Why your homepage got wider every year
Dunford on positioning as a decision, and what a one-person business still has to work out alone
What the book is really about
Dunford's argument is narrower than the word positioning suggests. She is not writing about taglines, brand voice, or the adjectives on a homepage. She is writing about context — the frame a buyer drops your product into in the first ten seconds, which then decides what they compare it to, what they expect it to cost, and which features they bother to look for.
The claim underneath is that the frame is not handed to you by the market. You pick it. And most products are still sitting in the frame their founder happened to start in: the one that made sense the week the idea arrived, kept because nobody ever scheduled the conversation to change it.
That turns positioning from a writing task into a decision task, which is why the book is useful to people who write well and still cannot explain what they do. The words on the page are the last step and the cheapest one. What comes before them is a short list of judgements — who the product is genuinely better for, what those people would use if you did not exist, and what to call the thing so a stranger knows where to file it.
The obstacle it speaks to
Narrowing Anxiety, and the book goes at it directly.
The mechanism is easy to miss because each step is reasonable. Someone outside your target says they might use it too, so you loosen a line on the homepage to make room for them. A friend in a different industry asks whether it works for their case, and you add a sentence. Six of those over a year and the page now says it is for teams of any size, at any stage, in any industry, which costs nothing to write and is the reason nobody reading it thinks the page is about them. The audience on paper got wider. The audience in the inbox got smaller.
Underneath sits an arithmetic error. Naming one buyer feels like subtracting all the others, so the wide version feels like the safe version. It is the opposite. A stranger decides in seconds whether a page is addressed to them, and a page addressed to everybody is addressed to nobody in particular, so the specific buyer who would have paid scrolls past their own solution.
The book's second contribution is to Niche-Commitment Fear. Dunford treats positioning as something you re-run when the evidence changes, not a tattoo. That matters more than the method itself. Most of the refusal to narrow is a belief that the choice is permanent, and a founder who understands the choice is reversible will make it in an afternoon.
Jargon Hiding gets the same treatment from the other side. The book keeps pushing you off the technical description of the product and onto what the buyer walks away with, because the buyer cannot convert your architecture into an outcome and will not try.
Three ideas that change behaviour
Start with the alternative, not the competitor. Ask what your buyer would actually do on Monday if you vanished tonight — a spreadsheet, an assistant, a freelancer, nothing at all. That answer, not the funded company in your category, is what you are being compared against, and it sets the price the buyer has in their head before they read a word you wrote.
Name the category before you polish the sentence. The category is the biggest lever on the page, because it tells the buyer what to expect and what to compare. The same product framed as a reporting tool and as an audit trail gets two different budgets and two different objections. Choose the frame that makes your strengths look like the point rather than a bonus.
Read your best customers, not your average ones. Positioning is found in the accounts that renewed without being chased and told three friends. Find what those two or three have in common that the rest do not, and you have a segment. This is the step that makes the whole exercise evidence rather than preference.
Where it falls short
The book was written for a B2B software team with a sales motion, a category with names in it, and a competitor set to compare against. A solo operator or a local service business has to do real translation work at every step, and the book does not help with it. When your alternative is the neighbour who does it cheaper and your category has no name because nobody sells one, half the framework has nothing to hold on to.
It also assumes someone will go and do the customer interviews. Dunford's process runs on evidence you do not have on hand — what buyers actually compared you to, in their words, recently. Without that, the workshop becomes several intelligent people guessing at a whiteboard, and it will produce an answer with the same confidence.
And it assumes a room. The method is built for a group with a sales lead, a product lead and a marketer who disagree, because the disagreement is where the wrong assumption surfaces. Alone, you are every stakeholder at once, which is faster and much worse at catching you.
What to do this week
Take the last five people who paid you. For each one, write a single line: what they would have used instead of you. Not what you think their options were — what they told you, or what you know they were using the month before they bought.
If the same alternative appears twice, you have found your real comparison set. Rewrite the first line of your homepage to beat that one thing, by name, for that one buyer. Give it thirty minutes and leave the rest of the page alone.