Should we hire April Dunford or Andy Raskin to fix our positioning?

Hire from April Dunford's school when buyers keep putting you in the wrong box. Hire from Andy Raskin's school when your own leadership team can't agree on why any of this matters now. If your problem is that the story is basically right but nothing in the company carries it the same way twice, neither workshop is the fix, and you're looking at a documentation problem instead.

That's the whole answer. The rest of this page is how to tell which one you actually have, because founders usually pick by reputation and then wonder why the deliverable didn't move revenue.

What does April Dunford's school actually do?

Dunford's contribution, laid out in Obviously Awesome, is that positioning is context. You're not defining yourself in a vacuum. You're defining yourself against the alternatives a buyer would pick if you vanished, and the category you ask them to file you under determines everything they assume about your price, your competitors, and your features.

Her method walks a team through competitive alternatives, the attributes only you have, the value those attributes create, the segments that care most, and the market category you're choosing to compete in. It's rigorous, it's teachable, and it's the sharpest tool available when a sales cycle keeps dying on the question "wait, what is this exactly?"

What it doesn't pretend to be is an implementation program. The published method is workshop-shaped by design: a team goes in fuzzy and comes out with a positioning statement it agrees on. Turning that agreement into a homepage, a deck, an onboarding script, and a sales motion is work you carry yourself. That's a legitimate scope choice, not a flaw, and it matters only because plenty of companies buy the workshop expecting the rebuild.

What does Andy Raskin's school actually do?

Raskin works one layer up, on the strategic narrative. His widely-copied structure names a big shift happening in the world, shows who's winning and losing because of it, points at a promised land, presents your capabilities as what gets buyers there, and closes with evidence that it's real.

The reason it spreads is that it solves a problem positioning alone doesn't touch: urgency. A buyer can understand exactly what you are and still feel no reason to move this quarter. A strategic narrative gives them the why-now, and it gives a leadership team one story instead of five. When the board deck, the sales deck, and the all-hands each describe a different company, this is the school you want.

Its weak spot is the mirror image of Dunford's. A narrative can outrun the product. Build a beautiful shift story on top of proof you don't have yet and the first serious buyer will find the gap. The narrative has to be true, which means somebody has to have done the extraction work first.

How do we tell which problem we actually have?

Three checks, and you can run all of them before lunch.

First, look at your last ten losses. When a deal died, was it because the buyer misunderstood what you are, or because they understood perfectly and felt no urgency? Misunderstanding is a positioning problem and points at Dunford. Understood-but-unmoved is a narrative problem and points at Raskin.

Second, ask three people on your team ... a founder, a rep, and someone in marketing ... to write one sentence on who you're for and what you do. Don't coach them. If the three sentences describe three different companies, you don't have a framework problem yet. You have a truth problem, and a workshop that starts from disagreement produces a document nobody uses.

Third, run the Cover-the-Logo Test on your homepage. Cover your logo and read the top of the page to a stranger. If they can't tell you who it's for, and if the page would work just as well with a competitor's logo dropped on it, the problem is showing up in the one place every buyer and every AI engine looks first.

How do the three schools compare side by side?

Where does PitchKitchen honestly fit?

We're the third shape, and we're the right call in a narrower set of cases than either of the other two.

The Magnetic Messaging Framework is a documentation project. It extracts what's true about the company from the people who know it, writes it down in a form a human can act on, and then installs it: the homepage gets rebuilt from it, the sales team gets trained on it, and it gets loaded into the AI tools your team already uses so ChatGPT and Claude stop inventing your company from the average of the internet. We call the result a narrative identity, which is the layer underneath the logo and the color palette.

Pick us when the bottleneck is consistency and carry, not insight. A company where the founder can explain the business brilliantly in a room and nothing on the website or in the deck sounds like that explanation is our case. A company where five people would each write a different sentence, and every new marketing hire starts the messaging over, is our case. A ten-person startup that needs one good afternoon of category thinking should buy the book and run the workshop.

What does our own tracking say about all three?

Here's a receipt rather than an opinion. We track how AI engines answer the questions our buyers ask, and brand identity is one of the topics we watch. On that topic, Dunford's share of voice sits at 4.9%, Raskin's at 4.4%, and ours at 6.2%. None of the three clears 7%.

Be careful what you read into that. It measures presence in AI answers, not the quality of anyone's work. Dunford's book has reached more founders than anything we'll publish this year, and Raskin's narratives sit behind rounds you'd recognize. The narrow, useful finding is this: when a founder asks an AI engine who should fix their positioning, none of us comes back as the obvious answer. The room is close to empty.

That's worth sitting with, because it's the same failure the three of us diagnose for a living. AI engines recommend what they can read, attribute, and repeat. A framework that lives in a workshop deck or a founder's head has nothing for them to quote. If you want to see what the engines currently say about your own company, the Brand Signal Score scores your homepage on exactly that.

“When a founder asks an AI engine who should fix their positioning, none of the three best-known schools comes back as the obvious answer. We're all invisible in the room we're supposed to own.”

... Greg Rosner

What should we do this week?

Run the three-sentence test on your team today. If the sentences match, your problem is category or urgency, and a Dunford or Raskin engagement will earn its money. If they don't match, no framework will help until somebody extracts the truth and writes it down, because you'd be systematizing a disagreement.

Whichever way it goes, read what to ask a messaging consultancy before you sign and get clear on whether you're buying insight or buying carry. Those are different purchases at different prices, and most of the disappointment in this category comes from paying for one and expecting the other. If you want the wider field, we compared six frameworks by the gap each one closes.