Hello Reader
When customer acquisition slows, you might be tempted to add more activity.
-Launch another campaign.
-Add a channel.
-Increase paid spend.
-Publish more content.
-Buy another AI tool to produce it FASTER.
More activity can create a welcome sense of momentum, but it's not going to help if you have weak positioning.
I ran into this in my last VP of Marketing role. I worked at a SaaS platform serving the travel industry and our CEO, CRO and head of customer support each had a different view of the audience, the problem we solved and what our buyers cared about most.
Which meant every campaign became a negotiation.
I’d build the strategy, gather feedback, work through competing opinions and eventually land on a compromise. By the time the campaign went live, the message had lost its edge.
Here's one of those early campaigns:
The result was predictably lackluster and pipeline barely moved.
After a few rounds of this frustrating experience, I did an audit of our strategy and realized I had a positioning problem. No one internally knew who we were really serving or why.
Once I untangled that, the campaigns (and the pipeline) came much easier.
This was one of the slides from the original positioning exercise. I was so proud.
If you’re suffering from slow demand, check whether your company has a clear story to tell. Solving this problem first is going to save you a lot of wasted spend (and a lot of headaches!)
Start With Your Story
“Any market worth being in today is super crowded,” says Mike Berger of messaging firm Harmonic. “Every AI native company sounds like every other AI native company. Everyone is trying to become more relevant, and in doing so, they’re becoming less differentiated.”
When several companies make the same claims, buyers struggle to see meaningful differences. They default to price, familiarity or whichever vendor reached them first.
A strong strategic narrative gives your campaigns a clearer foundation. It defines who you’re speaking to, which problem matters, why the timing matters and why your approach deserves attention.
Mike says there are six ingredients to a strong story.
The Six Ingredients of a Strong Story
Here’s how to develop a strong story for your brand.
1. Target audience
Who’s suffering from the problem?
A useful audience definition captures the situation the buyer is in, the pressure they face and the reason they’re likely to act.
As an example, “marketing leaders” covers too much territory, but “Marketing leaders responsible for putting AI to work across an established team” gives the story a stronger edge.
That level of precision changes who recognizes themselves in the message. It also helps you spend time and budget on the buyers with the strongest fit.
2. Why now
What’s changed for the buyer?
A strong “why now” points to a market condition, business pressure, technology change or internal mandate that makes delay costly. Without a credible reason to act, the offer will sound useful, but easy to postpone.
If you want to drive leads, you need to create urgency.
3. Big hairy problem
What’s the costly problem beneath the surface?
Buyers usually describe the symptom first, which points to a need, but they don’t always reveal the issue underneath.
Your job is to identify the big hairy problem and explain what’s getting in the buyer’s way, what that friction is costing them and why the current approach keeps falling short.
4. Big value
What outcome becomes possible once the problem is solved?
Big value describes the change the buyer is trying to create. It connects the problem to a result that feels important, easy to recognize and worth acting on.
That result might be faster decisions, stronger conversion, shorter sales cycles, lower campaign waste or a team that can execute with less debate.
The value should reflect what the buyer cares about most and make the benefit concrete enough to guide your message, offer and campaign.
5. How we solve the problem uniquely
What choices, methods or experience make your approach hard to copy?
It may include a process, a point of view, a body of work, access to original data or experience solving the problem in a specific setting.
Generic claims have little acquisition value because competitors can repeat them far too easily.
6. Future state
What does the buyer’s world look like after the change?
The future state describes the practical result of solving the problem. It should show how the buyer’s day-to-day work improves, how the business performs differently and what becomes easier to achieve.
For a marketing team, that might mean launching campaigns without reopening the strategy debate. Sales may enter calls with buyers who already understand the problem. The website may attract fewer weak-fit leads and convert more of the right ones.
Turn your POV into a story buyers can follow
The goal is to build a point of view that gives buyers a new way to understand their problem and a clear reason to see your company as the answer.
You need to describe your target audience’s world so they know you understand their situation. You show what they’re experiencing, what’s changed, which approaches have failed and what those failures are costing them.
Only then, can you talk about your company and solution.
You explain how your approach works, why it’s different, and what value it creates.
The finished POV gives your customer acquisition work a clear narrative path:
- Show buyers that you understand their world
- Help them see the problem through your frame
- Introduce a credible way forward
- Give them a reason to choose your approach
That’s what turns positioning into a point of view buyers can recognize, remember and act on.
Move Faster with AI
The last time I ran a positioning exercise in the pre-AI era it took three months. Customer interviews, surveys, sales call transcripts, competitor messaging. All of this required extensive planning, coordinating and countless hours of analysis.
That’s where Claude (or any other LLM) is useful.
It can help you plan the exercise, process the material faster, spot recurring themes and turn a broad set of inputs into stronger hypotheses for the team to test.
Here’s a list of items you can delegate:
- Draft audience segments from existing customer material
- Synthesize themes across interview transcripts
- Compare language across buyer groups
- Map competitor claims and category patterns
- Generate message routes for testing
- Challenge the logic behind your point of view
- Turn the finished story into instructions for campaign and content tools
This is a screenshot of how I asked Claude to analyze my audience data:
And here are two screenshots of the output from the POV exercise:
Once your point of view and messaging framework are complete, they will naturally feed your upcoming campaign briefs, landing pages, sales scripts, nurture sequences and review criteria.
Here’s a look at a LinkedIn post and the assets I created after running the POV exercise.
Usually it would take me a few hours to craft this type of content including the research, caption and graphics. Using my new POV project and Claude design, I generated the copy and assets in less than 10 minutes.
This is the LinkedIn caption:
These are the graphics I created in Claude design that I’ll publish along with the caption:
Never Delegate this to AI
It’s tempting to run the entire positioning exercise in ChatGPT or Claude.
The problem is it doesn’t know your buyers.
Only they can tell you whether the story resonates, whether the problem feels urgent and whether your language reflects how they see the world.
That means the humans on the team still need to:
- Interview prospects and customers
- Test messages with people who make or influence the purchase
- Listen for the language buyers use when they describe the problem themselves
Synthetic audiences can still help you prepare. They can surface possible objections, expose weak questions and help you pressure-test a research plan before you recruit participants, but they can’t validate the story.
That’s still your job.
I’d love to know if you’ve recently run a positioning exercise. If you have, how did you use AI as part of the process? Hit reply and let me know!