Brand and Positioning
Positioning is the decision about what you are, for whom, and instead of what. Brand is what people carry away from every encounter with the company. Founders often treat both as a later, cosmetic exercise, which is how a product ends up hard to explain in a sentence. The concepts here cover the choices that make a company legible to the people you want and, deliberately, uninteresting to everyone else.
3 concepts in Brand and Positioning
- PositioningThe context you set for your product, what kind of thing it is, who it is for, and what it should be compared against.
- Tagline vs. Value PropositionA value proposition states what a specific customer gets and why it is worth switching for; a tagline is a short memorable phrase built on top of it. Writing the tagline first produces slogans that decorate a decision nobody has made.
- Tone of VoiceThe consistent register a company writes in across every surface, from product copy and emails to error messages and sales conversations, expressed concretely enough that two different people writing on the same day sound like the same company.
Other topics
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Put brand and positioning to work on your own company
Reading the vocabulary is the easy half. Lev works through the whole arc with you, and explains the terms as they come up in your own documents.
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