Finding your D2C brand positioning with AI

If you’ve ever asked AI to help you create your brand positioning, you’ve probably been disappointed. Simply typing "help me find my brand positioning" will likely return something that makes you sound like every other beauty brand in your vertical.

AI is trained on massive amounts of data, of already existing things online. With your brand positioning, that is just the thing we’re trying to avoid. 

In this article, we will explain how you can use AI to help you develop the positioning of your D2C eCommerce brand. It covers the research and positioning side: what to gather, how to think about AI’s role, and how to land on a positioning statement that makes you unique. In a future article, we will cover how to use AI to turn that uniqueness into a brand identity.

The mental model: AI is a thinking partner, not an executor

The single biggest mistake founders make is asking AI to generate their brand strategy. That's not what it's good at.

AI is excellent at pressure-testing, organizing, and reflecting. It's poor at originality, judgment, and taste. If you ask it to come up with your unique angle, it will give you something that sounds plausible and is almost certainly not unique. It's pattern-matching against millions of brand strategy documents it was trained on. By definition, the average of that is generic.

Think of AI as a consultant you’ve just hired. It knows a lot of frameworks that you can apply to craft a unique positioning statement. However, it doesn’t know your brand or your market yet. Therefore, you need to brief them. The quality of that brief determines the quality of the output from your chosen AI app. Put garbage in… you know the rest. 

Build the foundation first

Before opening your favorite AI, gather four perspectives on your brand. These are the inputs you'll feed AI later.

Your view as the founder. Who are you, what are you selling, and why are you selling it? Write down the honest answers, not the marketing-friendly ones. The "why" matters most. That's usually where the differentiation lives. Think about the story of how you got here, and what in that story feels really important for you? Tip: record yourself asking questions out loud with fireflies.ai, and answer the questions out loud as well. It’s not weird, we talk to Wispr all the time now :) Once you’re done, you’ll have a complete transcript with all the little words in between. 

Your team's view. Ask your co-founder, your operations lead, your head of customer service. Each of them sees the brand from a different angle, and the gaps between their answers are revealing. A good question to ask is to have them characterize the company as if it were a person. Also, ask them what makes it special to work at your company, and what they believe the brand adds in value to society. Again, use an AI transcript tool. 

Your competitors' positioning. Pick the three brands you most often get compared against. Write down what they stand for, who they're talking to, and what language they use. A good way to do this is to use their ad library. Also, you could feed screenshots of their store to AI and ask AI about certain personas you think the other brand is targeting primarily. This is not to copy them, we want to become different from them. 

Your customers' view. This is the most important input, and honestly, the one most founders skip. Pull recent reviews. Read your support tickets. Call your customers! Why did they buy from you specifically? What made them buy now? The language customers use to describe your brand is almost always sharper than the language you use about yourself.

Once you have these four perspectives written down, you have something AI can actually work with. It often works well to analyze these parts, with AI, separately, and put the key findings together in a document per piece. 

Use AI to pressure-test your uniqueness

With your summarized documents ready, you have a very solid input for the AI you’re working with. But there’s one last thing you want to do. Take some time for yourself, and familiarize yourself with the data really deeply. I mean, really, really analyze all the data you have at your disposal now. 

Come up with your own hypothesis about what makes you unique. What is the common thread that goes through your research which makes you unique from your direct competitors, and also your indirect competitors. 

Now, once you have that, you can start to work with AI. Give the hypothesis to the AI and ask it to challenge you. Of course, add your documents in there as well. Ask it to poke holes. Ask it to ask you questions to pressure-test the hypothesis and see if it holds up. 

A prompt that works:

You are a top brand strategist. How do the world’s best brand builders synthesize research to find what makes a brand truly unique? What frameworks do they employ? If there are further questions they would want to ask, what would they be? Using these methods, help me craft the positioning for my D2C brand. We are looking for the thing that makes us unique.

[ Add short backstory on your brand, and what you do. 3-4 lines]

Included is the research on my brand, my team, my competitors, and my customers. I think the thing that makes us unique is [your hypothesis]. I want you to challenge this. Ask me questions to find out whether it's actually unique, whether it's actually true, and whether it actually matters to customers. Don't accept my first answer. Keep going until we've either confirmed the angle or found something better underneath it.

The first paragraph is to set the stage for the AI. It’s a good technique that works really well; use it also for other use-cases. The second paragraph is to add context for your brand. And the third paragraph is to define what you want the AI to accomplish. What we’re asking here is to make the AI a very critical thinking partner. 

Write the positioning statement (for internal use only)

Once you've found the one thing that's true and unique, write it down as a positioning statement. This is for your eyes only. It doesn't need to be pretty. It needs to be specific.

A useful test: if the statement makes you slightly uncomfortable with how narrow it is, you're probably close. If it feels comfortable and broad, you're still being generic.

You could fill in Marty Neumeier's Onlyness Statement from Zag: Our [offering] is the only [category] that [how it differs] for [audience] in [geography] who want [need] in an era of [underlying trend].

Remember: Positioning is what you're choosing not to be, more than what you are.

This is also where AI is genuinely useful again. Once you've drafted your statement, ask AI to find the parts that are still generic, the assumptions you haven't earned, and the places where your statement could describe ten other brands. Iterate until it can't.

What you have now

If you've done this work, you walk away with four perspectives on your brand written down, a positioning hypothesis that survived being challenged, and an internal positioning statement specific enough to feel uncomfortable.

This is the foundation everything else builds on. If the positioning is right, everything downstream falls into place.