Positioning and Claim-Substantiated Messaging in German

A claim you cannot substantiate is not positioning: Everything we deliver carries a source and a legal status per claim. In Germany that is arithmetic rather than caution. An unproven superlative is actionable under the Act Against Unfair Competition, and the letter arrives from a competitor's lawyer rather than from a regulator, at your cost, within weeks. Deutschlands günstigster Ökostrom requires a defensible comparison you can produce on demand. A green tariff claim requires guarantees of origin cancelled in the Umweltbundesamt register, not a supplier's assurance. Vom Tierarzt empfohlen requires the survey, its sample size and its date. The claim register is the part of this work clients are still using two years later. German is not a translation layer: We write the German positioning in German and the English one in English, and they are allowed to differ. Sicherheit and safety do not carry the same weight; Vertrauen is earned by a different set of proofs than trust. The du or Sie decision is made once, with a stated reason, and then held everywhere including support macros and the churn email nobody reads. Positioning that was written in English and rendered into German afterwards is detectable in the first sentence of the checkout, which is where it costs you. How the position is arrived at: We interview twelve to eighteen people: your buyers, your churned buyers, and the sales or retention staff who hear objections daily. We map the alternatives honestly, including doing nothing, which is the alternative that wins most often. We identify what you can prove that competitors cannot, then discard the candidate positions that rest on a proof point a competitor could match within a quarter. Two or three positions survive that filter, and those are what gets tested. Testing, in two stages that disagree: A panel of 300 to 400 respondents per market rates the surviving message sets. Then a four-week live test where the message is the only variable and creative format, targeting and landing structure are held constant. The panel tells you what people are willing to say. The live test tells you what they act on. When the two disagree, the live test decides and the panel explains why, which is more useful than either alone. What lands on your desk: A one-page positioning statement. A message hierarchy per segment: the primary claim, the two supports, the proof behind each. The claim substantiation register, with the evidence and its legal standing per market. An objection map pairing each objection with the response and the proof it rests on. And a rejected list, recording the positions we considered and why we did not take them, so the argument does not reopen every quarter with a new hire. What we will not sell you: Brand purpose. Naming and taglines. Logo or identity work. A two-day offsite whose output is a wall of sticky notes photographed for the deck. We do not write your website, and we do not produce a messaging document containing claims your legal counsel has not seen. Wrong engagement if: You are pre-product and positioning against a roadmap. Your only real position is cheaper, and your cost structure does not support being cheapest for more than two quarters. Your founder will overrule the tested result, in which case run the workshop and save the research budget. Or you need this in ten days; the live test alone is four weeks and we will not report on it early.