POSITIONING & NARRATIVE
Most website projects are really a positioning problem wearing a design brief.
Competitors
mapped before we write a word
1
sentence everything traces back to
Before
any screen gets designed
Every
headline earns its place
A claim you cannot defend in one sentence will not survive a scroll.
Complex technology companies rarely have a copy problem. They have an agreement problem: three people in the company describe the product three different ways, and the website ends up carrying all three at once. Every section argues for a different audience, and the visitor leaves unable to say what the thing replaces.
Positioning work is how that gets settled. Not a workshop that produces a deck, but a decision about what the company claims, who it is against, and what proof it can put behind it. Everything downstream, structure, design and motion, follows from that answer.
Discovery
Stakeholders, sales calls, and the three different versions of the pitch already in use.
Category scan
Where every competitor sits, and what nobody in the market is saying.
The claim
One sentence the company can defend, and the proof that earns it.
Message architecture
The claim broken into sections, in the order that makes it land.
Language rules
The words to use, the words to retire, and how to describe the product consistently.
Handover
A written system your marketing, sales and product teams all work from.
Positioning work that changed what got built.
Primefold
One five-word promise, and a scroll built to prove it.
Panxo
A category that did not have a name yet, defined and sold on the same page.
Reflow
Positioning settled on a funding-round deadline, then built to match.
When you need this
A new category, a repositioning, a raise, a merger, or three people in the company describing the product three different ways.
What you get
A claim, a message architecture, language rules and an information architecture. Written down, so it survives the people who wrote it.
A workshop and a deck
Two days offsite, a beautifully formatted document, and a team that goes back to describing the product however it always did.
A settled argument
A decision with proof behind it, applied to the site, the deck and the product, and specific enough that a new hire can follow it.
What a positioning engagement covers
Category definition
What the company is, what it is not, and which market it actually competes in.
Value proposition
The claim, the audience it is for, and the proof that supports it.
Message architecture
The argument broken into sections and ordered to land.
Narrative
The company story, the product story, and how the two connect.
Information architecture
Which pages exist, what each one has to prove, and how they link.
Voice and language rules
How the company writes, and the words it has agreed to stop using.
Not sure whether you have a design problem or a positioning one?
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