Using LLMs with copywriting frameworks to draft brand positioning

Most people use AI for marketing by typing "write me 5 posts for a moving company" and getting back generic slop. The tool isn't the problem. The problem is skipping the part that makes marketing good: research and strategy before any writing. Here's a real task from this week, start to finish. I co-run a small studio that does web and marketing work for clients, and one of our clients is a packers-and-movers business. I needed a one-page positioning summary: who the local competitors are, how they talk, what customers actually complain about, and where the gap is that we can own.

I use Claude for this, but honestly any of the big ones (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) will get you to almost the same place. Use whatever you already have. The process is what matters, not the logo.

Step 1 - Give it the real context first. I told it what the business is, the city it operates in, who the customers are, and what I already know about the competition. Two minutes of context beats an hour of fixing generic output.

Step 2 - Make it research before it writes. This is the step everyone skips. Roughly: "Before writing anything, research this. Look at how the main packers-and-movers companies in [city] talk about their service, and find what real customers complain about in this space - reviews, forums, discussions. Give me the actual words and phrases people use, not a vague summary, and tell me where each came from." The AI can pull from the live web now, so it comes back with the real language people use: "they broke my TV," "hidden charges at the end," "showed up 3 hours late." That language is gold, because now I write in the customer's words instead of industry jargon.

Step 3 - Make it think before it writes. "Based on that research, give me 3 positioning angles for our client. For each, tell me who it's for, what fear it removes, and why you chose it. Don't write the one-pager yet - show me your reasoning first." I edit the strategy here, which is far cheaper than editing a finished doc.

Step 4 - Then write, in my voice. I paste a sample of how I write summaries and say "match this tone." Then it drafts the one-pager. Total time: about 30 minutes for something that used to take me half a day.

Two honest caveats: Fact-check the research. It's usually right but it can be confidently wrong, and this is going to a client. Verify before it leaves your hands. It doesn't replace judgment. It's a fast researcher and drafter. The taste is still yours.

Research first, strategy second, writing last. That order is the whole trick. Happy to share the exact prompts if anyone wants them.

After a year of building AI into my workflow, here’s what I didn’t expect to find, and what it forced me to confront about the work I’d been calling “strategy.”

Four years of using AI every day = four years of pattern recognition across LLMs, four years of observing every bad habit AI creates.

We are at the stage where everyone is using the same descriptions for AI's impact on us.

Taste.
Judgement.
Agentic vs. Human

If you believe the nonsense X throws at you, you'll become the underclass if you don't learn to build agents.

I'm going to share some thoughts as an actual AI Native user. What does that mean?

I do most of my work using a terminal versus a prompt window. I program documents using MCP plugins. I automate everything I can - mainly low value work and I try to reduce context switching by limiting the number of tools I use by embedding as much as possible into Claude.

Let's start with judgement.

Here's a sample brief (I made it up). You're asked to create a brand for a new skincare range that ignores all the slop on Instagram. No lying, no deepfakes, no inaccessible beauty standards. Just a high quality product sold honestly.

As a CMO, you can hire an agency and the best work is still done by agencies IMO. A good strategist is worth the cost. The best brands in the world sit in your subconscious. That output does not come from an LLM. It's a human either prompting an LLM or using good old creative thinking. Anthropic use an agency and developers for that matter.

But if you're in a start-up and need a positioning statement or a communications platform, there are things you can do with an LLM to produce this thinking in-house. This is one of many tricks I have as a CMO trained in brand strategy. I cut a few corners here but this is a great example of "Judgement." AI speeds up the process. It does not produce this for you out of the box. Most people prompt "write me an opening line" and pick one. That is not how marketing works. AI is nowhere near replacing marketing. Ignore Anthropic when they tell you they have marketing skills - they do not. I would refer to them as task management tools.

So what is this doc? (Zoom in.)

These are the top 20 creative writing frameworks. If you have a clear product brief and you know your target customer, you can use these with AI to develop your own positioning statement and potentially a communication framework. I consider these outputs a V1 in terms of quality.

I named the brand STATED. Why? It states what it does instead of hiding behind AI slop advertising.

Despite what people say - education matters. Experience matters. You can't skip that phase of your career or the work - but you can learn some new ways to work faster when you need to. That is how judgement is developed - obvious statement but I think the internet forgot.

Save these frameworks for later - they might come in handy ✍🏻