with filler.
"For growing businesses" names nobody, because no business thinks of itself as shrinking. "Unlike other solutions" names nothing at all. Both are what a sentence sounds like when it's avoiding a commitment, and once they're in, the rest of the statement can't be wrong about anything.
The swap test
Take your statement, replace your company's name with your closest competitor's, and read it out loud.
If it still reads true, it isn't a bad sentence, it just isn't yours. You've described the aisle rather than the thing on the shelf. A real position is a sentence a competitor couldn't honestly say.
Most first drafts fail this, which is fine as a starting point. It's a problem if you stop there, though, because a statement that survives the swap can't guide anyone. It won't tell a designer what to cut or a salesperson who to walk away from.
Nine positioning statement examples, graded
These are the shapes real statements come in. We've written them out rather than quoting named companies, because a company's wording changes every few months and the pattern is what's useful.
| # | The statement | Swap test | What went wrong (or right) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "The all-in-one platform that helps teams work smarter." | Survives | No audience, no category, no alternative |
| 2 | "For growing businesses that want to scale, we are the leading solution in our space." | Survives | "Leading" is a claim about you, not a promise to them |
| 3 | "For marketing teams, the analytics tool that is easy to use, unlike complex enterprise tools." | Survives | Every vendor claims "easy" and blames "complex" |
| 4 | "For enterprise IT, the security platform trusted by the Fortune 500." | Survives | Trust is evidence, not a position |
| 5 | "For B2B founders with no sales hire, the prospecting agent that researches accounts overnight, unlike a bought list." | Fails | A narrow audience and a specific alternative |
| 6 | "For physiotherapy clinics with under ten practitioners, the booking tool that works without a front desk, unlike a receptionist and a paper diary." | Fails | The alternative is a person, which is specific and true |
| 7 | "For teams that have already outgrown spreadsheets, the fastest way to model revenue." | Nearly fails | Good situation, weak alternative |
| 8 | "For developers who hate writing tests, the tool that writes them from your commits, unlike a coverage dashboard that only tells you what's missing." | Fails | Names a behaviour rather than a company size |
| 9 | "Empowering businesses to reach their full potential." | Survives, and would for a bank | Not a statement so much as a mood |
Numbers four and five are worth comparing. Four sounds far more impressive and is worth much less inside the company, because "trusted by the Fortune 500" doesn't tell anyone what to build next. Five tells the team to invest in research quality and to stop chasing companies that already have a sales team.
How to write a positioning statement: rewriting number three
Start with the version almost everyone writes: "For marketing teams, the analytics tool that is easy to use, unlike complex enterprise tools."
First, the audience. Which marketing teams? The ones with a data analyst don't need "easy", so make it "for marketing teams with no analyst".
Then the situation. What's happening to them right now? They're "pulling numbers by hand for a Monday report".
Then the alternative. Nobody thinks of themselves as using "complex enterprise tools". What do they actually use? A spreadsheet and a screenshot, so "unlike exporting to a spreadsheet every week".
Put together: "For marketing teams with no analyst, who are pulling numbers by hand for a Monday report, X is the analytics tool that builds the report itself, unlike exporting to a spreadsheet every week."
Now run the swap with a big incumbent's name. It reads false, because they aren't built for teams without an analyst, and their answer to the Monday report is a dashboard somebody has to set up. The statement leaves people out, and that's what makes it useful. If yours leaves nobody out, it's describing the category rather than your place in it, the same mistake as a competitor grid full of adjectives.
Positioning statement or position statement?
They sound alike, but they're different documents. A position statement sets out an organisation's stance on an issue, the kind a professional body, a nursing association or a nonprofit publishes on a policy question, usually as the stance, the evidence and a recommendation. A positioning statement is the marketing tool on this page: who you're for and what you're better than.
If you came here for the first kind, the best examples are the published statements of the professional association in your field. If you came for the second, the nine above are the ones to borrow from.
When is positioning not the real problem?
If you haven't sold anything yet, positioning is premature. A good statement is a compression of what you learned from real buyers, and written before those conversations it's fiction with a template around it. Ten customer calls will teach you more than any workshop, and if you still can't name the audience after that, go and build a profile of who actually buys first. The audience slot carries the whole statement, and it can't be filled from a whiteboard.
Sometimes the statement is fine and nobody uses it. That's an operating problem, and putting it in the deck again won't fix it. Tie it to a decision people make every week, like which inbound leads get a call back.
It's also worth remembering what the statement is for. It's written for your own team to read. The spoken version is an elevator pitch, and the customer-facing version is the value proposition, which fails in its own particular way.
If you're on your third rewrite this year, the first version was probably too vague to be wrong, so every rewrite feels like progress without changing anything. Make it specific enough that it could turn out to be false, and the urge to keep rewriting tends to go away.
Once it is specific, it has a job: it becomes the starting point for research, which is how prospecting turns a position into a sentence about one particular company.