I don’t let a team touch their homepage until they’ve answered five specific questions. Not five taglines — five questions. If they can’t answer all five with a straight face, the homepage rewrite is decorating a house with a cracked foundation, and a fresh coat of paint isn’t going to fix that.
The framework comes from April Dunford, who broke positioning down into five components after years of watching startups confuse “we need better copy” with “we’ve never actually decided what we are.” I’ve run this with more teams than I can count, and it exposes the same gaps almost every time, like it’s the same house with a different address.
1. Competitive alternatives — what would they use if we didn’t exist?
Not “the competition” in general. The actual, specific thing a buyer would do instead of buying you, which is sometimes a named competitor and sometimes something less flattering, like a spreadsheet, an internal team, or plain nothing.
I worked with a company convinced their alternative was a specific, well-funded competitor. When we actually talked to lost deals, the real alternative in most of them was “we kept using the manual process and hired another person.” Entirely different battle than the one they’d been fighting in every sales deck for two years.
2. Unique attributes — what do we have that those alternatives don’t?
This one has to survive contact with the alternative you just named. Easy to list attributes that sound differentiated in isolation and evaporate the second you compare them to what a buyer would actually use otherwise.
In that same example, “faster implementation” wasn’t a real unique attribute — the manual process had zero implementation time, being, notably, not a piece of software. The real attribute turned out to be narrower and less flattering: the tool caught errors the manual process consistently missed. Not glamorous. True, and specific to the actual alternative, which counts for more.
3. Value — why does that attribute matter to anyone?
An attribute isn’t worth anything until you connect it to a consequence a buyer cares about. “Catches errors” is a feature. “Prevents the kind of billing mistake that took two people a full week to unwind last quarter” is a value. Buyers don’t buy attributes. They buy relief from a consequence they’ve already lived through, or are quietly afraid of living through again.
This step gets rushed constantly, because it requires actually knowing what a bad outcome looks like for the customer — meaning real conversations, not a whiteboard session with good energy.
4. Who cares the most?
Not everyone values the same thing equally. In the example above, the person who cared most about catching billing errors wasn’t the end user running the process day to day — it was the finance leader who got blamed when something slipped through, in a meeting that presumably nobody enjoyed. Different buyer, different concerns, than the one the original messaging had been aimed at the entire time.
Getting this wrong doesn’t just weaken messaging. Often you’re talking to the wrong person entirely, or talking to the right person about the wrong thing, with real conviction, at length.
5. Market category — given all of this, what are we, in the buyer’s head?
The one people get precious about, because it feels like it should be a clever, ownable term. Usually the better answer is more boring and more useful: pick the category the buyer already understands, so you inherit their existing mental model instead of spending years trying to install a new one. Inventing a category is sometimes the right call. It’s rarely the first move, and it’s never free — a topic I’ve written about separately, and at length, because it deserves its own space.
Running this for real
This is a working session, not a survey. Get sales, product, and a couple of customer-facing people in a room, work through the five questions in order, and write down where people disagree — because the disagreement is the finding. If your sales team gives three different answers to “what’s the competitive alternative,” that’s not a messaging problem waiting on better copy. It’s a positioning gap quietly costing you deals every time a rep improvises an answer on a call.
Run it once a year at minimum, and again any time you’ve entered a new segment, launched a major feature, or watched your win rate slide against a specific competitor for no obvious reason. Markets shift. The answers to these five questions have a shelf life, even when nobody’s rewritten a word of the website.