10 branding and strategy prompts

Articulating a brand, positioning and testing business assumptions — prompts for decisions that are hard to reverse. Written for ChatGPT, Claude. Square brackets mark what you fill in; everything else can be pasted as it stands.

Describe [product] in one sentence, for someone who has never heard of this category.

Banned: platform, solution, seamless, empower, leverage, next-generation, and the name of the category itself.

Write five versions. Then say which one a sceptical person would believe, and what each version assumes the reader already knows.

Our product is [product]. Our customer currently solves this problem by [current behaviour].

Describe that behaviour honestly: what it costs them, what they like about it, and why they have not changed.

Then say what would have to be true for them to switch, and what would make them switch back.

I need a name for [what it is]. It should feel [one or two qualities] and must not sound like [what to avoid].

Generate twenty, grouped by approach: plain description, metaphor, coined word, borrowed word, and compound.

For each group, say what kind of company that naming approach signals. Do not check availability; I will do that.

We need one sentence that everyone on the team can repeat without changing it.

It should: state what we do and who for, be impossible to confuse with a competitor, and still be true in two years.

Write five candidates. Then, for each, write the version a tired salesperson would actually say — that is the real test.

We say we value [value]. Make it observable.

For each of these situations — hiring, pricing, saying no to a customer, shipping something imperfect — describe what a company that genuinely held this value would do, and what one that only said it would do.

Then tell me which of those we currently resemble, based on this: [describe a recent decision].

Here is our pitch: [paste it].

Go through it as an investor who has heard two hundred pitches. For each claim, mark it: demonstrated, plausible but unproven, or unfalsifiable.

Then list the three questions you would ask that we would struggle to answer, and say what we should go and find out before the next meeting.

Here is how competitors in [market] describe themselves: [paste their taglines and positioning].

Identify the claim they all make, and therefore the one nobody owns. Then identify the claim nobody makes, and say whether that is an opening or a warning.

Propose one position for us that we could defend for three years. Say what we would have to give up to hold it.

Our strategy is: [strategy]. It rests on these assumptions: [list them].

For each assumption, tell me how we would find out it is false, and how long that would take. Rank by how expensive it is to discover late.

Then state the one assumption I should test first, and the cheapest test for it.

We want principles for [team or product]. Here is how we have actually decided things so far: [describe three real past decisions and their outcomes].

Derive principles from those decisions. Each must rule something out — if a principle does not make a plausible option unacceptable, it is decoration.

Write five. For each, name a decision it would have changed.

Here is our roadmap: [list the items]. We can do [capacity] of it.

For each item, say what it would cost us to not do it, measured in something concrete.

Then recommend what to cut. Cut on the basis of what we would stop being good at if we spread wider, not on effort estimates.