Converts marketing copy — headlines, ads, homepage claims, pitches, positioning statements — into value-first, vivid language: reframes save-time/save-money pitches as create-more-value pitches in the currency the customer measures value, fits each claim to the right level of the customer's needs (f

Positioning: More Value, Made Vivid Changing the way you describe a product can justify a multiple of its price — without changing the product. Most copy leaves that multiplier on the table: it sells saving time or money instead of creating value, mixes its price signals, and says it all in generic words nobody pictures. This skill converts existing messages, one at a time, through three disciplines — more value at the right level of the customer's needs, one consistent price story , and every sentence vivid — and records the survivors as a reusable positioning statement list. The mental model The repositioning multiplier A tool that doubles the cost efficiency of ad campaigns can be pitched two ways. "Cut your ad spend in half" caps the price at a fraction of the savings. "Double your leads at the same cost per lead" prices against growth , and the same customer happily pays several times more — faster growth is what their CEO celebrates; cost savings just prompt "and how will we use that to grow?" For a business buyer it is roughly ten times more valuable to grow faster than to save money. Same product, same math, several times the price: the multiplier is in the framing. The rule: never formulate the product as a way to save time, save money, or be more efficient. Position it as creating more value, in the currency the customer already measures value. This is not the old features versus benefits debate — "saves you three hours a week" is a benefit. It's about which benefits: less of something negative loses to more of something positive, and the best is more of the thing the buyer's own scoreboard counts (revenue, leads, deals landed, subscribers, bugs prevented before they cost anything, transactions completed). The conversion pattern: "write unit tests faster" becomes "prevent costly bugs by writing ten times more tests per hour"; "automate answers to common support questions" becomes "instant answers, 24/7 — maximize customer satisfaction"; "reduce infrastructure costs with auto scaling" becomes "handle a viral traffic spike without losing a single lead." Savings is not the only way a message fails this rule. Two others are just as common, and neither trips a save/spend test: The mechanism pitch — every sentence's subject is how the product works. "Our inference engine resolves every dependency in your stack into one canonical graph." "Derived from first principles, with every assumption declared at each step." This is the default failure of technical, scientific, and academic founders, who mistake the impressiveness of the machine for the reader's reason to care. The deliverable pitch — what arrives, rather than what changes. "A 40 page audit with every issue ranked by severity" names a thing in the buyer's inbox; nobody is graded on receiving a document. All three fail identically: they promise more of something the buyer does not count. The repair is the same for all three — find the scoreboard, promise more of that. Mechanism and deliverable claims aren't banned, they're demoted: they belong at your level, as features. So the first question for any message is: what is the paramount goal of the person reading this, and in what units do they count it? The rewrite promises more of that. Asked of the user directly it tends to return abstractions — efficiency, peace of mind — so ask it sideways: what does this person's boss praise or blame them for at their review, and what does someone else in the company say about them that makes their year or ruins it? That currency question is also the rule's own escape valve: when the reader's scoreboard genuinely is cost — a procurement or finance role comped on savings — the rule picks cost for that reader, stated as their win ("a cut you report at next quarter's budget review"), not as your discount. The test is narrow, because users over claim it: does this reader report that number upward, and are they paid on it? Both, or the exception doesn't fire — caring about cost isn't qualifying, since at some point everyone does. A budget you defend is not a number you get promoted for shrinking. And it's granted per reader , not per company: one buyer qualifying doesn't license a savings pitch aimed at the colleague who signs. One product often needs both: value framed statements for the champion, cost framed for the approver, each tagged by audience. Level fit Every claim lives at some level of the customer's ladder of needs — each need a means to the end one level up ("buy infrastructure" serves "set up a website" serves "build a following" serves "get a book deal"). Where a claim sits determines what kind of claim it should be: Your level — what you do — gets features. A buyer whose current thought (and search query) is at your level wants specifics, not lifestyle promises: a builder searching for a 5/16" socket wrench wants the spec and the mounted light, not photos of happy people — and doesn't need the benefits of photons spelled out. One level up gets the promise. The outcome claimed as the consequence of what you do is the next level, not the fifth: "your own website, live today" from the WordPress level. Each level up multiplies the value, but only one level up stays credible. Far above levels get aspiration, never promises. Don't claim you'll get them the book deal; show the part you play, with testimonials proving it happens and content that helps. Vendors above you get countered. They obviate you; answer with what the customer keeps at your level — flexibility, customization, uniqueness ("you don't want a site identical to a million others"). Levels below you get bragged about. You make those steps obsolete — say so, vividly: nothing to learn, manage, or pay for separately ("never think about infrastructure — live in one minute, even if you can't tell a server from a pizza box"). These are absence claims by construction, and that's fine in this role: the value rule governs a message's crux, not every supporting clause. What it forbids is an absence claim doing headline duty. A complete positioning statement list covers all five roles — and there is no sixth. An audience filter is not a role: narrowing lands inside a statement, as specificity qualifying a claim ("for the post Series A healthcare company facing its first SOC 2"), never as a standalone entry announcing who you're for. A message that does nothing but declare an audience gets folded into the claim it qualifies, or retired. Who the customer is was decided upstream; all this skill insists on is that the wording be specific about it. If the user has a needs stack file (levels numbered N1, N2, …), read levels and roles straight from it and cite them; if not, elicit a minimal ladder inline — your level, one up, one down — before rewriting. Make it vivid Saying the right thing vaguely is the same as saying nothing. Specificity is what makes writing vivid: the reader stops skimming the claim and starts picturing it. Compare: "Hacked websites suck — expensive and painful to resolve" against "A hacked website is a personal violation. It's terrifying. You pay a consultant $300 an hour to fix it, and you're still wondering whether it happens again in three months." Evocative emotion, personal, a number instead of "expensive," a specific uneasy mental state instead of "sometimes it recurs." Five moves get copy there: 1. No generic words. Words that span broad concepts instead of conjuring an image — very, many, various, several, some, effort, usage, useful, fast, effective, better, great, good, nice, bad — are lazy placeholders for the specific thing. Swap each for the specific: "easy" → "so intuitive you won't need a manual"; "inexpensive" → "a dollar a day"; "powerful" → "processes 6.2 million requests a day"; "beloved" → the actual rating, or the wall of unsolicited testimonials. When a generic noun or verb drags adjectives along to prop it up, replace the whole phrase with one word that embodies it ("walked quickly" → "scurried"). Then compress: "customers are very happy with our work" → "customers adore us" — word density buys room for the call to action. Category abused words count too: "secure," "safe," "military grade," a trailing "with AI" — each earns a place only as shown proof or a specific behavior ("predicts which deliverables will slip"), never as the adjective. And when a true precise number feels "less punchy" than a round one: precise reads as counted, round reads as marketing — "1,340 firms" beats "over a thousand." 2. No clichés. Some phrases are dead — always vapid or killed by repetition — and may not appear in any output: the Holy Grail of; the leading provider of; designed with you in mind; putting customers first; proven track record; the go to choice; the future of X is here; transforming the way you X; X is broken/dead/sucks; everything you know about X is wrong; saves time so you can get back to X; fast and easy; for everyone; …and more; win win; all new; solution (in its marketing speak sense only — the chemistry or math sense is fine); genuine; authentic; cutting edge; game changing; revolutionary; disruptive; value add; undisputed; world class. Everyone claims them, nobody believes them — 78% of "About Us" pages claim to be "the leading provider" of something. 3. Show, don't tell. Convert the adjective into tangible proof: "it's fast" → the third party benchmark against named competitors; "it's easy" → the video of a stranger going from nothing to published in ten minutes; "we innovate" → the public changelog; "we stand by it" → the ten year warranty; "legendary support" → "we're a small team; you get us personally." Two special forms: name & embrace — say the quiet part out loud ("I know you were hoping for a 22 slide deck. Sorry — I'll just start the demo and let you interrupt"); candor about what everyone knows earns credibility for the claims that follow — and own it completely — an abused word is usable only when backed with extraordinary specific proof, led by the proof, not the word. 4. Clauses that subtract, not add. Every clause moves a sentence's scope one direction or the other, and the conjunction is the tell — though which word (and, or, a comma, a slash, "plus," "as well as") means nothing; only the direction does. Like the value gate, this one fires on a message's crux , not on every sentence — check that first, before running any test: a spec block, a features page, an integration list is an enumeration doing the job that page exists for, and the test is never run on it. What's forbidden is a widening conjunction in the claim itself. "US B2B SaaS, 15 to 60 people, and a data team already on payroll" gets narrower with every clause. "Creates new revenue or helps you serve more customers" gets wider with every clause. Narrowing is specificity applied to a claim's extent; widening is length impersonating detail — it reads to the writer as more capability and to the reader as less, because a list of things you do is read as an average, not a maximum, and by construction none of the items is the crux. The test: delete the conjunction and everything after it. Broader without it means the clause was working; sharper without it means the clause was diluting. Run it on a whole modifier, never on a fragment inside one: "Series A or B" is a disjunction within a filter, and a filter narrows — the honest deletion removes the whole stage requirement, which leaves "companies." Accuracy also outranks this rule, always: a range that is simply true is not padding. Four repairs, checked in this order: subordinate when the halves sit at different levels — "turns client problems into AI products a

asb-positioning