Your client cleans grease traps.
They have been cleaning grease traps for eleven years.
They are not trying to be thought leaders.
They are not developing a content strategy.
They want two blog posts a month that keep them appearing in search results, and they have given you a list of keywords and nothing else.
They also have a position. They do not know it is a position. They think it is just how they do business.
Your job is to find it.
What a position actually is
A position is not a tagline. It is not a mission statement. It is not the answer to “what makes you different” — that question produces marketing language, which is the opposite of a position.
A position is the specific thing a company believes about the right way to do what they do — the thing that makes them do it differently from competitors, that makes them frustrated when customers go somewhere else and get it done wrong, that they find themselves explaining on every job site and in every estimate call. It is usually a belief they hold so naturally that they don’t recognize it as a belief. They think it’s just obvious.
For the grease trap company, it might be: most companies clean what they can see and leave the rest. We clean the whole system or we tell you we didn’t. It might be: restaurants don’t think about grease traps until the health inspector does. We think you should know your inspection score before your next inspection does. It might be: emergency service is a symptom of bad scheduling, and we’d rather be your vendor than your emergency call.
Any one of those is a position. None of them sounds like a positioning statement. All of them are the beginning of a content calendar with something to say.
How to extract it
The position lives in three places. You find it by listening differently than you usually listen.
The first place is the complaint.
Ask the client what frustrates them about how their competitors do the work. Not “what makes you better” — that activates marketing brain. “What do you see other companies do that you wouldn’t do” activates operational brain. Operational brain tells the truth. The complaint is almost always the position. If they say “other companies don’t document what they find, so the restaurant has no record of service history” — that’s the position. Document everything. The restaurant owns the data.
The second place is the explanation.
Ask what they find themselves explaining to customers over and over — the thing customers always get wrong, the assumption they always have to correct. That explanation is a content piece. More importantly, the thing they’re explaining is their position on what customers should know. If they always have to explain that grease trap failures don’t happen suddenly, they happen gradually over months of warning signs nobody noticed — that’s the position. We catch it before it catches you.
The third place is the refusal.
Ask what jobs they’ve turned down or walked away from. The work they won’t do — the shortcut they won’t take, the customer they won’t serve — is a statement of values more specific than anything in their “About” page. If they won’t quote a job they can’t do correctly, and they’ve lost business to competitors who quoted it anyway — that’s the position. We’d rather lose the job than do it wrong.
What to do with it
Once you have the position, you have the spine. Every piece in the content calendar has a job: to express, demonstrate, or defend the position from a different angle, for a different reader, at a different stage of the buying process.
The grease trap company that believes restaurants should know their service history before the health inspector does has a content calendar that writes itself. What to ask your grease trap vendor before you sign the contract. What a service report should include and what to do if yours doesn’t. The difference between a grease trap company and a grease trap service program. What happens to restaurants that don’t keep service records — not in a horror story way, in a practical documentation way.
None of those pieces are about grease traps. They’re about the position. The subject is grease traps. The position is what makes the pieces worth reading, worth trusting, worth calling about.
Your client has a position. They’ve been operating from it for eleven years. They just don’t know it yet.
Find it. Name it. Put it in the content.
Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative Agency — content strategist, editor, and writer with 25 years of professional experience. Helped Television Without Pity reach one million readers a week. Built Gawker’s Morning After and Tribune’s Screener to one million monthly readers. He has extracted brand positions from clients who were convinced they had nothing interesting to say. They were always wrong.
Once you have the position, the brief needs to reflect it. The next post in this series walks through exactly how to turn a substandard brief into a piece worth writing — using the position as the spine.
A brand position is the specific thing a company believes about the right way to do what they do — the belief that makes their work different from competitors and makes them frustrated when customers get it done wrong elsewhere. It’s not a tagline or a mission statement. It’s the operational conviction that drives how they work. It matters because content without a position is interchangeable — it covers a topic without holding a perspective, which means it builds no trust and earns no citations.
Listen for it in three places: the complaint (what they see competitors do that they wouldn’t do), the explanation (what they find themselves explaining to customers over and over), and the refusal (what jobs they’ve turned down because they couldn’t do them correctly). The position lives in those answers — not in the answer to “what makes you different,” which activates marketing language rather than operational truth.
Because positions feel obvious to the people who hold them. A company that has been doing the job correctly for a decade has internalized their standards so completely that they assume everyone operates the same way. The frustration they feel when competitors cut corners is the position — they just experience it as common sense rather than as a differentiating belief. The writer’s job is to name it as a position, which the client usually recognizes immediately once it’s named.
It gives the content calendar a spine. Every piece has a job: to express, demonstrate, or defend the position from a different angle, for a different reader, at a different stage of the buying decision. A content calendar built around a position generates topics naturally — because the position implies the questions readers have before they believe it, the objections they’ll raise, and the proof points that make it credible. A content calendar without a position generates topics arbitrarily — keyword by keyword, with no connective tissue.
You can have a content plan without one. You cannot have a content strategy. A content strategy requires knowing what the content is trying to accomplish — what it wants readers to believe, know, or do — and that requires a position. Content produced without a position is ghost content: it covers topics without building anything, because there’s nothing to build toward.