Most prompt lists you find online are recycled. Someone wrote one in 2023, fifty people copied it, and now the internet is choking on the same thirty variations of "Act as a marketing expert and..." None of those prompts produce work worth paying for. They produce fluent confidence about nothing.
The prompts below are pulled from real brand strategy work — positioning, messaging, naming, audience definition. They share a few things. They give the model something to work against, not just a job description. They name the failure mode they're trying to avoid. And they ask for a kind of thinking, not a kind of output.
Steal them. Adapt them. They work in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Dante, anywhere you happen to be working. The model matters less than the question.
POSITIONING
1. Pressure-test a positioning statement
Here's our positioning: [paste]. Don't tell me what's good about it. Tell me what a sharp competitor would say about it to take it apart in a pitch. Then tell me what an indifferent customer would say to dismiss it in three seconds. Be ruthless.
2. Find the unowned position
In the [category] market, here are the top five competitors and how they position: [list]. What are they all implicitly agreeing on? What's the assumption none of them are challenging? Give me three positions that would only work if you rejected that assumption.
3. The "what we are not" exercise
For [brand], generate a list of 20 things this brand is NOT. Don't list things it doesn't sell. List the values, behaviors, customer types, and aesthetic choices it actively rejects. The goal is to define the brand by what it refuses.
4. Strip the positioning to one sentence
Here's a 200-word positioning paragraph: [paste]. Compress it to one sentence — but the sentence must include exactly one specific verb, one specific noun, and zero adjectives. No abstractions, no marketing language, no "leading" or "innovative."
5. Test against the eulogy standard
If [brand] disappeared tomorrow, what specifically would the world be missing? Not "great products" or "good service." What thing would not exist anymore? Be specific enough that the answer couldn't be true of any competitor.
AUDIENCE
6. The "what they actually want" reframe
Our audience is [description]. Marketers usually describe what these people want as [list]. Tell me what they actually want under that — the deeper need they wouldn't articulate in a focus group. Then tell me how that changes how we'd talk to them.
7. Find the smallest viable audience
For [product/brand], who is the smallest group of people for whom this is a 10/10? Not the broad target. The narrow obsessives. Describe them in vivid, specific detail — what they read, who they trust, what they hate.
8. The audience contradiction test
Our stated target is [audience]. But our actual best customers behave like [different audience]. Reconcile that. Which one should we be designing for, and what's the cost of choosing wrong?
9. Map the rejection
For [brand], who should this brand actively repel? Name the customer type that would dilute the brand if we won them. Then write the line that would make them self-select out.
10. The future audience question
Our current customer is [description]. Who is the customer we'll need in three years if the category shifts the way it's likely to shift? Don't extrapolate. Reason from the change first, then back into who that creates.
MESSAGING
11. Strip the marketing voice
Here's a piece of brand copy: [paste]. Rewrite it as if you were explaining it to a smart friend at a dinner party. No selling, no hype, no marketing voice. Just the actual idea, said plainly. Then tell me what the original was hiding.
12. The headline test
Generate 20 headlines for [campaign/product]. After each one, write one sentence explaining what it's making the reader feel and what it's making them want to do next. If you can't articulate that clearly, the headline is wrong.
13. Find the unsayable thing
For [brand/category], what is the true thing that nobody is allowed to say out loud in marketing? The thing that would actually move people but feels too risky, too direct, too uncomfortable. Now tell me how we could say it.
14. The competitor mirror
Read the messaging on [competitor]'s homepage: [paste]. Identify the structure they're using — the implicit promise, the proof, the call to action. Now write our message using the OPPOSITE structure. What do we get?
15. Cut the verbs
Here's our copy: [paste]. List every verb in it. Identify the ones that are doing real work and the ones that are filler ("enable," "deliver," "provide," "leverage"). Rewrite using only the working verbs.
NAMING
16. Name from a feeling
I want to name a [product]. The feeling I want it to evoke is [adjective + adjective]. Don't give me names that describe the product. Give me 30 names that sound like that feeling — drawn from any source: nature, mythology, language, music, sports.
17. The phonetic gut-check
Here are five name candidates: [list]. For each, tell me what the sound of the name evokes (hard consonants vs. soft, length, rhythm). Then tell me which one would be hardest for a competitor to mock.
18. Names by category violation
For a [category] product, the standard naming convention is [pattern]. Give me 20 names that deliberately violate that convention — names that would feel like they belong in a different category entirely.
19. The trademark stress test
Here's a name: [name]. Brainstorm every reason this name could fail — phonetic confusion, negative connotations in other languages, trademark conflicts, awkward URL, unfortunate abbreviation, etc. Be exhaustive.
20. Stress-test the wordmark
Here's a brand name: [name]. Imagine it set in three different typographic styles: a serious editorial serif, a brutalist sans, and a soft humanist serif. In each context, what would the name communicate? Which contradicts the brand's intent?
STRATEGY AND DECISION-MAKING
21. The "what would we do if we were brave" prompt
Here's our current plan: [paste]. Tell me what this plan would look like if we cut all the safety hedges and trusted our hypothesis fully. What would we do differently? What's the cost of NOT being that brave?
22. Find the load-bearing assumption
Our strategy is [paste]. Identify the single assumption this entire strategy rests on. If that assumption turned out to be wrong, what falls apart? Now: how confident are we in that assumption, and what would prove it?
23. The pre-mortem
It's 12 months from now. [Project] has failed. Tell the story of how it failed — the warning signs we ignored, the decisions that compounded badly, the moment it became obvious. Be specific.
24. The opposite play
Our strategy is [paste]. Now write the strategy memo for the exact opposite approach. Not "different" — opposite. What would have to be true for that approach to be correct? Is any of it true?
25. Force a tradeoff
For [brand/product], we're trying to be: [list values]. That list is too long. Force the tradeoffs. Which two of those, if we doubled down on them, would require us to actively give up the other three? Which trade is most defensible?
SHARPENING THE OUTPUT
26. The "say it like you mean it" rewrite
Here's the draft: [paste]. Rewrite it removing every instance of: hedging language, qualifying phrases, "we believe," "potentially," "could help," and any adverb ending in -ly. Then tell me what's left.
27. Read it as your harshest critic
Read [paste] as the most cynical, intelligent reader in your audience. What's the first eye-roll moment? What's the line that makes them stop reading? Where does the writer lose them?
28. The screenshot test
Pull the single most quotable sentence from [paste]. If someone screenshotted that line out of context and posted it, would it land? If not, what sentence SHOULD be in there to pass the test?
29. The boring-on-purpose test
For [headline/tagline], rewrite it as boringly as possible — flat, descriptive, zero personality. Now tell me what the original was actually adding versus what was performative. Sometimes boring is more honest.
30. The "would a human send this" check
Read [email/post/copy]. If a real person on your team sent this exact text from their personal account, would it sound like them or would it embarrass them? If it would embarrass them, tell me which specific phrases gave it away as marketing-voice.
HOW TO USE THESE
The prompts work best when you've already done some thinking and you're using the AI as a sparring partner. They work badly when you're trying to skip the thinking and outsource the strategy. None of these will produce a brand for you. They'll pressure-test, sharpen, and stretch what you bring.
The model is not the strategist. You are. These prompts just give you a faster, smarter, more honest sounding board.
Save them, fork them, build your own. The good ones get sharper the more you use them on real problems.