value-proposition

🧭 Understanding the "Positioning Line"

The term "positioning line" (often called a Positioning Statement or Value Proposition) is the single, internal, guiding statement that clearly defines:

Who your target customer is.

What you offer (the market category).

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Why you are different and better (the unique value proposition or differentiator).

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It acts as the strategic compass for all your messaging, marketing, and sales materials. While your tagline might be punchy and public-facing, the positioning line is comprehensive, ensuring every employee (even solo!) and every piece of content communicates the exact same value.

Your service might look beautiful on paper and appeal to you. But after all, you're not serving yourself, you've providing a service to clients, not yourself. What specific problem do you solve? Is it a real need and do they recognize that need? Is there a strong demand or is it something that they can easily do without? How exactly do you plan to improve their lives through your freelance service package? What tangible results can they expect from working with you?

Elements of a Strong Positioning Line

A strong statement should follow a structure like this:

For (Target Customer) who (has this problem/need), [Your Firm Name] is a (Market Category) that (offers this key benefit/solution) unlike (Key Competitor/Alternative) because (Reason to Believe/Key Differentiator).

Element	Definition	Length	Audience	Formula	BUILD then MARKET Example
Value Proposition (VP)	What the customer gains in their own words. Outcome + proof.	1 sentence (<15 words)	Customer (founder, CMO)	"[End benefit] for [target] so you [relief]."	"10× LTV for DTC founders so you stop burning cash on agencies."
Positioning Statement	How you occupy mindshare vs. alternatives. Internal north star.	1 sentence (<25 words)	Internal team + investors	"For [target], [brand] is the [category] that [differentiation] because [reason to believe]."	"For DTC & SaaS founders, BUILD then MARKET is the revenue engineering studio that owns the full stack because we ship code and scale ads under one roof."
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)	The one thing no competitor can claim. Defensible moat.	1 phrase (<7 words)	Sales deck, ads, footer	"The only [category] that [unique mechanic]."	"The only studio that guarantees CAC or works free."

Customer Value Proposition or Unique Selling Proposition, USP

• A cluster of benefits that your organization promises to customers to satisfy their needs.
• How your product/service uniquely solves problems or meets needs better than competitors.
• Includes your choice of tech stack and how it benefits your clients (e.g., affordable no-code, fast turnaround, less developer dependency).

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DIFFERENT TYPES OF CVPs AND CUSTOMER SEGMENTS

You may feel you have the greatest product or service idea in the world, but how do you convince others of its greatness? This is where many entrepreneurs fall short: They have the idea in mind but may not be so clear on the marketing or the execution. In fact, some entrepreneurs cannot even prove that customers want to buy their offering. This is where the CVP really fulfills its potential, as it delineates the value of your idea in meeting customer needs. In this section, we will explore different types of CVPs and learn how to identify your customer segments.

Types of Value Propositions

Some CVPs are better than others. Let's explore three main approaches to creating value propositions: the all-benefits, points-of-difference, and resonating-focus approaches (see Figure 5.2) 26 The all-benefits approach to CVP involves identifying and promoting all the benefits of your product or service to customer segments, with little regard for the competition or any real insight into what the customer really wants or needs. This is the least impactful approach for creating a value proposition because it's overly product focused. In other words, you are promoting features and benefits that customers may not even need. The points-of-difference approach produces a stronger CVP than all-benefits because it focuses on your product or service relative to the competition and recognizes that your offering is unique and different from others on the market. However, although focusing on the differences may help you differentiate your business from the competi-tion, it still doesn't provide evidence that customers will also find the differences valu-able. Simply assuming that customers will find these points of difference favorable is not evidence enough to prove they will buy from you. A CVP that uses the resonating-focus approach (also called "just what the customer wants" or product-market fit) is the "gold standard." All-benefits and points-of-difference CVPs each provide a laundry list of the presumed benefits to the customers

why services behave differently from physical goods.

Master the Four I’s and you have the blueprint for turning a service from a source of customer anxiety into a source of competitive advantage.

Four I's of Services

• Intangibility
• Inconsistency
• Inseparability
• Inventory

Think of the Four I’s as the four levers that every service manager must push and pull to create a great customer experience.

1. Intangibility – “You can’t drop it on your foot.”

Core idea: A service is a performance, not an object. It has no physical form, so customers cannot touch, smell or “try it on” before they buy.

Marketing implications

• Customers feel higher perceived risk → need for trust signals (guarantees, testimonials, certifications).
• They rely heavily on surrogate cues: the look of the facility, the politeness of staff, the design of the website.
• Word-of-mouth and online reviews become the main “evidence”.

Operational levers

• Tangibilize the intangible: uniforms, clear signage, clean equipment, a well-designed app, a physical “evidence package” (ticket, wrist-band, welcome kit).
• Offer free trials, samples or simulations (e.g., airline VR cabin tour, software freemium).

2. Inconsistency (a.k.a. Heterogeneity) – “No two haircuts are ever the same.”

Core idea: Quality depends on who provides the service, when, where and to whom. Human interaction is variable by nature.

Marketing implications

• Hard to standardize the brand promise → risk of disappointment.
• Each “moment of truth” can go viral (good or bad).

Operational levers

• Industrialize the service: scripts, checklists, SOPs, training academies.
• Select and retain high-quality front-line staff; empower them to recover failures.
• Substitute technology for labor where appropriate (ATM, airline kiosk, chatbot) to reduce variation.
• Monitor quality in real time (mystery shopping, post-service SMS ratings).

3. Inseparability – “Produced and consumed at the same time.”

Core idea: The customer (or their belongings/data) must be in the factory; production and consumption are simultaneous.

Marketing implications

• The customer is a co-producer; their behavior affects their own outcome and that of others (classroom, stadium, ride-share).
• Capacity is fixed where the service is delivered (a seat on this flight, a stylist at that hour).

Operational levers

• Manage customers as partial employees: orient them quickly (“how to use the ticket gate”), pre-segment them (online check-in, fast-pass).
• Smooth demand: dynamic pricing, advance reservations, off-peak promotions.
• Expand the “place” of encounter: branches, video-conference, home delivery, tele-medicine.

4. Inventory – “You can’t stock a haircut.”

Core idea: Services are perishable; unused capacity is lost forever. An empty airline seat or an idle lawyer at 3 p.m. generates zero revenue but still incurs cost.

Marketing implications

• Heavy emphasis on yield management and last-minute sales.
• Customers learn to expect discounts at the last minute, eroding margins.

Operational levers

• Price-discriminate over time (early-bird vs. walk-up).
• Sell futures (season tickets, subscriptions, block-hours).
• Shift demand to fill valleys (happy-hour specials, matinee movies).
• Cross-train staff and share capacity (hotel ballroom used for conferences by day, weddings by night).

Putting the Four I’s together

Any service innovation or complaint can be traced back to one or more of these four characteristics.

Ask yourself:

• Are we making the invisible visible? (Intangibility)
• Are we reducing variation? (Inconsistency)
• Are we managing customer participation and capacity simultaneously? (Inseparability)
• Are we minimizing revenue lost to perishability? (Inventory)