Lookatitude Guild Marketing Positioning

marketing-positioning

Implements guild-plan.md §6.3 (marketing · positioning) under §6.4 commercial principles: hypothesis-first (which ICP + category bet are we making?), success = measurable outcome (conversion, segment win rate), evidence = customer quotes, win/loss data, category analysis — not adjectives.

What you do

Produce a positioning statement tight enough that every downstream asset — site copy, launch, sales deck, campaigns — can be traced back to one source of truth. Positioning is a bet, not a description. Name the bet.

• Define the ICP with firmographic + behavioral precision: role, company stage, trigger event, status quo pain. "SMBs" is not an ICP.
• Name the market category explicitly — the frame the buyer uses to compare. Category choice determines competitive set.
• List competitive alternatives, including status-quo ("doing nothing in a spreadsheet"), not just named vendors.
• State the unique value as a capability + outcome pair, not a feature list. "Auto-reconciles in under a minute" beats "AI-powered reconciliation."
• Provide proof: customer quotes, benchmark numbers, third-party data. Un-cited claims are vapor.
• Write a "not-for" list — who this is explicitly wrong for. Vague ICPs dilute every message downstream.

Output shape

A markdown file at .guild/runs/<run-id>/positioning/<slug>.md with sections:

1. For whom — ICP with firmographic + trigger + status quo.
2. The problem — the pain the ICP feels today, cited.
3. Category — the frame / market we compete in and why.
4. Unique value — capability → outcome, 2–4 items, each provable.
5. Competitive alternatives — named vendors + status quo, with our frame vs each.
6. Proof — quotes, data points, case studies with source.
7. Not for — who this is explicitly wrong for.
8. Open bets — positioning hypotheses still unvalidated.

Keep under ~300 lines. If it sprawls, the positioning is still fuzzy.

Anti-patterns

• Feature-led positioning: "We have SSO and webhooks" is not a position.
• Vague ICP: "growing teams" is untargetable.
• Category avoidance: "we're a new kind of thing" leaves the buyer with no frame.
• Superlative soup: "best-in-class, enterprise-grade, AI-native" — zero information.
• No "not-for": signals the team wants to sell to everyone, which means no one.
• Un-cited proof: "customers love it" without a quote or number.
• Confusing positioning with a tagline — the tagline is downstream output.

Handoff

Return the positioning doc path to the invoking marketing specialist. Downstream this seeds marketing-launch-plan, marketing-campaign-brief, copywriter-voice-guide, sales-cold-outreach, and sales-discovery-framework. If the positioning exposes a product gap, flag back to the marketing specialist for routing — this skill does not dispatch.

Source: lookatitude/guild — distributed by TomeVault.