[vinceguidry]

You're going to have to come up with a significantly better marketing paradigm than positioning in order to fix this. The basic idea behind positioning is that customer education is hard, it's much easier to piggyback onto another company's success when it comes to telling them what you can do for them.

Burger King had it easy. They let McDonalds do all the hard work of figuring out where to put restaurants, and Burger King just put theirs across the street.

Taglines, being the most heavily compressed medium possible for a startup to convey themselves, are simply that much more prone to positioning-speak. There is exactly zero room for customer education, all you can do is position.

Personally I think the way forward is to de-emphasize taglines, and move towards short blurbs. The startup space is entirely too crowded for USPs to easily conveyed in a single statement. But everyone expects you to be able to anyway.