Why should anyone care?
Your customer sees hundreds of brands a day. Positioning is the answer to one brutal question: why you, instead of every alternative — including doing nothing?
Positioning is not a logo or a slogan. It's the space you occupy in the customer's head: "the fast one", "the affordable one", "the premium one", "the one that actually replies on WhatsApp."
Writing a value proposition
A value proposition is positioning written down in plain language. A reliable template:
We help [who] get [outcome] without [pain], unlike [alternative].
- Weak: "Quality fitness services for all your needs." (Who? What outcome? Versus what?)
- Strong: "I help busy Abuja professionals lose their first 5kg in 12 weeks with three 30-minute home workouts a week — no gym membership, no starving."
The strong version names the customer, the outcome, the timeframe, and kills two objections. Read yours aloud: if a stranger can't repeat back what you do and for whom, rewrite it.
Benefits beat features. "24/7 delivery" is a feature. "Suya at 2am when nowhere else is open" is the benefit — the feature translated into the customer's life.
Competitor analysis: steal the map, not the car
Before you position, you need to know what space is already taken. Audit three competitors across their digital presence:
Website
- What promise is in their headline? Who is it aimed at?
- Is there a clear call to action? How many clicks to buy or contact?
Social
- Which platforms are active? Posting frequency?
- What content gets engagement — and what gets ignored?
- How fast do they reply to comments and DMs?
Ads
- Check the Meta Ad Library (free, public) — are they running ads? What offers and hooks?
- Search their name plus their category on Google — do ads appear?
You're looking for two things: what works (patterns worth adapting) and the gap (what nobody is saying that customers clearly want — you found those wants in the reviews last lesson).
Try it now
Take a brand you know and write its value proposition using the template above. Then write the value proposition of its strongest competitor. If both sentences are interchangeable, you've found a positioning problem — and an opportunity.