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Skills from A Smart Bear

Positioning: Reword your marketing until it's worth more

Convert save-money pitches and vague claims into value-first, vivid positioning — specific, cliché-free, Opposite-Test-passing statements you can reuse in every ad, page, and pitch. Adapted from Chapter 4 of Hidden Multipliers: A Rose by Any Other Name.

Input
Your marketing copy — headlines, ads, pitches, positioning statements — your pricing strategy (More for More / More for Less / Less for Less), and ideally your ideal-customer definition, needs stack, and voters analysis.
Output
A POSITIONING.md: a reusable list of vivid, value-first positioning statements organized by role, with a facts-to-verify list guarding every claimed number.

What this is about

The same product, described two ways, can command eight times the price. "Cut your ad spend in half" caps what you can charge at a slice of the savings; "double your leads at the same cost per lead" prices against growth — and the buyer will happily pay several times more, because growth is what their CEO celebrates. That's the book's first positioning rule: never sell saving time or money; sell more value, in the currency your customer already measures. Most copy breaks it on the first line — and two subtler breaks never use the word "save" at all: copy whose every sentence is about how the product works, and copy that promises what arrives — a report, a score, a read — rather than what changes. Technical founders live in both.

The second rule is that saying the right thing vaguely is the same as saying nothing. "Easy to use, robust features, customer-first" — the Opposite Test shreds it (who claims their product is difficult?), and generic words guarantee the reader skims without picturing anything. Vivid copy is specific copy: "$300 an hour" instead of "expensive," the benchmark instead of "fast," the changelog instead of "innovative," the quiet part said out loud.

This skill applies the whole toolbox to your actual copy, one message at a time: it diagnoses what the message breaks, then rewrites it with you, pressing for the true numbers and proof — it never invents a specific, and missing facts go on a verify list. The survivors accumulate in a reusable statement list covering every role: what you do, what you promise, what you make obsolete, how you counter the vendors trying to obviate you, and the inciting-event language that makes a reader say "that's me." It works markedly better if you bring your ideal-customer definition and needs stack — and it will tell you so — but it works without them.

What it's looking for

Every message gets run past all of these, in order, and a statement that fails one is never recorded:

  • Savings framing. "Cut your ad spend in half" caps your price at a slice of the savings. Unless your reader is paid on that number, it gets reframed into what they're actually counted on.
  • Mechanism pitches. Every sentence's subject is how the product works. The default failure of technical founders.
  • Deliverable pitches. What arrives — a report, a score, a dashboard — rather than what changes. Nobody is graded on receiving a document.
  • Wrong level. A feature blurb doing aspiration duty, or a promise three rungs above what the product actually does. One level up is the most you can credibly claim.
  • Clauses that widen instead of narrowing. "New revenue or more customers," "for startups and enterprises alike," "…and more." Every added clause reads to you as more capability and to your reader as less. The conjunctions worth keeping subtract.
  • A mechanism sitting beside an outcome. "Turns client problems into AI products and new revenue" joins what you build to what changes, as if they were peers. One is a means to the other, and belongs underneath it.
  • Generic words. Fast, powerful, easy, robust, secure, "with AI" — each swapped for the specific thing it's standing in for.
  • Clichés. Leading provider, cutting-edge, game-changing, world-class, proven track record. 78% of "About Us" pages claim to be the leading provider of something.
  • Telling where you could show. "It's fast" becomes the benchmark; "we innovate" becomes the public changelog; "legendary support" becomes "we're a small team, you get us personally."
  • Claims no competitor would contradict. The Opposite Test: if nobody would rationally choose the opposite, you've said nothing.
  • Mixed price signals. It asks which of the book's three pricing strategies you run — More for More, More for Less, or Less for Less — and holds every claim to that one story, because "highest quality" next to "cheapest" confuses the buyer into walking away.
  • Invented specifics. Numbers, benchmarks, and testimonials come from you or they don't go in — a placeholder and a verify line hold the slot until the real figure lands.
  • Gaps in coverage. No claim bragging about what you make obsolete, nothing countering the vendors trying to obviate you, no inciting-event language that makes a reader say "that's me."

Example invocation

You can invoke the skill like this:

/asb-positioning Here's our homepage hero and three ad variants. We
sell automated backup for dental practices — current headline is
"Enterprise-grade backup, made easy." Our CAROL.md and NEEDS-STACK.md
are in this directory too.

The skill walks your messages one at a time — diagnosing each against the value-framing, level-fit, and vividness rules, rewriting it with your real facts — and you walk away with a POSITIONING.md of statements sharp enough to reuse in every channel.

One practical note: say where you're working. Name a directory (or point at your existing files) when you invoke, and the skill keeps the method's files together there — if you don't, it asks before creating anything.

From the source

Two sources form the foundation of this skill:

  • As in Chapter 4 of Hidden Multipliers: A Rose by Any Other Name — hiddenmultipliers.com — the whole playbook this skill runs: the eight-times-more repositioning story, positioning by needs-stack level, and the Make It Vivid discipline (no generic words, no clichés, show-don't-tell, the Opposite Test and its dominate-the-field exception, the specificity checklist).
  • How repositioning a product allows you to 8x its price — the value-framing rule in full: why growth is worth ten times more than savings to the same buyer, and how the pitch (not the product) sets the price.

Supporting articles each supply a piece of the mechanism:

  • Specificity: A weapon of mass effectiveness — the vividness engine: generic words to specifics, truth to accuracy, concrete examples, and why specificity even makes copy funnier.
  • The "Opposite Test" — the claim filter: if no competitor would claim the opposite, you're saying nothing; passing claims have consequences you name and embrace.
  • "Authentic" is dead. And so is "is dead." — the cliché graveyard this skill enforces, plus the redemption paths: name & embrace, and owning an abused word with overwhelming proof.
  • As in Chapter 6 of Hidden Multipliers: Price Is Not Just a Number (section "Mixed Signals") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the three self-consistent pricing strategies (More for More, More for Less, Less for Less) this skill holds every claim to: when price and positioning tell different stories, customers are confused, and confused customers don't buy.
  • Using the Needs Stack for competitive strategy — the level-fit framework: features at your level, the promise one level up, and how to position against the vendors obviating you.
  • Selling to Carol: Why targeting an ICP brings 10x more customers than you expected — who the copy is for: the keystones and inciting events this skill mines for headlines come from the ideal-customer work.