Writing a Positioning Statement: 10 Compelling Examples
For complex technologies, a solid positioning statement is both hard to write and impossible to skip. Whether you’re refining your messaging or starting from scratch, this guide equips you with the knowledge and tools to effectively define and communicate your brand’s unique value.
As copywriters, we can gain a lot of inspiration from examples: we’ll use an analysis of linguistic attributes to help you understand the nuances of positioning that make taglines and positioning statements resonate with audiences. If you’re looking for a more strategic framework, start with our B2B Brand Positioning Framework or book a workshop.
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How the Right Words Build Connections.
Brand positioning is the strategic foundation that guides all messaging and marketing efforts—aligning a brand’s promise, benefits, and differentiation to create a clear, consistent, and compelling identity. Our Value Map helps teams visualize and refine these elements for stronger alignment.
Language is the tool we use to shape audience perception of that positioning and help brands ensure clear communications to leave a lasting impression in a competitive marketplace.
In choosing language that reflects your brand’s personality, values, and tone, you’re working to:
- Build emotional connections. Evoking emotions fosters trust, loyalty, and relatability to form lasting customer relationships.
- Simplify complex ideas. Clear language ensures even intricate offerings are accessible and amplifies your value proposition.
- Differentiate from competitors. Highlight unique selling points and advantages that position the brand in relation to others.
- Enhance memorability. Well-crafted taglines, phrases, and messaging increase the likelihood of recall and engagement.
Check out our guide for how we write better content for technology products, including how to craft brand and positioning statements.
See the Product Communications Guide!
Brand positioning template
Use this formula to express your brand’s unique value to your target audience:
How [your brand], in [product category], helps [your audience] address [challenge(s)] with [benefit] by offering [solution].
This full, unpolished brand positioning statement serves as a starting point to ensure your positioning is both customer-focused (challenges and benefits) and results-driven (solution).
To learn the methodology behind creating a compelling positioning statement, see our free and open B2B brand and positioning resources that will guide you every step of the way.
The linguistic attributes of ten brand and product positioning statements
We’ve collected real-world examples of taglines and full positioning statements to show how they work together to effectively articulate their unique value. Compelling communications connect with their audience while maintaining clarity, emotional appeal, and technical relevance. A tagline should be short, succinct, and free of jargon so it can be immediately understood—and easily remembered. It stems from the full positioning statement that clearly identifies benefits, offers specific actions and outcomes, and sets the tone and style for all brand communications.
#1 Source (Talent Platform)
Tagline: One portal. A world of talent you can trust.
Balancing the vastness and inclusivity of the talent world with the singularity and simplicity of one portal, this tagline offers a memorable contrast that resonates with diverse audiences—and speaks to an emotional need to trust Source to find their talent.
Positioning Statement: Source lets you scale your team efficiently with freelance creative, digital, and consulting services - vetted by industry veterans, selected by a personal account manager, and available on demand through a single, simple contract.
Beginning with the key benefit Source services offer, scale your team; the tagline also identifies other audience pain points in on-demand and through a single, simple contract: time-saving and efficiency. Action-oriented words (vetted, selected, and available) create a sense of dynamism and productivity while establishing credibility. And the three-part list is a familiar structure that provides rhythm and readability to make it worth remembering.
#2 Platform.sh (Hosting Platform)
Tagline: Deliver your applications faster, at scale.
The primary audience goal of deliver is balanced with their primary pain point of faster completion to provide a sense of accomplishment and progress—that scales with team size. Two core benefits are offered in one straightforward statement that avoids fluff or overpromising to appeal to a technical audience.
Positioning Statement: 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.
The opening line establishes instant empathy and credibility by showing a deep understanding of developers’ needs, balancing that emotional reassurance with the technical precision of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to appeal to both kinds of decision-making. The triad of benefits—efficient, reliable, and secure—encourages confidence in the platform’s shared developer priorities.
#3 Docker (Container-based Application Development Tool)
Tagline: Develop faster. Run anywhere.
A simple four words in two mirrored phrases. Starting with the action of develop and ending with the flexibility of anywhere, they suggest compatibility across a wide audience of developers working in diverse environments and highlight the essential advantage of faster speed along the way.
Positioning Statement: Accelerate how you build, share, and run applications. Docker helps developers build, share, run, and verify applications anywhere — without tedious environment configuration or management.
Starting with accelerate emphasizes speed and improved efficiency, directly appealing to developers’ priorities and highlighting product outcomes; without tedious environment configuration or management builds on that empathy by addressing a common pain point. Additional benefits—build, share, run—show the platform’s comprehensive utility and offer a memorable, rhythmic structure.
#4 Lockr (Secrets Management Tool)
Tagline: Affordable, ironclad security in a flash
The repeated a sounds in affordable, a, and flash create catchy alliteration, while ironclad evokes strength and impenetrability. Combining that quality with affordable appeals to both budget-conscious and security-focused audiences, with the quick implementation offered by in a flash.
Positioning Statement: Lockr's secrets management platform makes state-of-the-art security affordable, fast, and easy to use. We can help you protect your business by securing the keys to your site, systems, and data.
A repeated three-item list builds a steady rhythm while addressing potential users' core needs (site, systems, data) and core pain points (affordable, fast, easy). The empathy embedded in we can help you protect your business strengthens rapport with customers, and state-of-the-art-security balances technical reliability with user-centric messaging.
#5 Hubspot (Customer Relationship Management Platform)
Tagline: Grow better with HubSpot
Grow invites businesses of all sizes and industries to partner with HubSpot, working together to reach their aspirational goals and become better.
Positioning Statement: Software that's powerful, not overpowering. Seamlessly connect your data, teams, and customers on one AI-powered customer platform that grows with your business.
Not overpowering contrasts and emphasizes the powerful, cleverly conveying strength without complexity or the common pain point of overly complicated software—and connecting with both technical and non-technical audiences. With your business offers a customer-centric focus and another balance point between approachability and the technological innovation of AI-powered.
#6 Mailchimp (Email Marketing Tool)
Tagline: Turn Emails & SMS into Revenue
The value proposition is a clear ROI relationship, actively turning emails and SMS into a final outcome of revenue: business communications are now framed as direct drivers of growth rather than just tools.
Positioning Statement: Get more opens, clicks, and sales with the #1 email marketing and automations platform*—now with SMS.
Using straightforward, non-technical language, the value in tangible outcomes like more opens, clicks, and sales are supported through the claim of ranked authority as the #1 email marketing and automations platform. And the clear call to action in the first word get motivates marketers of all sizes and industries to envision using the platform.
#7 Trello (Project Management Tool)
Tagline: Trello makes it easier for teams to manage projects and tasks
With a simple statement of specific utility, users know the platform’s function at a glance: to address the core need to make teams’ work easier so they can manage their projects and tasks more efficiently—and they’ll know this process will likely also be simple and friendly, as the tone indicates.
Positioning Statement: Simple, flexible, and powerful. All it takes are boards, lists, and cards to get a clear view of who’s doing what and what needs to get done.
Trello’s minimalistic approach continues, offering two parallel lists of three core benefits (simple, flexible, and powerful) and three core features (boards, lists, and cards) that offer a practical visual of how the platform shifts workflows to address user pain points. The simple language and straightforward relationship reinforce the notion that this process will be both easy and efficient.
#8 Tableau (Visual Analytics Platform)
Tagline: Tableau helps people see and understand data. What do you want to do with yours?
The conversational tone of the rhetorical question encourages curiosity, driving a subtle call to action: explore the platform to see what your data can do for you. Help positions Tableau as an enabler of insight and decision-making, encouraging users to reflect on how useful it might be to see and understand their own data.
Positioning Statement: When it comes to elevating people with the power of data, only Tableau combines a laser focus on how people see and understand data with the kind of robust, scalable platform you need to run even the world’s largest organizations.
A sophisticated, higher-purpose image of elevating people positions Tableau as the unique (only) transformative tool that centers around user experience and addresses a critical need for seeing and understanding how to access and use their data. And robust, scalable reassures enterprise-level customers of its ability to simplify even the most complex data.
#9 Sulu (Open Source Content Management System)
Tagline: Deliver awesome, robust, reliable websites with Sulu CMS
A specific and clear identification of Sulu as a CMS is balanced with enthusiastic adjectives (awesome, robust, reliable) describing the quality of outputs that the platform acts to deliver.
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.
Complex sites and great user experiences highlight results that meet both agency and business needs, identifying a specific value proposition fit for a diverse set of content teams, PHP developers, and agencies—both technical and operational users.
#10 Edit Together (Collaborative Editing Tool)
Tagline: Edit better, Edit Together.
Already just four short words, the repetition of the e sound (edit, better, together) makes the tagline poetic enough to stick while emphasizing the solutions (better, together) rather than common pain points like disjointed or inefficient editing workflows.
Positioning Statement: Secure, real-time collaborative editing under your control in your CMS.
The first three words (secure, real-time, collaborative) identify the pain points EditTogether solves: confidentiality, efficiency, and teamwork obstacles. Users who need to get team editing under your control can see that it doesn’t take another new outside tool, since its seamless collaboration happens in your CMS.
Linguistic best practices
These examples follow patterns that show how a few essential techniques can make all the difference: balancing action-oriented language with brevity and emotional resonance with technical precision creates memorable and impactful messaging.
Tagline best practices
- Action-oriented verbs like deliver and turn focus users on outcomes.
- Brevity and simplicity make it easy to understand and remember.
- Dual benefits like speed and reliability maximize appeal.
- Alliteration creates rhythm and makes it memorable.
- Keep them short to keep that rhythmic flow easy to recall.
- An aspirational tone inspires users to imagine how the product elevates their success.
- Imagery words or phrases like a world of talent to evoke emotions.
- Highlight contrasts to make your imagery more impactful.
- Subtly suggest an action or transformation to prompt engagement.
- Capture brand character and values with your tone and core principles.
- Keep it clever, witty, unexpected, or thought-provoking to stand out.
Positioning Statement Best Practices
- Keep the key benefits clear and focus on how they solve problems or meet user needs. Use a balanced list of three features to create rhythm and additional impact.
- Create credibility by demonstrating empathy with user pain points and offering proof points such as industry leadership and established expertise. Using terms like your site or your data speaks directly to the audience to foster further rapport.
- Highlight outcomes like measurable results or transformations that users can achieve using the product or platform.
- Clear and simple language (not jargon!) ensures accessibility for technical and non-technical audiences; balancing that relatability with professional precision will keep your technical users assured of your authority.
- A specific value proposition means outlining the product’s unique features, functions, or focus areas to differentiate it from competitors.
- Frame the product as a long-term partner by emphasizing its scalability and versatility for diverse industries, team sizes, and evolving use cases. Action-oriented verbs convey progress and impact.
Watch out for these common mistakes
Even the most well-intentioned brand positioning efforts can fall short; this section highlights key pitfalls to avoid as you work to make your messaging clear, audience-focused, and emotionally compelling.
- Vague positioning statements don’t clearly differentiate the brand and aren’t often memorable.
- Overemphasizing features without highlighting the benefits ignores customer needs.
- Overcomplicating the message with complex language or jargon makes the brand's value proposition hard to understand.
- Using hyperbole and relying on exaggerated claims that lack credibility can alienate audiences and damage brand trust.
- Ignoring the target audience leads to a generic message that fails to resonate with potential customers.
- Overlooking the emotional aspects of decision-making by presenting only logical arguments misses the opportunity to connect with customers on a deeper level.
Connect with us!
Whether you know what you want to say (but need help saying it) or you’re still trying to define your value proposition, our Value Map can help structure your thinking and guide your messaging. We can also assist in crafting compelling product communications.