What makes a positioning recommendation defensible
A positioning recommendation is defensible when you can answer five questions about it: what evidence supports it, what contradicts it, how old that evidence is, what it assumes about the customer, and what would change your mind. If any answer is “I would have to look”, the recommendation is not ready.
Check 1: every load-bearing claim has a source you can open
List the claims the recommendation depends on. Remove the ones that are decoration. The remaining claims each need at least one source, and a claim about customers needs a customer source, not only a vendor page.
Check 2: the contradicting evidence is written down
A recommendation that has no counter-evidence usually means nobody looked. State what points the other way and why you still recommend this.
Check 3: freshness is stated
A positioning claim built on a pricing page from six months ago should say so. Competitors reprice and reword on a schedule of their own.
Check 4: the customer assumption is explicit
Positioning is a bet about a segment. Name it: “agencies of 10 to 30 people that run research for more than five clients.” If the evidence came from agencies of a different size, say that too.
Check 5: there is a condition that would reverse it
Write the trigger. “If Meridian drops its 10-seat minimum, the price-gap argument weakens and we revisit.” A trigger turns monitoring into something with a purpose.
A recommendation, before and after
| Version | Text |
|---|---|
| Draft | Position Fieldnote as the faster, cheaper alternative to Meridian. |
| Defensible | Position Fieldnote as the note tool for agencies of 5 to 30 people. Support: Meridian lists a 10-seat minimum and $59 per seat (pricing page, read 2026-10-09). Counter-evidence: two reviews say Meridian's import tool saves time for large agencies, so we do not claim speed for agencies above 30. Review in 60 days, or if Meridian changes its minimum. |
The second version is longer. It is also the one a client can challenge line by line and get an answer to.
What to keep alongside the recommendation
- The claim list with statuses.
- The sources and retrieval dates.
- Who approved it and when.
- The reversal condition and the next review date.
A quick test before the meeting
Ask someone who was not involved to pick any sentence in the recommendation and find its source in under two minutes. If they cannot, the trail is too thin to defend live, and it is better to find that out in a rehearsal than in front of the client.
Who should run the checks
The author of a recommendation is the worst person to find its gaps. Have a colleague read the claim list and the counter-evidence before the recommendation is presented. Ten minutes with the five questions usually finds the one claim that was assumed and never sourced.
In Sigblaze
Positioning actions in Sigblaze are created from approved insights and keep a trace to the claims and sources behind them. Whether the reasoning is sound is still a human judgement, which is why the review step exists.
This piece contains no external statistics. Fieldnote and Meridian are fictional companies, and the figures in the examples are synthetic.