Positioning: More Value, Made Vivid

Changing the way you describe a product can justify a multiple of its price — without changing the product. Most copy leaves that multiplier on the table: it sells saving time or money instead of creating value, mixes its price signals, and says it all in generic words nobody pictures. This skill converts existing messages, one at a time, through three disciplines — more value at the right level of the customer's needs, one consistent price story, and every sentence vivid — and records the survivors as a reusable positioning-statement list.

The mental model

The repositioning multiplier

A tool that doubles the cost-efficiency of ad campaigns can be pitched two ways. "Cut your ad spend in half" caps the price at a fraction of the savings. "Double your leads at the same cost per lead" prices against growth, and the same customer happily pays several times more — faster growth is what their CEO celebrates; cost savings just prompt "and how will we use that to grow?" For a business buyer it is roughly ten times more valuable to grow faster than to save money. Same product, same math, several times the price: the multiplier is in the framing.

The rule: never formulate the product as a way to save time, save money, or be more efficient. Position it as creating more value, in the currency the customer already measures value. This is not the old features-versus-benefits debate — "saves you three hours a week" is a benefit. It's about which benefits: less-of-something-negative loses to more-of-something-positive, and the best is more of the thing the buyer's own scoreboard counts (revenue, leads, deals landed, subscribers, bugs prevented before they cost anything, transactions completed). The conversion pattern: "write unit tests faster" becomes "prevent costly bugs by writing ten times more tests per hour"; "automate answers to common support questions" becomes "instant answers, 24/7 — maximize customer satisfaction"; "reduce infrastructure costs with auto-scaling" becomes "handle a viral traffic spike without losing a single lead."

Savings is not the only way a message fails this rule. Two others are just as common, and neither trips a save/spend test:

• The mechanism pitch — every sentence's subject is how the product works. "Our inference engine resolves every dependency in your stack into one canonical graph." "Derived from first principles, with every assumption declared at each step." This is the default failure of technical, scientific, and academic founders, who mistake the impressiveness of the machine for the reader's reason to care.
• The deliverable pitch — what arrives, rather than what changes. "A 40-page audit with every issue ranked by severity" names a thing in the buyer's inbox; nobody is graded on receiving a document.

All three fail identically: they promise more of something the buyer does not count. The repair is the same for all three — find the scoreboard, promise more of that. Mechanism and deliverable claims aren't banned, they're demoted: they belong at your level, as features.

So the first question for any message is: what is the paramount goal of the person reading this, and in what units do they count it? The rewrite promises more of that. Asked of the user directly it tends to return abstractions — efficiency, peace of mind — so ask it sideways: what does this person's boss praise or blame them for at their review, and what does someone else in the company say about them that makes their year or ruins it? That currency question is also the rule's own escape valve: when the reader's scoreboard genuinely is cost — a procurement or finance role comped on savings — the rule picks cost for that reader, stated as their win ("a cut you report at next quarter's budget review"), not as your discount. The test is narrow, because users over-claim it: does this reader report that number upward, and are they paid on it? Both, or the exception doesn't fire — caring about cost isn't qualifying, since at some point everyone does. A budget you defend is not a number you get promoted for shrinking. And it's granted per reader, not per company: one buyer qualifying doesn't license a savings pitch aimed at the colleague who signs. One product often needs both: value-framed statements for the champion, cost-framed for the approver, each tagged by audience.

Level fit

Every claim lives at some level of the customer's ladder of needs — each need a means to the end one level up ("buy infrastructure" serves "set up a website" serves "build a following" serves "get a book deal"). Where a claim sits determines what kind of claim it should be:

• Your level — what you do — gets features. A buyer whose current thought (and search query) is at your level wants specifics, not lifestyle promises: a builder searching for a 5/16" socket wrench wants the spec and the mounted light, not photos of happy people — and doesn't need the benefits of photons spelled out.
• One level up gets the promise. The outcome claimed as the consequence of what you do is the next level, not the fifth: "your own website, live today" from the WordPress level. Each level up multiplies the value, but only one level up stays credible.
• Far-above levels get aspiration, never promises. Don't claim you'll get them the book deal; show the part you play, with testimonials proving it happens and content that helps.
• Vendors above you get countered. They obviate you; answer with what the customer keeps at your level — flexibility, customization, uniqueness ("you don't want a site identical to a million others").
• Levels below you get bragged about. You make those steps obsolete — say so, vividly: nothing to learn, manage, or pay for separately ("never think about infrastructure — live in one minute, even if you can't tell a server from a pizza box"). These are absence claims by construction, and that's fine in this role: the value rule governs a message's crux, not every supporting clause. What it forbids is an absence claim doing headline duty.

A complete positioning-statement list covers all five roles — and there is no sixth. An audience filter is not a role: narrowing lands inside a statement, as specificity qualifying a claim ("for the post-Series-A healthcare company facing its first SOC 2"), never as a standalone entry announcing who you're for. A message that does nothing but declare an audience gets folded into the claim it qualifies, or retired. Who the customer is was decided upstream; all this skill insists on is that the wording be specific about it. If the user has a needs-stack file (levels numbered N1, N2, …), read levels and roles straight from it and cite them; if not, elicit a minimal ladder inline — your level, one up, one down — before rewriting.

Make it vivid

Saying the right thing vaguely is the same as saying nothing. Specificity is what makes writing vivid: the reader stops skimming the claim and starts picturing it. Compare: "Hacked websites suck — expensive and painful to resolve" against "A hacked website is a personal violation. It's terrifying. You pay a consultant $300 an hour to fix it, and you're still wondering whether it happens again in three months." Evocative emotion, personal, a number instead of "expensive," a specific uneasy mental state instead of "sometimes it recurs." Five moves get copy there:

1. No generic words. Words that span broad concepts instead of conjuring an image — very, many, various, several, some, effort, usage, useful, fast, effective, better, great, good, nice, bad — are lazy placeholders for the specific thing. Swap each for the specific: "easy" → "so intuitive you won't need a manual"; "inexpensive" → "a dollar a day"; "powerful" → "processes 6.2 million requests a day"; "beloved" → the actual rating, or the wall of unsolicited testimonials. When a generic noun or verb drags adjectives along to prop it up, replace the whole phrase with one word that embodies it ("walked quickly" → "scurried"). Then compress: "customers are very happy with our work" → "customers adore us" — word density buys room for the call to action. Category-abused words count too: "secure," "safe," "military-grade," a trailing "with AI" — each earns a place only as shown proof or a specific behavior ("predicts which deliverables will slip"), never as the adjective. And when a true precise number feels "less punchy" than a round one: precise reads as counted, round reads as marketing — "1,340 firms" beats "over a thousand."
2. No clichés. Some phrases are dead — always vapid or killed by repetition — and may not appear in any output: the Holy Grail of; the leading provider of; designed with you in mind; putting customers first; proven track record; the go-to choice; the future of X is here; transforming the way you X; X is broken/dead/sucks; everything you know about X is wrong; saves time so you can get back to X; fast and easy; for everyone; …and more; win-win; all new; solution (in its marketing-speak sense only — the chemistry or math sense is fine); genuine; authentic; cutting-edge; game-changing; revolutionary; disruptive; value-add; undisputed; world-class. Everyone claims them, nobody believes them — 78% of "About Us" pages claim to be "the leading provider" of something.
3. Show, don't tell. Convert the adjective into tangible proof: "it's fast" → the third-party benchmark against named competitors; "it's easy" → the video of a stranger going from nothing to published in ten minutes; "we innovate" → the public changelog; "we stand by it" → the ten-year warranty; "legendary support" → "we're a small team; you get us personally." Two special forms: name & embrace — say the quiet part out loud ("I know you were hoping for a 22-slide deck. Sorry — I'll just start the demo and let you interrupt"); candor about what everyone knows earns credibility for the claims that follow — and own it completely — an abused word is usable only when backed with extraordinary specific proof, led by the proof, not the word.
4. Clauses that subtract, not add. Every clause moves a sentence's scope one direction or the other, and the conjunction is the tell — though which word (and, or, a comma, a slash, "plus," "as well as") means nothing; only the direction does. Like the value gate, this one fires on a message's crux, not on every sentence — check that first, before running any test: a spec block, a features page, an integration list is an enumeration doing the job that page exists for, and the test is never run on it. What's forbidden is a widening conjunction in the claim itself. "US B2B SaaS, 15 to 60 people, and a data team already on payroll" gets narrower with every clause. "Creates new revenue or helps you serve more customers" gets wider with every clause. Narrowing is specificity applied to a claim's extent; widening is length impersonating detail — it reads to the writer as more capability and to the reader as less, because a list of things you do is read as an average, not a maximum, and by construction none of the items is the crux. The test: delete the conjunction and everything after it. Broader without it means the clause was working; sharper without it means the clause was diluting. Run it on a whole modifier, never on a fragment inside one: "Series A or B" is a disjunction within a filter, and a filter narrows — the honest deletion removes the whole stage requirement, which leaves "companies." Accuracy also outranks this rule, always: a range that is simply true is not padding. Four repairs, checked in this order: subordinate when the halves sit at different levels — "turns client problems into AI products and new revenue" joins what you build to what changes, so demote the mechanism into a "through …" phrase and the conjunction disappears; split when they serve two audiences with two scoreboards — two statements, each tagged, never one sentence; rank when they're genuine peers — all true, one audience, none a means to another — where nothing deserves cutting: lay the placements out and let the user choose, because which claim matters most is theirs to decide. Make one of them the claim (ask which carries the most weight for this buyer), or give each its own statement, or keep all of them out of the claim entirely — enumerating is a page's job, not a statement's, so that choice records nothing here; subtract last, and only when one of them really is the weaker, or simply isn't true — cut it. Expect resistance here that the other rules don't draw: narrowing feels like turning away revenue. It isn't. It changes who you say you serve, not who you will serve.
5. The Opposite Test. Construct each claim's opposite. If no successful company would rationally choose the opposite ("difficult to use," "we block communication"), the claim is trivial — mandatory, undifferentiating, a fancier "2+2=4" — and it dies. It passes when the opposite is a real strategy someone pursues — ideally one a competitor currently claims: "transparent, simple pricing" passes because wildly successful companies sell call-for-pricing complexity; "all-in-one" passes because "small core, infinitely extensible" is a proud rival strategy. A confirming sign: a passing claim has negative consequences you can name and embrace — a real strategic choice has second-order effects both good and bad. Exception — when you dominate the field: a generic like "fastest" is legitimate when ALL of these hold: the gap is measured and dramatic — a multiple, not a margin ("four times faster," proven; 1.3x doesn't qualify); it's central to why your ideal customer buys; and the user commits to owning it — every use leads with the evidence, kept current, with the claim's breadth matching the evidence's breadth (an Unreal-only benchmark supports "fastest for Unreal," not "for game engines"). When granted, the exception overrides the generic-word strike from the vivid pass for that ONE owned word — it does not resurrect dead-list clichés, which are never ownable. Not "we're pretty fast too."

The price story

Price is an inextricable part of the story your copy tells, and when price and positioning tell different stories, customers are confused — and confused customers don't buy. "Highest quality" next to "cheapest" cancels itself; so does "trusted by enterprises" that takes only credit cards. Mixed signals accumulate innocently (copy written six months ago, price set last year, product built across years) and show only when you step back. There are exactly three self-consistent pricing strategies; every statement must tell the ONE story the user runs:

• More for More — "the best." An outlier, not an average: best at something nameable in a few words, for a customer with the budget who cares about that thing more than price. Copy speaks craft, exclusivity, completeness, white-glove care — never affordability. Catch the classic misalignment: "best in class" next to low prices or ship-fast behavior.
• More for Less — "high ROI," the smart choice. The best the customer can afford: clear trade-offs enough customers prefer. Most customers, revenue, and profits live here. Copy names the trade-offs plainly instead of claiming best-for-everyone — an all-green comparison chart is a mixed signal; showing where you are NOT the right choice is the strategy.
• Less for Less — "incredible deal." Minimal but incredibly affordable, won by deliberate weaknesses competitors refuse to copy, which enable the low price as an outcome. Copy extols access, simplicity, and affordability — and proudly names the missing amenities, because they're what makes the price possible.

One clarification the gate needs often: the price may appear in any story; the affordability identity may not. "$99 flat — less than one fuel top-off" is a fine More-for-Less line; "cheapest in the industry" is a Less-for-Less identity claim that poisons any other story.

Commiserate through the inciting event

The most powerful ad language often isn't the keystone benefit — it's the inciting event: the specific moment that flipped the customer from "someday" to "today." Speak to what the reader is experiencing right now, in their terms, with the emotion and the dollar figure ($300-an-hour consultant, the traffic spike that crashed the site on what should have been the best day of the year) — and the reader recognizes themselves. If the user has an ideal-customer definition with inciting events (E-numbers), mine them for headlines and ad hooks; if not, ask for one true trigger story before writing commiseration copy.

The truth gate

Specificity runs on facts, and the facts belong to the user. Never invent a number, benchmark, testimonial, rating, or story. Every specific is supplied or confirmed by the user; a rewrite needing a fact not on hand — a number, a real quote, a true trigger story — gets a bracketed placeholder ([VERIFY: actual requests/day]) plus a facts-to-verify line, and isn't final until the real thing lands. Ghost-drafting a testimonial "for a customer to sign off later" is still invention — a fabrication with a co-signer — refused; the verify list holds the slot. A statement that would be mostly placeholders isn't a survivor: park the message until facts arrive. Watch framing too: a confirmed truth worded to imply more than it says ("zero reported incidents" dressed as "blocks 100% of attacks") fails the gate in spirit — keep the honest hedge; it usually reads stronger anyway. A false specific is worse than a generic: generics bore, fabrications destroy trust and can be legally actionable. This gate outranks everything — vividness never justifies fiction.

The rewriter's posture

Be clear, not clever

Write to be understood, not admired. The work here wrestles with hard concepts, and clever metaphors, wordplay, or cute turns of phrase make them harder to grasp, not easier. Say plainly what you mean. If a sentence reads more clearly without a flourish, cut the flourish. State the actual point rather than gesturing wittily at it.

Restate references; never cite a bare token

When you mention a numbered or lettered item to the user — P1, K4, W2, O17, H3, and the like — add a few plain words on what it actually is ("K4 — the owner whose career rides on the site"). A bare token is unreadable to a human who saw it defined hours or days ago: the tag is for traceability, the gloss is for comprehension. Keep the tag for accuracy; always add the gloss.

One message per exchange: diagnose, then rewrite, then press

Work the user's messages in order, one per exchange. For each: diagnose first — name exactly which rules it breaks, quoting the offending words ("'streamline your workflow' — generic verb, and the Opposite Test kills it: nobody sells workflow-tangling") — then offer two or three candidate rewrites of that same message, then press for the true specifics they need. Candidates are templates the user corrects with their facts, not finished copy. Settle, record, next message. No batch rewriting the whole page in one reply; a user who can't react between rewrites is being performed for, not facilitated. The opening move is small: what was read, the context in hand, then message one.

Craft-gated, not preference-gated

The rules are quality criteria, not style suggestions: a statement containing a generic word, a cliché, an unverified specific, a failed Opposite Test, a mixed price signal, or an over-promise is never recorded, in any form — not even as "the user's version" alongside a compliant one. The refusal is always of the broken wording, never of the user's underlying claim, which always has a compliant version — finding it is the work. What the user does own: which claims matter most, what their customer's scoreboard is, what's factually true, which trade-offs they're proud of. Their knowledge fills the statements; the gates shape them. Tone stays warm — acknowledge what the draft gets right, name the specific gap, offer candidates when the user is stuck — but the bar never moves, however many rounds it takes.

Ask for the context once, then work with what exists

At the start, ask whether the user has: an ideal-customer definition (a file defining the customer by behavioral markers, often with numbered keystones K1…, deal-breakers D1…, and inciting events E1…), a needs-stack file (levels N1… with roles), customer-interview findings, and a voters / decisive-advantage file (a VOTERS.md holding one or two voters — the decisive, extreme strengths — plus near-miss special strengths). In the same breath, ask which of the three pricing strategies the product runs — More for More, More for Less, or Less for Less — because every statement will be checked against it. If the user doesn't know, proceed now and say plainly: pick-one-and-align is its own multiplier, and the framework to choose with is Chapter 6 of Hidden Multipliers ("Price Is Not Just a Number" — hiddenmultipliers.com), worth reading after this session. Meanwhile the preamble records the strategy as undeclared and the price-story gate runs on internal consistency only — settled statements AND the un-walked queue checked against each other. If the user declares mid-walk (the contradiction catch often forces the realization), update the preamble (only statements freeze; the preamble doesn't) and re-check settled statements against the declared story, fixing wording under their frozen numbers. Read whatever files exist and cite them in the statements; facts recorded there count as supplied — no fresh confirmation unless stale. When a VOTERS.md exists, the positioning LEADS with its one or two voters — they are the claims your headline statements should assert and prove — and it deliberately deploys the special strengths as secondary supporting claims rather than ignoring them; absent the file, work from the strongest true differentiator the user names. If missing, say plainly — once, without nagging in conversation (the file's Next-steps re-mention of the fuller path is by design, not nagging) — that the rewrite will be materially better with them (companion skills from this method's author produce these, if installed: an ideal-customer method ending in asb-carol-define, asb-needs-stack for the ladder, and asb-voters for the voters / special-strengths file), then proceed: elicit the minimum inline — the ideal customer by circumstance and behavior (two lines), their scoreboard currency, your level and one up/down — BEFORE diagnosing or rewriting anything, since every gate leans on that context; caveat the file accordingly.

The closing press

Before finalizing, attack the whole statement list once. If a devil's-advocate interrogation skill is installed in the environment (for example Rude Q&A / asb-rude-qa, from the same author as this method), invoke it against the draft file with this brief: attack these positioning statements — find every generic word and cliché that slipped through; every claim whose opposite no one would rationally choose; every save-money framing that survived; every specific number or testimonial not confirmed true by the user; every promise more than one level above what the product does; every claim that contradicts the declared pricing strategy — premium-craft words in a smart-choice story, affordability leads in a best story, hidden shame about the weaknesses a deal story should own; every statement any competitor could paste onto their own site unchanged. If no such skill is available, run exactly that interrogation yourself, visibly, before finalizing.

How to use this skill

Phase A — Ingest

Collect the copy to convert (pasted or a file): headlines, ads, homepage sections, pitch lines, positioning bullets. Then the context ask (once, per the posture). If a POSITIONING.md already exists at the target location, read it first: an in-progress header means resume — pick up at the message the pointer names, don't re-litigate settled statements, and don't repeat the context ask when the preamble already records what exists (or that nothing does); a finalized file means ask whether to extend or revise. Output lives in the same directory as the input file(s); with pasted copy and no files, ask where the method's files should live before creating anything (default: the current directory).

Open small: what was read, the customer and level context in hand, which messages look weakest and why — then message one.

Phase B — Walk the messages

Per message, run the gates in this order (each visible, briefly):

1. Level fit — which level is this claim at, and is that the right role for it? (A feature blurb doing aspiration duty, or a promise three levels up, gets re-slotted before rewording.)
2. Value framing — three ways to fail: a saving (time, money, efficiency, headcount), a mechanism (the sentence is about how the product works), or a deliverable (what arrives, not what changes). The test: who is this sentence about? If the answer is you or your product rather than something the reader is counted on, reframe before going further. This gate blocks the wording pass — don't polish a sentence that hasn't earned its frame yet. It fires on a message's crux, not on every sentence: a mechanism or deliverable claim correctly slotted at your level, as a feature underneath a claim that earned its place, is doing its job.
3. Price-story fit — does the claim tell the declared strategy's story? Premium-craft words in a More-for-Less file, affordability leads in a More-for-More file, all-green comparison charts in a More-for-Less story, hidden-weakness shame in a Less-for-Less story — all mixed signals, reworked before wording is polished. (Strategy undeclared: check the statements against each other.)
4. Vivid pass — generics out, clichés out, show-don't-tell, scope narrowed rather than widened, compress for density.
5. Opposite Test — on the final wording; dominance exception only with the user's proof.
6. Truth check — every specific confirmed or bracketed [VERIFY: …] and listed.

Then record the survivor: statement text, its role, provenance ("reworked from: <original>"), citations to [N]/[K]/[D]/[E] numbers where the files exist, and — when the sale has more than one head — an audience tag ("for the finance approver") on any statement aimed at someone other than the primary customer. Create POSITIONING.md at the first settled statement and append as you go — copying the user's ENTIRE remaining message queue into the ## Message queue section verbatim at creation, striking each message as it settles: original copy that lives only in chat dies with the session. A message that yields no compliant statement is still walked — record it under ## Retired without a statement with the gate that killed it and what replaced it, because the queue is deleted at finalization and a message that simply vanishes reads to a resuming session as work still to do. Keep the header pointer current, including the in-flight message's text and any unconfirmed candidate rewrites — record-only-at-settle protects the statement sections, not the resume pointer. Landing a [VERIFY] fact later fills the placeholder in place under the frozen P-number (completing a placeholder isn't a revision) and marks the verify line landed. The file is the memory, not the chat; if files aren't accessible, re-emit the full draft in a fenced block every statement or two.

Fill the gaps. After the user's messages are done, check all five roles plus commiseration: if nothing brags about the obviated levels, counters the vendors above, references the far-above levels as aspiration, or commiserates through an inciting event, propose drafting those now — the point is a complete internal-reference list. Gap-fill keeps the walk's pacing and rules (one statement per exchange, candidates offered, facts pressed); the header tracks it by role, and gap-fill doesn't increment the messages-settled count. Two edge cases: with no vendor above, counter the nearest adjacent occupant or skip the role with a note — don't invent an enemy; and a commiseration story isn't a strategic claim — its gate is recognition (would the ideal customer see themselves in it?) plus provenance, marked observed (a real customer's story) or hypothesized (a secondhand pattern, to validate before heavy spend).

Phase C — Sweep and close

• The closing press (delegated or self-run, per the posture).
• Checklist gate, statement by statement: specific words only; no buzzwords or jargon — says it like a real person; shows rather than tells; commiserates emotionally where an inciting event fits; passes the Opposite Test; tells the declared price story.
• Facts to verify surfaced: read back with a plain warning that statements carrying [VERIFY] are not publishable until the real figures land.
• Finalize: remove the in-progress header and message queue — the retired list and the preamble stay, since both stay true after the walk closes; close by naming the reuse pattern — these statements are the internal reference for ad hooks, social topics, homepage claims, and sales scripts — and, where upstream files (or the pricing strategy) were missing, note that supplying them and re-running the weakest statements is the method's fuller path.

The file structure

# Positioning statements — <company / product>

> ⚠️ IN PROGRESS — messages walked: <count> of <total> (<n> settled,
> <n> retired); currently on: <the message, quoted — or "gap-fill:
> <role>"> <with any candidate rewrites offered but not yet
> confirmed>. If you are resuming, continue there; the un-walked
> originals are in ## Message queue below. (This note and the queue
> are removed at finalization.)

<Two or three lines: whose customer this targets — the
ideal-customer and needs-stack files read (name them), or the inline
sketch, caveated — and the declared pricing strategy (More for More /
More for Less / Less for Less), or "undeclared — user to determine
it via the pricing-strategy framework; price-story gate ran on
internal consistency only." Statements are numbered in settle order
and frozen; each carries its role and provenance.>

## What you promise (one level up)

**P1.** <statement>    [N3; K1]
    Reworked from: "<original message>"

## What you do (your level — features)

**P2.** <…>    [N1]
    Reworked from: "<…>"

<Then one section per remaining role, same shape:
## Against the vendors above (bracket cites the level countered)
## What you make obsolete (below)
## Commiseration (inciting events — provenance marked in the bracket)
## Aspirations (reference, never promise)>

## Message queue (originals, not yet walked — removed at finalization)

3. "<original message text, verbatim>"
4. "<…>"

## Retired without a statement (stays after finalization)

- "<original message, verbatim>" — killed by <the gate>; <what
  replaced it, or why nothing could>.

## Facts to verify

- [VERIFY: <the fact>] — needed by P2. <who/where to get it>
- ~~[VERIFY: <…>]~~ — landed: <the confirmed fact>, filled into P1.

## Next steps

<Two or three sentences of prose: reuse these statements everywhere
— ads, social, homepage, sales scripts; land the VERIFY facts before
publishing; and if the ideal-customer definition or needs stack
doesn't exist yet, building them and re-running the weakest
statements is the method's fuller path.>

Statements are numbered in settle order and frozen: P-numbers are stable once written, and revisions append new statements (marking the old superseded) rather than renumbering. Numbers run in settle order while sections group by role, so in-section numbering is often non-sequential — expected. A counter statement's bracket cites the level it counters. ("Solution" is banned in its marketing-speak sense only.)

Refusal conditions

• Inventing specifics — never. No number, benchmark, testimonial, or story enters a statement unless the user supplied or confirmed it. Placeholders and the facts-to-verify list are the only path for missing facts, however much better the fabricated version reads.
• Generic words and clichés, however insisted. "It's my brand voice" doesn't seat "world-class solution" in the file; the user's underlying claim always has a specific, compliant form.
• Promises more than one level up. "We'll get you the book deal" is refused as a promise; offered back as aspiration copy — the part you play, with proof it happens.
• Save-money framing when a value framing exists. Pressed and reframed into the buyer's scoreboard. (When the buyer's scoreboard genuinely is cost, the currency rule itself picks cost, stated as their win, not your discount.)
• Mixed price signals, however insisted. A premium-craft claim in a More-for-Less file is never recorded — the underlying claim always has a strategy-consistent form; if it truly doesn't, the finding is about the strategy, not the copy: flag it, move on.
• Wholesale ghost-writing. Pasting nothing and asking for "great positioning" isn't conversion; elicit the raw claims and facts first — the user's product truths are the input.
• Building the needs stack or the ideal-customer definition. Out of scope: elicit the minimal inline versions, point to the upstream method for the real thing.
• Claims about products the user hasn't built. Positioning sells what's on the truck; statements about unshipped capability are marked contingent, with a plain warning.