Which positioning framework should we use, and where does each one break?

Positioning frameworks don't fail because the thinking is weak. They fail because each one quietly requires an input you may not have, and the step where that input goes is the step teams skip. Pick by the input you can actually supply, not by the framework's reputation.

Seven models come up over and over when a founder goes looking: Ries and Trout's original, Geoffrey Moore's beachhead statement, April Dunford's Obviously Awesome, Jobs-to-Be-Done, StoryBrand, Play Bigger's category design, and Andy Raskin's strategic narrative. Every one of them is real work by serious people. Every one of them has a precise breaking condition, and it's usually sitting in your company rather than in the book.

Before the comparison, answer the upstream question. Most teams shopping for a framework don't have a framework problem.

Do we need a positioning framework at all?

Four questions, ten minutes, and you'll know which of these to read and which to put down.

• Ask three people on your leadership team, separately, to write down the top three things a buyer does instead of buying you. Include doing nothing. If the three lists don't match, you have a truth problem, and no framework will resolve it for you.
• Is your buyer one person with a budget, or a committee of six with a procurement process? Several of these models assume the first and break against the second.
• Does your category already have a name your buyers use in their own sentences? If it does, designing a new one is an expensive way to avoid winning the one you're in.
• When your best rep explains why you win, does that explanation appear anywhere on your homepage? If it doesn't, your positioning may be fine and your messaging may be the thing that's broken.

Question one is the gate. If your own leadership can't agree on what you're the alternative to, every framework below will produce a confident document built on a disagreement nobody surfaced. Fix that first, and fix it in a room, not in a template. We wrote the longer version of this test in what's the difference between positioning and messaging.

Why does the framework we rolled out stop paying?

Here's a finding from our own data that explains most of these stalls. In the 2026 Healthtech Messaging Index we scored 302 B2B healthtech homepages against the 19 criteria of the Brand Signal Score rubric. Two criteria sit at opposite ends of the results.

Solution Clarity asks whether a stranger can say what you do after one pass. It averages 1.58 out of 2. A hundred and seventy-six of the 302 companies score full marks, and exactly one scores zero. Alternatives Acknowledged asks whether you name what a buyer would do instead of buying you, and the honest trade-offs. It averages 0.10 out of 2. Six companies score full marks. Two hundred and seventy-eight score zero.

Read those two numbers next to each other. Clarity is the most-solved criterion in the whole rubric. Naming your alternatives is the least-solved, by a factor of roughly sixteen. And naming competitive alternatives is step one of Obviously Awesome, the book most of these companies will tell you they've read.

This produces what we call clarity saturation. When 176 companies in one market all clear the clarity bar, a buyer comparing five vendors reads five perfectly clear pages and still can't choose between them. The framework that made you clear did exactly what it promised and bought you nothing, because clarity is now the price of entry rather than the advantage. That's the condition most founders are actually in when they go looking for the next framework.

What are the seven positioning frameworks, and where does each one break?

Same shape for each: what it's genuinely best at, the input it assumes you're bringing, and the condition under which it stops working.

• Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout (1981). Best at forcing one idea into one mind and refusing the rest. Assumes a category with an existing ladder your buyer can already picture, plus enough media weight to climb it. Breaks when the category is new or contested, and when your budget is a growth-stage budget rather than a consumer-advertising one.
• The value positioning statement, Geoffrey Moore. Best at forcing a beachhead choice: for this customer, who has this need, we're the category that does this, and unlike that alternative, we do this. Assumes you'll genuinely say no to the segments outside the beachhead. Breaks the moment leadership refuses to give up that revenue, which turns one statement into a paragraph with five targets inside it.
• Obviously Awesome, April Dunford. Best at the rigorous account of where you win and why, and the only one of the seven that starts from what a buyer would do instead of buying you. Assumes your team can name the real alternatives, including the status quo. Breaks at step one, and our index above suggests it breaks there for the large majority of companies that try it.
• Jobs-to-Be-Done, Clayton Christensen, with Tony Ulwick's outcome-driven variant. Best at explaining why buyers switch and at surfacing competitors you weren't counting. Assumes the job itself is contested. Breaks when everyone agrees on the job and the real fight is about trust, proof, and implementation risk, because it tells you why they'd move without telling you why they'd move to you.
• StoryBrand's SB7, Donald Miller. Best at the fastest route from we-speak to readable, with the customer as hero and the vendor as guide. Assumes a single hero with a single decision. Breaks against a six-person buying committee, and breaks again under clarity saturation. We covered both in where StoryBrand works and where it breaks.
• Category design, Play Bigger. Best when you genuinely have a new problem that existing categories mislabel, and it's the most ambitious play here. Assumes budget, multi-year patience, and a category that isn't already named. Breaks when you're actually in an existing category and the honest move is to win it. The trade-off is laid out in category design vs positioning vs strategic narrative.
• Strategic narrative, Andy Raskin. Best at making buyers care: name a change in the world, show who wins and loses, point at the promised land, name the obstacles, bring evidence. Assumes the change in the world is real and that your product is genuinely the response to it. Breaks when the narrative lives in the CEO's keynote and never reaches the homepage, the deck, or the second sales call.

Notice the pattern in the breaking conditions. Only two of the seven break on a flaw in the model. The rest break on something the company didn't bring: an agreed list of alternatives, the willingness to say no, a real change in the world, a buying process that matches the assumption. If you've tried two of these and both went quiet, the common factor is probably yours rather than theirs. That's also the argument in how do you run a competitive positioning analysis for your company.

Which one should a $5M to $75M B2B company start with?

If your leadership team can't agree on what you're the alternative to, start with Dunford. She's better at that specific step than anyone, and the work is cheap relative to what it prevents. If your homepage is genuinely unreadable and you need it fixed this month, StoryBrand is faster and costs less than anything else here. If your buyers already understand the category and the fight is about why now, Raskin's narrative is the right instrument. If you're being consistently mislabeled by a category that doesn't fit, read Play Bigger and be honest about the budget it assumes.

Those are real recommendations, and for a lot of companies one of them is the whole answer.

Where does the Magnetic Messaging Framework fit?

It sits one layer down from that list. The Magnetic Messaging Framework isn't a competing theory of positioning. It's the documentation layer: your narrative identity written down in enough detail that it survives contact with a sales team, a website rebuild, and the AI tools your people now draft in. Category design is one anchor inside it, not the whole play.

It fits a specific company. Growth-stage B2B, roughly $5M to $75M, where the strategy is broadly right and nothing downstream carries it: the reps improvise, the homepage says something older, and the AI writes the average of the internet because it has nothing specific to write from. If that's not your situation, one of the seven above is a better and cheaper answer, and we'd tell you so on a call. The four-way version of this comparison lives in MMF vs StoryBrand vs Obviously Awesome vs Fletch.

What should we actually do this quarter?

Run the four-question check at the top. If question one fails, book two hours with your leadership team and don't leave until three people write the same list of alternatives. That single artifact unlocks Dunford, unlocks Moore, and tells you whether Raskin's change-in-the-world is real or wishful.

If question one passes and the work still isn't landing, your problem has moved downstream, and clarity saturation is the likely reason. A clear page in a category of clear pages doesn't lose on readability. It loses because nothing on it is quotable, ownable, or specific enough for a buyer, or an answer engine, to repeat back. Naming your alternatives is where that specificity comes from, which is exactly the criterion 278 of 302 companies scored zero on.

Start with the free diagnostic if you want a number before a conversation. The Brand Signal Score runs your homepage against the same 19 criteria we used on those 302 companies, including the two this article turns on.