Most Positioning Is a Feature List with Adjectives

The clearest signal that a company has confused positioning with description is the appearance of an adjective.

Innovative, scalable, AI-powered, customer-centric, integrated, intuitive, secure, modular, end-to-end, best-in-class.

These words mean nothing, in the strict sense that they cannot fail. There is no buyer for whom not innovative is the better proposition; no investor for whom not scalable is the more attractive bet. Adjectives that cannot fail are adjectives that cannot differentiate. They are, in commercial terms, free. And anything free is, in commercial terms, worth approximately nothing.

A positioning statement constructed out of these adjectives is not a position. It is a description, with adjectives.

The structure repeats itself almost mechanically across the homepages of B2B and SaaS companies between pre-seed and Series B. X is a [category] for [audience] that [verb phrase containing one or two product features], so that [generic outcome]. Every component of this sentence is true. None of it commits to anything. The audience is whoever buys the product. The features are whatever the product does. The outcome is whatever the buyer wanted in the first place. Run the sentence through three competitors in the category, swapping nouns, and it remains roughly correct each time. This is the test.

The reason this happens is not stupidity. It is the structural pressure of writing positioning by committee.

A committee positioning sentence is a treaty. Every stakeholder in the room wants their priority included. The CEO wants ambition. The CRO wants the audience to stay broad. The CMO wants the brand voice protected. The product lead wants the most recent feature mentioned. Engineering wants the language to be honest. Customer success wants the existing customers to recognise themselves. Investors want the TAM to look big. The product marketing manager, attempting to honour all of these, writes a sentence that neither excludes anyone nor commits to anything and reads, on the page, like a particularly well-typeset shrug.

Real positioning is the opposite procedure. Real positioning is what is left after you have decided who you are not for, what you will not do, and what you will deliberately concede. The deliverable is a sentence that, when read aloud to the room, causes someone to flinch. If no one flinches, the positioning is still a description.

The test I use, on draft after draft, is this. If a direct competitor reads this sentence out loud, would it be obvious that the sentence was not theirs? If the sentence works equally well for the competitor, it is not a position. It is a category description, applied to the wrong company.

The reason this matters commercially is that the buyer in this market is exhausted.

A buyer evaluating, say, an early-stage AI tool will see eighteen companies in their search this quarter. Sixteen of those companies will have descriptions on their homepage. Two will have positions. The buyer's working hypothesis, formed in approximately seven seconds per homepage, is that the sixteen descriptions are interchangeable. The two positions are not. The two positions are remembered. The two positions, even if rejected initially, are returned to. This is the entire mechanism of becoming the company that a buyer thinks of in the meeting after the meeting where the procurement decision is made.

A description does not get returned. A description is what was in the search result and is now closed.

The way out, in practice, is not more cleverness but more refusal.

I do not believe in writing positioning that is unique. Unique is an aesthetic standard, and aesthetic standards drift. I believe in writing positioning that is exclusionary. Exclusionary is a structural standard. A position is exclusionary if it makes a non-trivial claim about who the company is for and who it is not for, what it will win on and what it will deliberately concede. A position that does this can be unpretty and still work. A position that does not do this can be beautifully written and will not.

In my experience, the hardest sentence to write is about who the company is not for. Every founder I have worked with has said something along the lines of, "But they buy from us already, sometimes at the moment of drafting this sentence." The sentence is hard because it tells a small number of existing buyers that they are not the priority. It is also the sentence that does the most work. It tells priority buyers they are the priority; the sales team where to spend; the product team what to refuse; and the marketing team which adjectives to delete from the homepage.

If you are reading your homepage now and the description fits at least three of your competitors, the problem is not the copy. The problem is that no decision has been made. The copywriter has been asked to disguise the absence of a decision as a sentence. The copywriter has done as well as a copywriter can. The next step is not a better copywriter.

The next step is a position.