Value vs. positioning: Align your message
Learn the critical differences between value propositions and positioning statements — and how aligning both through OSP’s Value Mapping methodology strengthens internal alignment and external messaging for B2B tech companies.
Value Proposition vs. Positioning Statement: How to differentiate, connect, and align your messaging
Fractured communication—confusing positioning statements and value propositions, for example—can frustrate customers, misalign internal teams, and hamper growth. We’ve seen this at tech companies, where Marketing creates a tagline they call a “positioning statement,” Product Management creates a “value proposition," and Sales develops its own pitch based on something else again.
Instead, you can create a foundation for compelling, consistent messaging that connects with your audience and differentiates your offering in the marketplace by understanding the distinct roles of value propositions and positioning statements and how they work together.
At Open Strategy Partners, we’ve developed our Value Mapping methodology to help B2B tech organizations build value propositions and positioning statements from the ground up. The Value Map creates a foundation of factual, differentiated messaging that resonates across all customer touchpoints by connecting your product's technical features to audience needs.
Learn more about our Value Mapping and Positioning Workshop.
tl;dr
In this article, you’ll learn:
- The precise definitions and key differences between value propositions and positioning statements
- How these two tools complement each other in B2B messaging
- Step-by-step guides and best practices for creating both, with real-world examples
- When and how to use each for maximum impact
- Common pitfalls to avoid, and how to ground both in technical truth
Definitions and distinctions: Unique Value Proposition vs. Positioning Statement
What is a Unique Value Proposition?
A Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a customer-facing statement that clearly articulates what you offer, who it’s for, and why it matters. It’s the concise answer to the question, “Why should I buy from you instead of your competitors?” Your UVP speaks directly to your audience about the specific value they’ll receive.
Effective UVPs embody empathy by starting with the customer’s perspective. They focus first on benefits — the outcomes your customers achieve — rather than features. This benefit-first thinking bridges the gap between technical capabilities and human needs.
Consider these real-world examples:
- Stripe’s UVP: “Financial infrastructure for the internet.” In just five words, Stripe communicates what they offer (financial tools), who it’s for (internet businesses), and why it matters (it’s infrastructure — fundamental and necessary).
- Mailchimp’s UVP: “Turn emails and SMS into revenue.” This concise statement immediately conveys the benefit (generating revenue) while communicating what it’s for (email and SMS marketing) and what makes it valuable (direct business impact through marketing channels).
What is a Positioning Statement?
A positioning statement defines your place in the market. While it guides internal strategy and alignment, it also forms the foundation for your external communications, appearing on websites, in marketing materials, and across customer touchpoints.
A well-crafted positioning statement helps your entire organization understand what you do and how you do it differently from others in your category. It creates a framework for consistent messaging across all communications and teams.
A complete positioning statement typically includes these key components:
- Category: What business are you in?
- Audience: Who specifically do you serve?
- Challenge: What problem do you solve?
- Benefit: What outcome do you deliver?
- Differentiators: How do you provide this uniquely?
Consider this example from Platform.sh: “Built for developers, by developers. The efficient, reliable, and secure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that gives development teams control and peace of mind while accelerating the time it takes to build and deploy applications.”
This statement clearly defines their category (PaaS), audience (developers and development teams), challenges (control, peace of mind, time to deploy), benefits (efficiency, reliability, security), and differentiator (built by developers for developers).
Their supporting tagline — “Deliver your applications faster, at scale” — distills this positioning into a concise, memorable phrase. That’s the UVP.
Want more examples? Our guide to crafting positioning statements has ten examples.
Summary: UVP vs. Positioning Statement
| Unique value proposition | Positioning statement | |
| Primary audience | External (customers, prospects) | Both internal (teams, stakeholders) and external (customers, partners) |
| Purpose | Communicate customer benefits | Define market placement and differentiation |
| Components | Benefit, implied audience, value | Category, audience, challenge, benefit, differentiator |
| Tone | Direct, benefit-driven | Strategic, contextual |
| Usage context | Website headlines, ads, sales decks | Strategic planning, website landing / about pages, marketing materials, content briefs |
| Example format | “Do X and achieve Y.” | “How [brand] helps [audience] solve [challenge] with [benefit] by offering [solution].” |
How UVPs and Positioning Statements work together in a B2B messaging strategy
While value propositions and positioning statements serve different purposes, they must work harmoniously to create an effective B2B messaging strategy. This alignment is critical. A disconnect between what you promise customers (UVP) and how you position yourself in the market leads to mixed messaging, fractured internal understanding, and erodes trust with prospects and customers.
A disconnect between your UVP and positioning leads to mixed messages, teams pulling in different directions, and lost trust with prospects and customers.
At OSP, we use our Value Mapping methodology to ensure that UVP and positioning are aligned and fact-based. The Value Map starts with your product’s technical truth—what your product actually does—and builds upward through functional groupings to connect features with benefits, challenges, and audience needs. This bottom-up approach ensures that your UVP and positioning statement remain grounded in reality, not marketing hyperbole.
Technical truth serves as the foundation for both elements. When you build messaging from what your product actually does—rather than aspirational claims—you create authentic communications that build trust with technical decision-makers.
Case study: Sulu’s aligned UVP and positioning
OSP helped Sulu, an open source content management system, develop both a UVP and positioning statement that aligned with their product’s technical capabilities and addressed specific audience pain points:
- Tagline/UVP: “Deliver awesome, robust, reliable websites with Sulu CMS.”
- Positioning statement: “The ideal combination of PHP developer experience and agency platform. Deliver complex sites and great user experiences for the content teams who work on your site every day.”
The Value Mapping process revealed that Sulu’s key differentiator wasn’t just being another CMS, but providing an exceptional balance between developer and content creator needs. By connecting features to audience challenges (delivering complex sites while maintaining great user experiences for content teams), OSP helped Sulu craft messaging that resonated with both technical and operational users while accurately reflecting their product’s unique strengths.
When your UVP and positioning statement are derived from the same Value Map, they naturally complement each other while serving their distinct purposes. Your technical teams recognize the product they built, while your marketing and sales teams have compelling messages that genuinely reflect what customers will experience.
Ready to align your UVP and positioning? Book a Value Mapping workshop today.
Step-by-step guide and best practices: Writing Unique Value Propositions and Positioning Statements
Crafting a Unique Value Proposition
The best UVPs focus on outcomes rather than features, speaking directly to what customers gain from your solution.
At OSP, we structure UVPs using our Value Case flow: Benefit → Challenge → (Implied) Solution. We often lead with the benefit—painting a picture of what life would be like if the customer adopted your product—while acknowledging the challenges they face. We typically imply the solution rather than state it explicitly.
A step-by-step guide to applying this methodology would look like this:
- Start with your Value Map: Review your product’s key benefits as documented in your Value Map.
- Identify your primary benefit: What is the most compelling outcome your customers will experience? For example, Sulu CMS focuses on delivering robust and reliable websites.
- Connect to a key challenge: What obstacle stands in the way of this benefit? One of our clients, Lockr, addresses the challenge of security being either too complex or too expensive.
- Refine to a concise format that implies your solution: Hint at how you solve the problem without diving into technical details. Aim for a punchy one-liner or brief elevator pitch. Mailchimp’s “Turn emails and SMS into revenue” implies their platform is the solution without explicitly saying so.
- Test distinctiveness: Could this statement apply to your competitors? If yes, refer back to your Value Map, then revise to highlight your unique approach or benefit.
When you’ve already identified the most important benefits through the Value Mapping process, crafting a UVP becomes much more straightforward. Your Value Map highlights which benefits resonate most strongly with your target audience and distinguishes you from competitors.
Creating a Positioning Statement
Positioning statements do two things: They guide internal strategy and form the foundation of external communications that appear on websites, in marketing materials, and across customer touchpoints.
At OSP, we use this template for positioning statements:
“How [brand], in [category], helps [audience] solve [challenge] with [benefit] using [solution].”
A step-by-step guide to gathering the right information and distilling it into a positioning statement would be something like this:
- Workshop and research: Begin with a structured workshop bringing together stakeholders from across your organization — engineering, product, marketing, sales, and leadership. In this collaborative session:
- Interview key stakeholders about product capabilities and unique strengths
- Map your audience’s challenges to your product’s features
- Identify what truly differentiates you from competitors through direct comparison
- Vote on which benefits and features matter most to your target personas
- Define your category: Clearly state what business you’re in. Example: “Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)”.
- Specify your audience: Name who you serve. Example: “PHP developers and agencies”.
- Articulate the challenge: State the problem you solve. Example: “securing keys to sites and systems”.
- Highlight your benefit: Express the outcome you deliver. Example: “a clear view of tasks and priorities”.
- Emphasize your differentiator: Identify what makes you unique. Example: “vetted by industry veterans”.
- Combine and refine: Create a statement that’s clear, accurate, and distinctly yours.
Once you’ve defined your value proposition and positioning statement, you can also incorporate them into Product Data Sheets for your sales and marketing teams.
Use cases and pitfalls: When and how to use each statement effectively
When to Use a Unique Value Proposition
Your UVP directly addresses early-stage buyer questions like “What's in it for me?” and “Why should I care?” It's your first opportunity to connect with prospects before they’re ready to dive into details. For this reason, it works best in situations where you need to capture attention and communicate core benefits quickly:
- Homepage hero sections: The prime real estate on your website should lead with your UVP, making an immediate impact on visitors.
- Pitch deck opening slides: Begin investor or sales presentations with your UVP to frame the conversation.
- Outbound email subject lines and openers: Grab attention with benefit-focused messaging.
Social media profiles and ads: Limited character space demands the clarity and punch of a strong UVP.
When to use a Positioning Statement
Positioning statements support your broader marketing infrastructure, including campaign architecture, messaging hierarchy, and competitive differentiation—so they are helpful in a wider variety of contexts:
- Website about / landing pages: Expand on your UVP with context about your market position — say on an “about” page, or further down your landing page.
- Sales enablement materials: Equip sales teams with language that places your offering in the competitive landscape.
- Content marketing strategy: Guide topic selection and messaging for blogs, webinars, and other content.
PR and media communications: Provide journalists and partners with clear, consistent language about your market position.
Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
Even the most well-intentioned messaging efforts can fall short. Watch out for these common problems:
- Confusing UVP and positioning: Your UVP is a concentrated benefit statement, while your positioning provides market context. Keep them distinct but aligned.
- Using generic, hyperbolic language: Claims like “best-in-class” or “revolutionary” without substantiation damage credibility. Ground both UVP and positioning in your product’s technical truth.
- Creating messaging in isolation: Develop UVP and positioning with input from multiple stakeholders to ensure accuracy and buy-in.
- Set-it-and-forget-it mentality: As your product and market evolve, your messaging should too. Revisit both UVP and positioning after major product releases or market shifts.
- Neglecting to test with your audience: Whatever sounds good internally might not resonate externally. Test messaging with prospects and customers before wide-scale implementation.
OSP’s Value Map methodology prevents many of these pitfalls by starting with your product’s technical truth and systematically connecting it to audience needs, ensuring compelling and credible messaging.
Conclusion: Get strategic, get specific, get aligned
Understanding the difference between positioning statements and value propositions — and how they work together — is crucial for effective B2B tech marketing.
Your Unique Value Proposition is a concise, compelling statement of your essential benefit to customers.
Your positioning statement provides the strategic context for your place in the market.
Both elements must be grounded in two fundamental truths: your product’s technical capabilities and your audience’s genuine needs. When built on this foundation, they create a consistent narrative that resonates with customers and aligns your internal teams.
At OSP, our Value Mapping methodology helps you uncover these connections, creating UVP and positioning statements that accurately reflect what makes your product valuable. We bring stakeholders together to develop messaging that everyone, from engineering to sales, can confidently stand behind.
Book your Positioning and Value Mapping workshop today and transform how you communicate about your product.
FAQ: Value Proposition vs. Positioning Statement
What’s the difference between a value proposition and a positioning statement?
A value proposition is an external-facing statement that clearly communicates the benefit your product delivers to your audience.
A positioning statement defines your place in the market and is used internally and externally to guide consistent messaging, differentiation, and strategic alignment.
Why do B2B tech companies need a UVP and a positioning statement?
Each plays a distinct role.
The UVP answers “What’s in it for me?” from the customer’s perspective.
The positioning statement sets the strategic context, showing how your product compares in its market.
When aligned, they ensure consistent, credible, and compelling messaging.
How do I make sure my UVP and positioning are aligned?
Start with your technical truth—what your product actually does.
Use a structured methodology like OSP’s Value Mapping to connect features to benefits, challenges, and audience needs. This ensures both your UVP and positioning are fact-based and work together.
Where should I use my value proposition versus my positioning statement?
Use your UVP in high-visibility, benefit-driven contexts like website hero sections, sales decks, and social ads.
Use your positioning statement in strategic materials—landing pages, content briefs, and messaging docs—to ensure consistency across marketing, sales, and internal teams.
What are common mistakes to avoid when writing a UVP or positioning statement?
Avoid:
- Confusing the two
- Using vague claims like “best-in-class”
- Working in silos without consulting other teams or stakeholders
Don’t forget to test your messaging with real users and update it regularly as your product and market evolve.