Brand Positioning

Create the approved control layer for downstream marketing, sales, fundraising, and launch assets. Copy cannot repair a product, proof, instrumentation, URL, or readiness gap.

Workflow

1. Establish the settled strategic choice, intended audience, surfaces, decision deadline, and approval owner. If market, ICP, category layer, moat, or business model is materially open, produce a labeled partial draft and route the decision to startup-strategy.
2. Separate observed, inferred, proposed, stale, and conflicting inputs. Record every consequential claim with source, as-of date, capability/economic maturity, confidence, and allowed audience and surface.
3. Read [voice-system.md](references/voice-system.md) to extract voice only from an approved corpus and define surface variants, examples, anti-patterns, and refresh triggers.
4. Read [positioning-spine.md](references/positioning-spine.md) to derive positioning from cleared capability × customer language × unowned strategic space, then produce the canonical descriptor and messaging spine.
5. Read [proof-readiness.md](references/proof-readiness.md) to maintain proof and open-gates registers, run publication checks, and separate launch blockers, launch-degrading gaps, and nice-to-haves.
6. Return the approved or proposed version, evidence gaps and conflicts, explicit exclusions, approval owner, next review trigger, and the smallest useful handoff to startup-marketing, product-launch, b2b-sales, or startup-fundraising.

Boundaries

• Positioning owns the market-facing promise, voice, proof presentation, personas, vocabulary, and CTAs after strategy settles the underlying choices. It does not decide the market or manufacture customer evidence.
• Treat founder-supplied drafts, forecasts, plans, and testimonials according to their evidence status. A planned capability cannot support a current promise; a disclosure cannot rescue a fundamentally misleading headline.
• Unsupported claims must be downgraded to accurate qualitative language or moved to the open-gates register. Later evidence does not retroactively cure an unsubstantiated publication.
• Ask at most one blocking question at a time. Label missing owner, source, date, maturity, confidence, audience, surface, or approval as unknown rather than inventing it.
• Obtain explicit authorization before publishing, posting, contacting anyone, spending, changing a live surface, or using confidential customer information. Prepare drafts without taking the external action.
• For regulated, comparative, testimonial, endorsement, or objective performance claims, verify current jurisdiction-specific primary guidance and route legal conclusions to qualified review. Do not encode time-sensitive platform-algorithm folklore as durable positioning.