Positioning Workshop — the sentence everything else hangs on

Positioning is the decision the rest of marketing inherits. Get it wrong and the ads, the funnel, and the sales calls all fight uphill carrying a claim buyers cannot place. This workshop builds the position from what is verifiably true — starting from what buyers would do instead of you, not from what the company wishes were special — and refuses to output a sentence a competitor could claim tomorrow.

Inputs

• The product and who buys it today, plus any positioning attempts already made: $ARGUMENTS
• From marketing-brief.md if present: the customer section (pains, desired outcomes, language bank), The competitors with their claimed positions, and any existing position line to pressure-test rather than replace blind.

Do this

1. List the real alternatives — what buyers actually do instead of buying you. Include "do nothing", "spreadsheet and gritted teeth", and "hire someone", not just named competitors. The alternative frames the whole argument.
2. List the differences that are true: capabilities, attributes, or a way of working that you have and the alternatives lack. Kill every difference the customer does not care about, however proud the team is of it.
3. For each surviving difference, connect difference → value → who cares most. A difference only matters through the value it creates, and every value has a segment that feels it hardest.
4. Draft three candidate position sentences in the brief's format:
   • For {WHO}, against {ALTERNATIVE}, we are the one that {DIFFERENCE}, proven by {PROOF}.
5. Stress-test each candidate against the competitor claims in the brief (inside Claude Code, positioning-decoder can map those claims and positioning-strategist can run the challenge):
   • Could any competitor say this sentence tomorrow without lying? Then it is a slogan, not a position.
   • Could a sceptical buyer check the proof in ten minutes? If not, it is decoration.
6. Pick the winner and write the argument behind it — why this WHO, why this alternative frame, why this difference beats the others considered. Keep the two rejected candidates with one line each on why they lost.
7. Update Positioning & message in marketing-brief.md with the position line and its argument, and flag the downstream sections (offer, message map, channels) that now need re-checking against it.

Output

The position sentence, the argument behind it, and the two rejected candidates with reasons — written into the Positioning & message section of marketing-brief.md, plus the list of brief sections to re-check against the new position.

Rules

• Build from what is verifiably true. A difference without existing proof goes on the product roadmap, not into the sentence.
• A position a competitor can honestly claim is not a position. Re-test until the sentence excludes them.
• Proof must be checkable — a number, a named mechanism, a demonstrable result. Adjectives are not proof.
• Narrower wins. A sentence that makes a tenth of the market say "this is exactly for me" beats one that makes all of it nod politely.
• If no true difference survives step 2, say so plainly and route to /marketing:offer-builder — the fix is the offer, not braver wordsmithing.