# Positioning: more value, made vivid Human Guide

## What This Is For
Converts marketing copy — headlines, ads, homepage claims, pitches, positioning statements — into value-first, vivid language: reframes save-time/save-money pitches as create-more-value. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for brand and messaging: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Positioning: more value, made vivid agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for positioning: more value, made vivid.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Positioning: more value, made vivid guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- **The mechanism pitch** — every sentence's subject is how the product
- **The deliverable pitch** — what arrives, rather than what changes.
- **Your level — what you do — gets features.** A buyer whose current
- **One level up gets the promise.** The outcome claimed as the
- **Far-above levels get aspiration, never promises.** Don't claim
- **Vendors above you get countered.** They obviate you; answer with
- **Levels below you get bragged about.** You make those steps
- **No generic words.** Words that span broad concepts instead of
- **No clichés.** Some phrases are dead — always vapid or killed by
- **Show, don't tell.** Convert the adjective into tangible proof:
- **Clauses that subtract, not add.** Every clause moves a
- **The Opposite Test.** Construct each claim's opposite. If no

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: The mental model, The repositioning multiplier, Level fit, Make it vivid, The price story, Commiserate through the inciting event, The truth gate, The rewriter's posture, Be clear, not clever, Restate references; never cite a bare token.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- The rule: **never formulate the product as a way to save time, save
- **Far-above levels get aspiration, never promises.** Don't claim
- uniqueness ("you don't want a site identical to a million others").
- separately ("never think about infrastructure — live in one minute,
- post-Series-A healthcare company facing its first SOC 2"), never as
- deliverables will slip"), never as the adjective. And when a true
- **Show, don't tell.** Convert the adjective into tangible proof:
- doing the job that page exists for, and the test is never run on

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Positioning: more value, made vivid human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the asmartbear/asb-skills skill entry for `asb-positioning`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# 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.