Clarity
Clarity is the work of choosing your position — which customer, which painful problem to own, what you stand for and what you exclude — from the candidates understood in the Customer work, and then articulating that choice in language the target customer recognises as describing their own situation.
“Can you finish ‘we help [specific person] solve [specific painful problem] so they can [specific outcome]’ in language that makes the right reader nod and the wrong reader self-deselect — and is that sentence consistent across your website, LinkedIn, proposals, and sales conversations?”
Best Practice for the Clarity link
- Positioning — You have made an explicit choice of what you stand for, who you’re for, and what you don’t do. Includes both the additive niche question (do you serve a specific kind of business?) and the substantive niche question (do you solve a specific kind of problem?).
- Articulation — You have translated your positioning into language the customer would use. Includes the “we help X solve Y so they can Z” sentence and its variants across different touch-points.
- Self-deselection language — You have explicit signals that tell the wrong customer they’re not the target. Specificity that would alienate a non-target customer is a feature, not a bug.
- The Room Test — When two of your target customers are in a room and one mentions a problem you solve, does the other naturally say “you should talk to [you]”? Tests whether your positioning is recognisable enough to travel by word of mouth.
- Consistent application across surfaces — Have you implemented your positioning and language across your website, LinkedIn profile, proposal templates, sales conversation openers so that they all reflect the same positioning in the same language.
What it doesn’t cover
- Brand identity, visual design, logo, colour palette (downstream and design-led, not strategic).
- Tone of voice as a stylistic exercise (tone follows from clarity; it is not the input).
- Tagline-writing as a creative exercise disconnected from Customer work.
- Naming and naming conventions (downstream of positioning).
Sub-structure
Clarity has two operationally distinct activities: strategic positioning (the choice of who and what) and articulation (the translation into customer language). They are sequentially related — you cannot articulate what you have not decided — but a business can be weak in one without being weak in the other. Some firms have made strong positioning choices but articulate them in seller language; others articulate vague positioning very fluently.
Further reading on the Clarity link?
We cover the clarity link in detail in these articles:
- Marketing Clarity: How to Express Your Customer Choice So the Right Buyer Recognises Themselves
- Marketing Clarity vs Positioning vs Value Proposition vs Brand Identity: A Practical Comparison
- Marketing Clarity Case Studies: What Actually Happened to Firms That Made the Decision
- How AI Search and Changing Buyer Behaviour Are Making Marketing Clarity More Important
How can we help you?
Our Clarity Recipes are coming soon!