HYPOTHESES
What are you actually testing?
Break your positioning into hypotheses:
- Customer
- Are we positioning for the right audience?
- Problem
- Is the problem important?
- Alternatives
- Are these what customers actually compare us against?
- Value
- Does our differentiation matter?
- Context
- Does the category/frame help customers understand us?
COMPREHENSION
Test comprehension before persuasion
Show the product/description and ask:
- What do you think this product does?
- Who do you think it's for?
- What problem would make someone use it?
- What would you compare it to?
- Why might someone choose it?
Don't immediately correct the participant.
The gap between their interpretation and your intended positioning is useful evidence.
INTERVIEWS
Use customer interviews differently
Don't ask: “Do you like this positioning?”
Ask about reality:
- How are you solving this today?
- What triggered you to look for something different?
- What alternatives did you consider?
- What mattered most in the decision?
- What nearly stopped you buying?
- What would you miss if this disappeared?
Evidence about actual behavior is usually more useful than approval of marketing language.
SALES
Sales conversations are positioning tests
Repeated objections contain information.
If prospects consistently misunderstand the same thing, investigate it.
If the same part of the proposition creates interest, investigate that too.
Look for patterns across conversations rather than overreacting to one prospect.
MESSAGE TESTS
Test messages without confusing them with positioning
Ads, landing pages, outbound messages and content can test how different expressions perform.
But a message test alone cannot prove the underlying positioning.
Poor performance could mean:
- Wrong audience.
- Weak creative.
- Wrong channel.
- Weak positioning.
- Bad timing.
- Insufficient evidence.
Treat message tests as evidence, not verdicts.
EVIDENCE
A positioning evidence ladder
Evidence generally becomes stronger as it gets closer to real customer behavior — from what your team thinks, up to what customers actually do and keep doing.
- 1
Internal opinion
What the team believes. Useful for forming hypotheses; weakest as evidence.
- 2
Customer comprehension
Whether the right people understand what the product is and who it's for, in their own words.
- 3
Customer interviews
What customers describe about their real problems, alternatives and decisions.
- 4
Sales behavior
How prospects respond in live conversations — the objections, questions and interest that repeat.
- 5
Purchase behavior
Whether the positioning's intended customers actually choose to buy.
- 6
Product value/retention
Whether those customers go on to receive the value the positioning promised.
None of these rungs should be read mechanically. A single strong signal lower down can matter more than a weak one higher up; the ladder is a way to weigh evidence, not a scoring system.
WHEN IT FAILS
What to change when a test fails
Don't immediately rewrite the homepage.
Ask which assumption failed:
- Customer?
- Problem?
- Alternative?
- Value?
- Context?
Only then decide whether you need different positioning or merely different messaging.
OVER TIME
Positioning is a living strategic choice
Positioning should be stable enough to create consistency but revisited when meaningful evidence changes:
- product changes
- market changes
- customer base changes
- competitive context changes
- repeated sales evidence contradicts assumptions
It's one of the strategic decisions in the GTM Decision Layer — upstream of the messaging and execution built on top of it.
HOAG
Thinking through positioning evidence with HOAG
HOAG can help you separate positioning assumptions from messaging execution and reason through what the evidence is actually telling you.
Pressure-test your positioning