Positioning
Positioning is the heart of PlumPMM. It’s where you decide who you’re for, what you say, and why you’re different — and every other artifact (drafts, ATF, BTF, audits) is written against the positioning you land here. Get this right and the rest of the app is filling in the details. Get it wrong and you’re polishing copy that points the wrong way.
Open a project and click the Positioning tab. Inside it you’ll find three sub-tabs, worked left to right:
ICP Candidates → Statement → Differentiators
The hierarchy
Everything hangs off the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). An ICP isn’t just a label — each ICP variation carries its own complete positioning: its UVP, its positioning statement, its differentiators, and its market category. A project can hold several ICPs (Primary, Secondary, Tertiary), and the Statement and Differentiators tabs always operate on whichever ICP is currently active (there’s an “Active ICP” selector on both tabs).
| Sub-tab | What it holds | Drives |
|---|---|---|
| ICP Candidates | The personas you’re positioning for — pain points, characteristics, the buyer you’re speaking to | Everything below is scoped to the active ICP |
| Statement | Six positioning-statement frameworks generated for the active ICP; you star one as the winner | The winning statement becomes the ICP’s positioning statement, used as context for ATF, closing CTA, and founder-story copy |
| Differentiators | The active ICP’s UVP, market category, and differentiators, reviewed together | Feeds downstream copy — e.g. the UVP drives ATF headline strategies |
The flow is linear: 1. pick (or generate) your ICP → 2. pick a winning statement → 3. review the UVP, market category, and differentiators that fall out of it.
A quick vocabulary note:
- UVP (Unique Value Proposition) — one punchy sentence: the single most compelling reason the product exists. One per ICP; lives on the Differentiators tab.
- Positioning statement — a structured paragraph following a chosen framework (below). This is the “winner” you star on the Statement tab.
- Differentiators — the specific, defensible reasons you win versus the alternatives.
The six positioning-statement frameworks
On the Statement tab, PlumPMM generates one variation per framework so you can compare the same positioning told six different ways, then star the one that fits. Each framework is a different strategic lens:
| Framework | The angle it takes |
|---|---|
| Geoffrey Moore | The classic template — “For [target] who [need], [Product] is the [category] that [benefit]. Unlike [alternative], [Product] [differentiator].” Anchors on the market category. |
| Jobs to Be Done | Leads with the trigger situation and the job the customer is hiring the product to do — not features. |
| April Dunford | Competitive-alternative framing (from Obviously Awesome): name the substitute customers use today, your unique attribute versus it, and the value that delivers. |
| Category Design | Names and owns a new market category instead of competing in an existing one. Best when you’re genuinely creating a space, not entering one. |
| Outcome-First | Leads with the customer transformation — a concrete before → after — before naming the product or category. |
| Competitive Positioning | Explicitly contrasts you against your named competitors, claiming the angle they’re missing. |
Competitive Positioning needs data to exist. It’s only generated when you have at least one audited competitor linked on the project’s Competitive tab — it literally positions you against them. With no competitors linked you’ll see five frameworks; add a competitor and the sixth appears.
You can edit any generated statement inline, regenerate a single framework, or delete ones you don’t want. Starring a framework as the winner copies its text into the ICP’s positioning statement (and, if it’s empty, auto-fills the market category from it).
The “Recommended” card — matching a framework to your maturity
Six frameworks is a lot of choice, so the Statement tab shows a Recommended card that suggests the most probable framework to start with, based on where your product sits in its market. You set that with a “Where are you?” toggle with three options:
| Market position | What it means | Recommended framework |
|---|---|---|
| New category | You’re creating a space that didn’t exist — no real incumbent to compare against | Category Design |
| Challenger | You’re entering an existing market against established alternatives | April Dunford |
| Established | You’re a known player competing head-to-head on the merits | Competitive Positioning |
If a recommended framework wasn’t generated for this ICP, the card falls back to a sensible alternate (for example, New category falls back to Geoffrey Moore; Established falls back to Outcome-First).
How your position is chosen. If you haven’t set the toggle, PlumPMM infers it from your linked competitors: no competitors → New category, one or more → Challenger. Established is never guessed — you opt into it with the toggle, because “we’re the incumbent” is a claim only you can make.
Your buyer can override the position. The recommender also reads the active ICP’s pains and characteristics, and two signals can trump the market-position pick:
- If the ICP reads as ROI-driven (mentions cost, budget, revenue, or C-suite / executive buyers), it recommends Outcome-First — that buyer wants the before/after result, not a category lesson.
- Otherwise, if the ICP has many distinct pain points (three or more), it leans Jobs to Be Done — lots of separate pains usually means they’re hiring you for a job, not shopping a category.
The recommendation is rule-based and deterministic — the same inputs always produce the same suggestion. The card shows a one-line rationale and a “Use this →” button that stars the recommended framework for you; the matching statement card also gets a ⭐ Recommended pill. It’s only a suggestion — star any framework you like.
Generating and regenerating
- Generate Positioning seeds the project’s first ICP with a UVP, a positioning statement, differentiators, and a first messaging variation in one pass — 3 audit-units. If the project has a linked market-research report, the primary ICP is anchored to it (label, pain points, and category copied from the research).
- Generate all frameworks on the Statement tab produces all six variations for the active ICP at once (five without competitors) — also 3 audit-units.
- Per-card regeneration is free. Re-rolling a single framework, filling in a dismissed one, or regenerating the UVP, differentiators, or market category doesn’t cost audit-units — only the bulk generators do.
Setting a winning statement and editing the market position are reserved for the project’s creator or an org owner; anyone with access can view and generate.
→ Audit-unit budgeting and per-tier limits: Plans and pricing
See also
- Projects, drafts, and pages — where positioning sits in the project → draft → page hierarchy
- Fasttrak — auto-fills all of this from a URL, then you refine it
- Competitive — the audited competitors that unlock Competitive Positioning
- Market Research — the research a primary ICP can be anchored to
- Audits — the 13 dimensions your positioning is ultimately graded on