GLOSSARY · PERSONAL BRANDING
Positioning
Positioning is the deliberate choice of what a person or company wants to be known for, by whom, and in contrast to what alternatives. It answers the question a buyer asks silently: why this person rather than the other options, including doing nothing? For a personal brand, positioning is the stable idea underneath the headline, About section, content pillars and recurring opinions. It is expressed in a sentence a stranger could repeat. Positioning is set before content is written, because it determines what the content should argue and what it should leave out.
How it works in practice
Positioning for a person on LinkedIn borrows from product positioning but has one difference: the person is the product, and people change. The components are the same. The audience: who, specifically. The category: what kind of thing you are, in words the audience already uses, such as fractional CFO, sales trainer or SaaS pricing consultant. The alternative: what they would do instead, whether a bigger firm, a cheaper freelancer, a tool or nothing. The difference: what you do or believe that the alternatives do not. The proof: why anyone should believe it. The output is a short statement for internal use that drives everything public. A test of good positioning is that it excludes.
If it could be said by any competent peer, it is not positioning. If no reasonable buyer would prefer the alternative, it is probably not true. Positioning shows up on LinkedIn less in a tagline than in repetition: the same two or three opinions argued from different angles for a year, the same kind of example, the same kind of reader addressed. Revisit it when the business changes, when a new competitor makes the old contrast meaningless, or when the best customers of the past year do not match it. Content built on vague positioning can be well written and still produce nothing, because readers cannot place the author.
Example
Internal statement: "For founders of B2B software companies under 150 people who have stalled on LinkedIn, I am the ghostwriter who measures voice and refuses to invent, unlike agencies that produce generic posts at volume." Public expression: every post argues some part of that.
Common mistake
Positioning on adjectives, such as "authentic, strategic and results-focused". Nobody claims the opposite, so the words carry no information and the brand has nothing to be remembered for.